Doornails! palindromes! and try to find a cat.

11th March 2024

Heads up! This newsletter is more than eight months old. Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed. Please handle with care.

Hello!

And in particular, hello to those in North America who will be receiving this newsletter one hour "earlier" than usual: the clocks went forward for you, but European ones won't until the end of the month. Back when I used to make weekly videos, and posted them from wherever I happened to be, the time change always used to be a concern for me — did I get the DST conversion right this time? Fortunately, that's not something I have to worry about as much right now.

Which is partly because it's now been ten weeks since I posted a video! And after ten weeks I can announce: absolutely zero plans to post anything new, at least for a while. Sabbatical is a joy, even if I am starting to itch to work on a few new ideas.

So instead, what else is going on around the internet?

This week on Lateral: our regular guests, Ella Hubber, Caroline Roper and Tom Lum from 'Let's Learn Everything', face questions about cycling coercion, hoovering hacks and disproportionate drinks!

And on YouTube:

Epic Spaceman is an incredible channel. Start with a visualisation of four million stars, pulled into a black hole, scaled down to fit over New York. Except it's not just a visualisation! This is 3D animation, made by one person, starring that same person, at a human scale, using motion capture and face capture. There are so many "animation and voiceover" science-explainer channels, some high-effort and many, many low-effort — and these days, there are even more AI-slop zero-effort channels, just started by trying to make a quick buck. This channel is the highest of high-effort, and I also found this behind-the-scenes Q&A fascinating. (Thanks to Linus for sending this over.)
Why "dead as a doornail"? This video is less than two minutes long, visually interesting, and answers a question I never thought to ask.
A palindromic video! Michael Tan performs a musical duet, with himself, in one continuous take. This took a couple of attempts to wrap my head around. (Thanks Chethan for the suggestion.)

Away from the world of video:

My friend V Buckenham has launched "downpour", a lovely little phone app that lets people make and share interactive story games in just a couple of minutes. Games like "Where's Madeleine?", which will take you about two minutes to play and which involves simply trying to find a very good cat.
You'd think that, in the year 2024, leap days wouldn't have much of an effect on the world. But no: here's a list of 2024 leap day bugs, including failing petrol stations in New Zealand, grocery stores in Sweden, street lights in Paris.
New daily puzzle game! Squeezy involves fitting (or, rather, squeezing) letters into words, and it's a good combination of difficulty and reward — even if the words you're looking for can sometimes be a touch too obscure.
From 2013: the location of every photo taken from the ISS, more than one million of them, all plotted and arranged into interesting maps and charts.

And finally: Tenacious D cover "Baby One More Time".

All the best,

— Tom

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