Water towers, drinking fountains, and level crossings!

• Lemonade, by Andrea Love, is a short stop-motion animation made using needle-felting. The attention to detail and craft make it worth watching, but for me, the standout is the sound design by Richard Gould: I don't know if those are foley effects from a stock library, or if they're custom-made — perhaps a mix of both — but the audio really helps to "sell" the animation. (Thanks to Sam for sending this over.)
   
• The YouTube recommendation engine showed me a video, and I was baffled: why does a playthrough of a kid's detailed, painstaking video-game recreation of the railroad crossings in his local area have 8.8 million views? I have no answer to that question other than "algorithms" and "children". I'm putting it in the newsletter because this feels very much like the sort of thing that I'd have made and played as a child if I'd had access to today's creation tools. Also, some of the comments appear to be from teenagers with nostalgia. Blimey.
   
• Kendra Gaylord takes on the impossible water tower beauty standards, which is really an excuse to explain the use and history of North American water towers, complete with a field trip, a run of town puns, a picture of a "peachoid", and several other excellent bits of shtick that kept me watching.
   

• I'd not heard about Toronto's Deep Lake Water Cooling System: air conditioning and cold water powered by, well, a very deep lake.
   
• How do you accidentally run for president of Iceland? Several people have, including the author's aunt, and it's entirely down to bad user interface design.
   
• The Verge does a deep-dive into the buttons on North American drinking fountains and why they probably don't deserve their bad reputation, which is far more interesting than it sounds.

And finally: AI music may indeed be another horseman of the video-content apocalypse, and yes, I'm worried about how automatically-generated slop channels are going to crowd out actual creators. But sometimes there's clearly still a human hand holding the tools that make the TikTok, to the point where I think this can simultaneously be both an attempt to cash in and charming self-parody.

All the best,

— Tom