I couldn't make these videos, but other people did!
26th August 2024
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Heads up! This newsletter is more than three months old. Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed. Please handle with care.
Hello! Before we get to the list of Good Stuff On The Internet this week, some updates about a couple of upcoming projects:
First, over on Lateral this week, one new player and two returning favourites. Eglė Vaškevičiūtė joins Bill Sunderland and Dani Siller from Escape This Podcast, to face questions about mammal moments, brand boundaries and artist assistance.
First, over on Lateral this week, one new player and two returning favourites. Eglė Vaškevičiūtė joins Bill Sunderland and Dani Siller from Escape This Podcast, to face questions about mammal moments, brand boundaries and artist assistance.
In other Lateral news, I'm happy to announce a US edition of the Lateral book! Published through Union Square & Co, it's available for pre-order now from all good US booksellers, and probably some terrible ones too. (Don't worry, the questions are the same as the UK edition: the changes are mostly spelling and style. Plus, you don't have to import it across the Atlantic.)
Also! Thanks to all your wonderful support, the regular tickets for the Lateral live show in London have now sold out! I'm pleased to say that the venue is opening up the upper circle to make a few more seats available "up in the gods". So, if you want to join us in London on October 12th, all the details are here.
Right! With all that done, here's the good stuff on YouTube that I've found:
- Wonderful chaos as Evan and Katelyn try to make the world's heaviest dice out of resin, tungsten powder and a lot of trial and error.
- I never tackled "California water rights" on my channel. I thought about
covering it, I found a couple of interesting locations... but I could never figure out the narrative, there was just too much to the story. Fortunately, Rollie Williams has taken it on, and included better jokes than I ever could: who's taking America's water?
- And this feels like a video from my early days: Let Us Try That visits a strange neighbourhood in Cameron Park, California that's a "fly-in community". I actually did ask to film at Cameron Park once, but never got any response from the folks there. My channel was far too established by that point to do this sort
of simple just-passing-by visit (I'd have needed to actually land or take off, and I'd have needed to interview someone local!) so it's nice to see a video that tackles all the main points. I do miss making videos like this.
And away from video, more good stuff:
- The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is a challenge to write "opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels", and the 2024 winners have been announced. Deliberately bad writing requires a special talent.
- I do like daily puzzles, and Gisnep is the latest one to catch my eye. The letters of the quote are in the right columns, but not necessarily in the right order: in other words, it's a Quotefall with a couple of extra tricks that works decently-enough on mobile. This is a little more challenging than the average Wordle, but it's still easy enough to be a
daily challenge while feeling rewarding.
- Programmer fallacies about postcodes. However big you think this postcode might be, it's almost certainly bigger.
And finally: Siegfried and Joy's TikTok account is, well, a joy. Occasional videos from them keep coming up on my feed: it's the same joke every time but somehow it always makes me smile.
All the best,
— Tom
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