Tech Dif is back! A great video essay! And a good pool game.

• First, J. Draper (who I've linked to before and who's played Lateral a few times) asks: would you watch a public execution? This is an incredible video essay: artistic, fascinating, and covering dark themes without being exploitative. The content warnings at the start are justified.
  
  And as a side note: I've read an advance copy of J's upcoming book Mavericks, and it's great. (That's an affiliate link, but I'd have linked to this video without it, and J didn't ask me to put the book here!)
   
• Ed Pratt attempts to travel the entire River Thames, from source to sea, without leaving it. This is a ridiculous challenge taken very seriously. It requires far more endurance than you might think, and Ed does a great job of bringing the audience along for the ride. This is part one, and even at this length, it doesn't feel stretched out.
   
• Also in history, I've no idea how I missed Townsends until this week: a store for historical reenactors that also now has a massively-popular YouTube channel. Food That Time Forgot: Ship's Biscuits sets up a brilliant promise of eating a ten-year-old biscuit at the start, and the video has more than enough interest throughout to stop you skipping to the end. (Thanks to Mike for sending this over.)
   

What about away from YouTube?

• Over on the relatively-new social network Bluesky, Andy Baio curates a long list of the people playing with the Bluesky firehose (the list of all posts sent on the service). This does feel like something from the early days of Twitter... but the online world feels like it's changed significantly since those days. The perfect example of this: Hank Green's recent video discovering a bot army that disagrees with everyone (strong language). Honestly, I think an auto-disagreement bot would have felt like a pretty good gag back in 2006 — it's the sort of thing younger-me might have built for a quick laugh, albeit without the benefit of language models to back it up. 18 years later, it just doesn't seem funny. The world's communication seems to have moved on to group chats and Discords and other private groups; the days of "tell everything to everyone, what could go wrong" are past, and perhaps that's for the best.
   
• Comball is an interesting, quick browser game that combines pool with 2048's colour-matching. Combine the balls, get higher colours; you lose if there are more than 15 balls on the field. I have some issues with it (the physics seem a little off, and as a Brit I'd much prefer the balls use either snooker colours or the spectrum) — but it's a fun way to spend a few minutes.

As ever, if you spot something that might fit in here, do send it over: one of the joys of this newsletter is being able to push a little bit outside the usual recommended videos, and to see things that wouldn't normally be surfaced for me!

And finally, over on TikTok: daredevil Marius Ciut leaps from a hot air balloon, through clouds, swinging on a rope attached to someone else who's parachuting. Jumping through cloud cover is probably the most reckless part of it; the final footage is stunning.

All the best,

— Tom