A live show! a wonderful camera! and an angry penguin.

• Alexis Dahl, who I linked to in one of the very first newsletters, visits the massive Marquette Ore Docks in Michigan. The Ore Docks were on my research list for a long, long time but I never made it there. I also didn't think they were still in operation! This video does a good job of explaining the history and showing the huge scale of the operation; if you're missing short clips of weird industrial history, this should help. Hopefully Alexis' channel can get big enough that she's able to get access to film inside places like this; as I write this, there's a great pinned comment from the first mate of the ship that she filmed loading! (Thanks to Kieran for sending this over.)
   
• I was wondering whether to put in a Christmas link to this week's newsletter, but the decision was made for me when an anonymous reader sent over synthet's guide on how to make every Christmas song ever. I was smiling and impressed throughout. Is this a true tutorial? a song? a series of jokes? It's all of those, rolled into an incredible two and a half minutes. There's so much skill being quietly, competently demonstrated here, and it's very much worth your time. (The best Christmas songs of recent years are, of course, Kelly Clarkson, Cher, and Kelly Clarkson and Cher.)
   
• AlphaPhoenix builds a billion-frames-per-second camera. Not only is this a stunning build on a very low budget, but the explanation includes a couple of very clever compositing gags that I'm not sure I figured out.
   

• BE/HOLD's 'Where They Landed' is "the score to a sci-fi horror film that doesn't exist". Only the first track, 'These Woods Are Haunted' is out so far: the combination of dark synths and banjo brings to mind a dark version of 'Journey of the Sorcerer'. The liner notes are, in short: aliens have landed in the Appalachian mountains, and they're not friendly.
   
• "Humphrey's World" is a fascinating (and, it would seem, unauthorised and unwanted) profile of the man who owns dozens of pubs but keeps many of them closed.
   
• And on a much lighter note, the results of this year's Comedy Wildlife Photograph Awards are out! I linked to these last year, and I'll probably link to them again. My favourite's the woodpecker and owl, but I will say: despite being massively over-HDRd, the penguin-argument photo should have ranked much higher.
   

A lovely Christmas to all who celebrate; there's one newsletter, and one more Tech Dif episode, left this year.
 

And finally: this is how much a wind turbine bends.

All the best,

— Tom