I recreated old Welsh fireworks, and found footage from the past.
21st June 2021
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Hello!
In this week's video, Steve the explosives expert is back, recreating almost-forgotten fireworks from North Wales. The most surprising thing for me is how much abuse a GoPro can take.
Other interesting links I've found this week:
In this week's video, Steve the explosives expert is back, recreating almost-forgotten fireworks from North Wales. The most surprising thing for me is how much abuse a GoPro can take.
Other interesting links I've found this week:
- The history and origin story of Planet Hollywood, a strange fever-dream of a 1990s restaurant. I had no idea just how bizarre it was.
- Too many videos about theme parks just play other people's footage while a monotone voiceover summarises a wiki article. This Defunctland episode on the Handwich, Disney's "sandwich of the future", is not one of those: it's a lot more fun.
- American baseball players are using sticky gunk to doctor baseballs, which the article describes as "blatant cheating". I found it amazing how this can be so well-known, and so blatant, but as-yet the folks in charge
haven't cracked down on it.
- The past is a different country: an hour-long documentary from 1990, about policing the M25 motorway. Part 2 is here. It's notable for the production, which would be unthinkable nowadays: there's no commentary, no confessional to-camera afterwards, and no music to manipulate emotions. And then, it's also notable for just how much has changed. I was a kid in 1990, I should remember how things were then, but several sections in there startled me: from the lax approach to seatbelts, to hitchhikers just walking down the side of the motorway. (Warning: while there's nothing bloody, the final section covers a death following a collision.)
Side note about that last link: I'm a bit uncomfortable pointing to a pirated documentary reuploaded to YouTube, both because the original producers have rights over that footage, and because sending a large audience to a mostly-unknown video could mean that it's Noticed in a way that works out badly.
I wouldn't do that for something personal or individual, but when it's part of a documentary strand produced by a big company, and there's absolutely no other way to find it, I think I can justify it. If you do leave a comment, please be cautious and polite — I guess the best thing I can ask is "please leave the video in a better state that you found it"!
- And finally, from the ever-interesting qntm, code that converts between Unix time and International Atomic Time. A perfect example of "well, just how hard could it be"?
Now that I've hopefully found a steady company for this to work with, I'm going to carefully start rolling this out to a larger audience. Thanks for being with me as the experimental phase continues!
All the best,
— Tom
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