A clean railway, a bizarre ride, and nesting season.
8th May 2023
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Heads up! This newsletter is more than two years old. Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed. Please handle with care.
Hello!
The "Tom wearing protective clothing" trilogy continues this week, as I visit the world's cleanest railway. (Technically, it's a cable car, but that makes for a much worse title.)
The "Tom wearing protective clothing" trilogy continues this week, as I visit the world's cleanest railway. (Technically, it's a cable car, but that makes for a much worse title.)
And over on Lateral, it's the return of Mark Rober, Virginia Schutte and Jabrils: with questions about rigorous racing, perceptive photography, and vexatious vexillology.
Elsewhere on YouTube this week:
- You've seen the new Captain Disillusion video, right? Surely everyone's seen it by now. If you haven't heard of the Captain before: then for 15 years, he's been debunking viral CG videos with incredible style and flair, often recreating what the original footage must have looked like. There's so
much work involved in every shot, and this is well worth your time.
- Every aspiring YouTuber wants to know about "the algorithm": in short, how do you make videos that work on YouTube? This video from Answer in Progress is a near-perfect answer to that: the complete history of the YouTube algorithm, I guess. If you've got a small YouTube channel, or just want to know how everything works, this is a great place to start.
- I really enjoyed the statistics
of microwave popcorn: making animated physics and math explainers is easy, but making good ones is really hard. This is one of the latter.
- Last week, I mentioned a video on Tim Hunkin's channel, which had a few sections from "The Ride of Life", a 1990s British dark ride that I'd never heard of. Here, uploaded to YouTube, is a documentary that covers its chaotic history. This isn't a modern YouTube video essay, it's an actual television documentary from the time, made up of original, contemporary footage! The concept was bold: a shopping mall on a former steelworks site that decided to have a dark ride as an attraction. Artists were (somehow!) given carte blanche — and spent months or years creating bizarre and and occasionally-gruesome scenes that would have terrified children. Construction was complete, the merchandise was ready... and then the entire thing was cancelled just before opening. How on earth did any of this happen? What a strange, strange bit of amusement-park history, and a fragment of that early-90s consumer-society "shopping centres and theme parks" optimism.
Other interesting links I've found this week:
- No, the king doesn't own all the swans in Britain.
- It's Eurovision this week! And the Guardian has interviewed the British Eurovision performers who weren't as successful as Sam Ryder last year: Blue, Bonnie Tyler, Scooch, and SuRie all talk about what happened after the
show was over.
- If you haven't got an invite to Bluesky, the shiny Twitter-alike that will likely collapse into a ball of drama within a week, don't worry: it's still small enough that you can see every post, in real time, on a completely separate public web
site. Back when Twitter started, it had a similar public "firehose". To me, this seems almost rude to watch: sure, by design, every post is meant to be public, but somehow this recontextualisation feels like a reminder that "public but not broadcast" is always going to be an uncomfortable bodge.
- Inside the chaotic world of kids trying to play video games on school laptops.
That's it for now! The last in the Scrubs Trilogy is next week, if all goes well.
And finally: it's nesting season. I have listened to this about twenty times so far.
All the best,
— Tom
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