Tiny electric cars! strange food reviews! and buses!

• Adam Savage has visited the Earl Hayes Press, where Hollywood makes its fake printed props, and it's fascinating. (There are a few other recent videos from there on the channel, too!)
   
• Lots of people have tried to update Bowling for Soup's track "1985", because — like the Stacy's Dad version I linked to a couple of weeks ago — it's a fairly obvious joke. Not only do a lot of people remember the original, but its time has come: it was released 19 years after 1985, which means people who heard it as teenagers are now the age of the song's main character. The catch is in the writing: no-one seemed to nail the lyrics. Well, I think davvn's "2002" has managed it: and since there's an official release and a "feat. Bowling for Soup" on the track, it looks like the band agree. (There is a sound-effect gag on the way out of the bridge that made me laugh out loud.)
   
• I had a couple of long conversations with YouTube creator friends about Joe Is Hungry, a fast-food-review channel that breaks pretty much all the rules of how to make modern YouTube videos. His latest review, of Taco Bell, is a good example of his style. Brace yourselves, because it's time for nested bullet points:
  
  
  • I had no idea that fast-food-review channels are a thing, but it turns out there are a lot of them. (I guess, particularly if you're in America, it's relatively simple content to make, and it lets you business-expense food.) That glut of creators means you have to differentiate yourself by charisma and by style, and Joe certainly manages that. The edit here, along with the preparation for it, must take so much time.
     
  • I would never advise anyone to start a YouTube video with 90 seconds of introductions and shoutouts. Surely he loses a lot of potential audience there, people who just click on the thumbnail and then immediately click away. But perhaps if no-one's doing it, it becomes a unique selling point?
     
  • A couple of videos of his going somewhat viral (order by popular and you'll see them) doesn't seem to have resulted in more long-term views. I suspect that's because "look at this, the editing's interesting!" is something that works once, but you don't need to see it again. But then, perhaps a call-to-action will help the video reach returning audiences, people who'll come back because they like Joe. (I'm reminded of YouTube's "help, hub, hero" strategy advice.) Are people enjoying this ironically, unironically, or both? I've no idea.
     
  • Basically: YouTube is weird and sometimes, if you break enough of the rules, you loop round to being interesting again.
     
• London double-decker bus racing! There's a few comments in here worth reading, too, from one of the drivers and from a child of one of the drivers.

• Several people spotted pulsars before the discovery that's recorded in the history books... but they weren't believed, or they dismissed them as faulty equipment. And one Air Force radar technician didn't want to talk about it, just in case it gave away classified information.
   
• The world's last internet cafés is a fascinating documentation of a relatively brief phenomenon. I remember visiting internet cafés when I was on holiday, pre-smartphones: I'd feel very different about typing my username and password into an unknown computer now. (thanks to several people who sent this over)
   
• A story from the computer-science trenches: how early PayPal was nearly devastated by a security improvement that went wrong.
   
• New Word Order, a game: can you work out which of these words and phrases was coined first? (For Brits of a certain age: every time I see the "RIGHT!" banner, I hear it in Roy Walker's voice.)

And finally: the summer intern who ate his lunch on a nuclear bomb in 1955.

All the best,

— Tom