Ships! heist news! and the best video I've seen in a long while.
20th November 2023
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Heads up! This newsletter is more than a year old. Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed. Please handle with care.
Hello!
For years, I've been trying to film at one of the very few places in the world where ship captains train to pilot enormous tankers: well, I finally made it. And all I had to do was not get stuck in the Suez Canal!
For years, I've been trying to film at one of the very few places in the world where ship captains train to pilot enormous tankers: well, I finally made it. And all I had to do was not get stuck in the Suez Canal!
And over on Lateral, Bernadette Banner, Emily Graslie and Dani Siller face questions about jogging jobs, textual T-shirts and dangerous dogs.
Around the rest of YouTube, there's been some really good videos:
- First: Bobby Fingers' latest project, Jeff Bezos Rowing Boat (strong language, adult themes, surgical imagery) is the single most creative, most remarkable video I've seen on the platform all year. It starts slow; stay with it. The amount of skill, effort and dedication involved is far, far beyond anything
I could imagine putting into a video. There are jokes in here that made me laugh so hard I had to pause and rewind, and a moment where I was watching from between my fingers because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It's also a project that could not work in any other medium. If you click through to nothing else in this newsletter, not even my video: watch this one.
- There are a
lot of nostalgia-bait videos on YouTube, videos that just regurgitate footage of old TV shows just within the boundaries of fair use, while someone repeats a Wikipedia article and cracks poor jokes over the top. This is not one of them. Bob the Fish's IT! The Short Sad Life of the ITV Telethon (occasional strong language) is well
worth a watch: what was a vague memory for me, mostly involving an annoying jingle and a blue fuzzy mascot, turned out to be far more complex than I thought. I don't want to spoil it: I'll just say that this went to places I didn't expect. (Thanks to Rusty for sending this over!)
- I have to remind myself that FortNine is a Canadian retailer of motorcycle gear, and their
YouTube channel is just a spinoff: because despite not being in their target market, I keep finding their videos entertaining and... well, non-corporate. Gore-Tex is a Marketing Gimmick makes exactly the argument is says in the title, really well: and given they're selling things made with the stuff, I'm impressed they're willing to make
it.
What about the rest of the web?
- Heist news! (Odd, frustrating heist news.) This time, the hijacking of $339,000 worth of rare Japanese KitKats.
- Fascinating, albeit a press release, so treat with caution: US rideshare company Lyft built its own in-house mapping and navigation product, rather than relying on Google, and apparently it's paying dividends.
- The David Rumney Historical Map Collection has just added a full text search to its maps, along with the existing interactive globes and high-resolution scans.
Right! Next week, if all goes well, a light subject.
And finally: Mr Sandman, man me a sand.
All the best,
— Tom
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