Construction, a good puzzle, and a double bollarding.
12th May 2025
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Hello!
A side note before this week's "good stuff I've found on the internet": it's
been brought to my attention that em dashes are now seen as a "tell" for AI. Which is frustrating, because I've been using em dashes for a long time! Producer David even put a fake sponsor read for them in an episode of Lateral. I guess I'll just have to go back to the old ASCII double-hyphen instead.
Speaking of Lateral! This week there are three returning players: Katie Steckles, Hannah Crosbie, and Geoff Marshall, facing questions about airline advertising, alphabetic adverts and album alternatives. (The rare complete eight-word alliteration by producer David, there.)
Now, this week's
newsletter has a bit of a theme: things made or constructed. And in the video section, we start with three: one for entertainment; one a long-lost prototype; and one as art.
- LEGO creator Banana Gear Studios asks: could making a wheel of wheels make a car go faster? There's so much skill on display here, and complicated build elements that must have taken hours or days are just casually introduced. Other video creators might have spent an hour breaking down all the failures and attempts along the way, but no: this twelve-minute video is exactly as long as it needs to be, and no longer, and I respect that. (Thanks to Lukas for sending this over!)
- This second recommendation requires a bit of explanation:
- First, a the long-lost prototype for a never-produced 1947 prototype Chinese-language typewriter has been rediscovered! That link will give you all the context.
- Second, someone has managed to record a video
tour of that recently-found prototype, albeit with infuriating and out-of-place music. But the mechanism's not in motion there! So:
- Finally, to explain how special it is, watch my actual recommendation: this Chinese-language video from HTX Studio, whose title translates simply to "We Made A Chinese Typewriter". YouTube's automated subtitle translation is almost flawless here; it's entirely comprehensible if you switch the language in settings, and I would strongly recommend making the effort. What an incredible project.
- First, a the long-lost prototype for a never-produced 1947 prototype Chinese-language typewriter has been rediscovered! That link will give you all the context.
- Die Mimik der Tethys is a lovely kinetic artwork: an ocean buoy, suspended in mid-air in an Italian gallery, moved up and down and around by motors, mimicking motion data sent from an actual buoy in the Atlantic, near Nantes. If the sea there is calm, so is the buoy; if it's stormy, then the rise and fall will be drastic. Now, I'm always somewhat skeptical of art where there's live data or processing involved -- because it would be so much easier just to fake it, or at least fudge the results quite a bit! But the artist's page on the project shows the buoy in question, complete with solar panels and electronics, and so I reckon it might be the real thing.
Away from the world of video, you might like:
- Congratulations to the New Zealand amateur rocketeers who managed to launch a small rocket from the South Island, past the Kármán line, and into actual space! It's the first successful amateur non-US spaceshot, and the new velocity record-holder. (Thanks Josh for the suggestion!)
- Also, congratulations to the Swiss student who broke the world drone speed record, at more than 550km/h (340mph)!
- Finally, let's break the theme with a daily puzzle game that I've enjoyed. Puzzmallow, which has a lot of daily games, has invented Buzzled, a hexagonal sort-of-picross, sort-of-sudoku game. Make all the hexes yellow or black, fulfil the requirements pinned on the outside. It has that rewarding flow of a puzzle where it's initially very hard, then one discovery leads to another, and another, and another, and then suddenly the puzzle feels like it's solving itself. Recommended.
And finally: the rare Double German Bollarding.
All the best,
— Tom
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