Waggles, warlocks, and three videos I'd never usually have clicked on.

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11th August 2025

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Heads up! This newsletter is more than three months old. Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed. Please handle with care.

Hello!

The Technical Difficulties continues! Matt, Chris, Gary and I go from waggle to warlock and also (as is traditional) insult Lancashire. And in this week's Lateral: the Let's Learn Everything crew are back, facing questions about special substances, street squabbles and sporting stakes.

All the video suggestions this week were sent in by newsletter readers! And those videos have all jumped out of their intended audience in one way or another: they're videos I'd never have clicked on from the title and thumbnail. I needed someone to say "trust me, this is good".

First up: Dua Lipa versus the literary landscape (one bit of strong language at the very end), a well-crafted video essay about literature from small channel Below the Fray. I would never have expected something like this to hit the mainstream, but: 1.5 million views! And it's fascinating, even to someone like me who doesn't get some of the literary references in here. Interviewing is a skill, particularly deep and intelligent interviewing, and -- breaking stereotypes -- it turns out that pop star Dua Lipa has it. (Thanks Adrien for the suggestion.)
How slick is this video about an auto-aiming trash can?! There's so much in here, presented so quickly, that I find it hard to believe some of it. For other makers, this could be three videos, each half an hour long, talking about the processes and failures along the way -- and that would help "sell" the reality. But here it's just the results, all killer no filler, at a relentless pace. Then I recognised the name, HTX Studio: I've seen this channel before! Back in May, I linked to a video about making a Chinese typewriter, noting that YouTube's auto-translation of subtitles made it perfectly understandable. But that's on their Chinese channel, and this video is their all-new, English-language channel. They're posting the same stories to both: but any part of the video where there's someone talking is filmed in both languages. So they're not using YouTube's new single-video multi-language features here: everything's translated, including graphics, and that's almost certainly the right decision. (Thanks to Isak for sending this over!)
I would never have clicked on this next video given its title and thumbnail. It looks like the sort of inane lowest-common-denominator clickbait that plagues modern YouTube. In fact, I'm not going to tell you the title for that reason. All I'm going to tell you is that you need to stick with this, it's a slow burn, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. (Strong language.) Full marks for the technical work and performance, too: it "feels real" in a way that a lot of videos like it don't. (Thanks to Barr for sending this!)

And around the rest of the web:

Alexander Sammon, at Slate, responded to one of those "recruitment" spam texts. The subheading is perhaps a bit hyperbolic: if "it got weirder than [he] could have imagined" then I think his imagination needs some work, but this is still a good insight into the mindset of both scammer and potential scam-ee.
Earlier this year, the TV channel BBC Wales returned to the past, showing an old electronic ident from 1985... using the original technology. Here's a technical interview about they did it, complete with Vimeo link to demonstrate it at the end.
French people are using their lunch discount card to get free travel on the London Underground.

And finally: four radioactive wasp nests found on South Carolina nuclear facility. I'm sure it's fine.

All the best,

— Tom

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