Many more words than usual! Also, a good cat photo.

• "A microchip that runs on air" is the title for soiboi soft's video, and surely, surely, there has to be a better possible title than that? But I can't think of one, so instead, let me recommend this in a different way: if you know what AND, OR and NOT gates are, you should watch this, because this video replicates how they work using vacuum pumps and precise 3D printing, and then uses them to make an physical, air-powered "circuit" to make a squishy little robot walk. This was fascinating. (Thanks to Benjamin for sending this over!)
   
• Student Accomplice is a "capstone" animated film, made by around 30 students at Brigham Young University as part of their final year at BYU's School for Animation. And it feels like one of the shorts that'd run before a Pixar movie: not just because it was made in part with Pixar software, but because the character design, style, and comic timing feels so professional. I can see why it won awards; there's a brief behind-the-scenes article here. (Thanks to Donald for the suggestion!)
   
• RAYE's single WHER-- no, sorry, I can't include that many capital letters, even if that is the official styling. Raye's new single Where Is My Husband has been understandably near the top of most of the music services' charts this week. It's brilliant: genre-bending and deeply layered, the sort of sound that I assumed could was only possible in the studio with modern hyper-optimised production techniques. For example, the vocals are, at a minimum, two different performances, stereo-split -- with so many overlapping lines. Surely, it'd have to be massively changed to be performed live? After all, her previous single, Escapism (strong language, drug references) literally doesn't have enough breathing room between words when performed live!
  
  Well: the actual reason I'm including the new song in the newsletter is this live performance from the Graham Norton show, which is a tour-de-force from very single part of the production. Not just the lead vocals and performance, which stand up well against the recorded version, but also the backing singers; the whole band's well-rehearsed movements; the production team who are mixing that presumably-live band; the vision mixer who's planned out and executed camera moves and cuts that work with the song. And I can't see any continuity errors: I think this might genuinely be the one-and-only live take. What a show.
  
  • Side note on this -- and yes, you're getting nested bullet points -- if you want to see how a production like this is "called" from the gallery when it's a fully-live performance, the Superbowl 50 half-time show behind-the-scenes is worth watching too. I've linked to it before, and will happily link to it again now. 
     
  • Second side note: if you want to see how poor vision mixing and editing can cast a pall over a live performance, try T-Pain's cover of Black Sabbath's War Pigs. Incredible audio (and T-Pain can sing!) but once it gets going a couple of minutes in, the video direction lurches between "randomly change the camera angle every bar", "randomly change the camera angle every beat" and "just randomly change the camera angle for no reason". That's not entirely the editor's fault -- it's a directorial problem too, no-one's getting closeups most of the time -- but like so many things, vision mixing is a skilled job that only gets noticed when something "feels wrong"... even if the audience might not understand why.
     

• This has been all over, and at least two people I know have considered buying them: a New Jersey theme park has put its animatronic dinosaurs on Facebook Marketplace as it shuts down. If you want to see what they look like in situ: full marks to Ray Out There on YouTube for doing a walking tour, and cramming all the necessary keywords into the title so it showed up first when I searched.
   
• A 16th century painting with literal illustrations of over 100 Dutch proverbs, turned into an interactive web toy.
   
• Just a good photo of a Pallas cat (and some other photos, and some context, but let's be honest, the best way I can recommend that is to say it's a good photo of a cat).

And finally: 90s Europop on a Dutch street organ.

All the best,

— Tom