Arms, candy, and sign language!

11th May 2026

Hello!

This week's video on Nebula has one of my favourite titles of the entire series. I know it does sort-of spoil the punchline of the video... but there are so many other things in the video that I don't mind at all. Oh no: I sympathised with a Victorian arms dealer.

And over at the much more algorithmic YouTube, this week's video is currently titled "If you found candy with my name in it, here's why". Will that change? No idea, get it while it's hot. But not too hot, molten sugar will scald you. (I did also consider setting it so that viewers with their language set to UK English would see 'sweets' rather than candy, but it turns out that -- along with pluralising 'it' to 'them' -- makes the title too long to fit on small screens.)

And then, of course, there's this week's Lateral! Matt Gray, Rowan Ellis and Verity Babbs face questions about pervasive players, biscuit barrels and foreign flags!

Here's some good stuff I've found on YouTube this week. As ever, if you see something that might fit here: please do hit reply and tell me about it!

I've talked about sign language translation a few times in this newsletter. To keep that thread going, here's a great video by awti, about rhyming in American Sign Language. It's an 11-year-old video, and I've no idea how I've never seen it before! It's exactly my sort of thing. Turn on captions: this is a really engaging brief lecture, performed in ASL. (Thanks to Gołąb for sending it over.)
Ironic Sans talks about the celebrity taxis that everyone hated: New York City's audible in-cab safety warnings, voiced by famous people. This is a pop-culture deep-dive that includes well-edited interviews with not just the people who came up with the idea, but also the folks involved in making it work, one of the celebrities, and the person who was in the room when the decision was made to kill it off. There are lots of slop "remember this?" video essays out there, and this is definitively not one of them.
Multiview Stereo Projection is a clever idea, well executed, and explained entirely with calm visuals and zero narration. I'd really like to see the results of this in real life.

And around the rest of the web:

klattsch is a "primitive formant synthesiser": almost-manual text-to-speech, old school. When reader Lexus sent this over, it was a little small web toy: since then its popularity has exploded, with a whole community making stuff with it. If nothing else, have a listen to the Daft Punk-style demo.
The man who blew up a nuclear power station and disappeared. Not a clickbait headline: this is an interesting and investigative long read about... well, a man who blew up a nuclear power station and disappeared.
And thanks to Adrian for sending over Landmarkr: a surprisingly-tricky, well-curated daily game of "guess the landmark".

And finally, on Instagram: hold on, I'm getting a call.

All the best,

— Tom

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