Telescopes, hoaxes, and a better link.
8th June 2026
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Hello!
Straight into the new videos, because there's a lot to
cover! First of all, over on Nebula this week, I get to push a button and fulfill a childhood dream that I thought was impossible, as I ask: can a 70-year-old telescope still be useful?
For those of you watching on YouTube, it's less button-pushing and more lever-pulling, because pulling the lever is the easy part.
In this week's Lateral: the Let's Learn Everything crew are back! Ella Hubber, Caroline Roper and Tom Lum face questions about inward injuries, backwards bars and Luneburg lenses.
Away from my own channel: I made it to one of Wired's White Void Interviews, giving advice and answering questions about making stuff for the internet!
And an early heads up for newsletter subscribers: if all goes well, the Technical Difficulties will return this Thursday, with a tweak to an old format!
Here's the other good stuff I've found on YouTube this week:
- A classic debunk deep-dive from Cambrian Chronicles, with Jon Bois-style motion graphics and great historical details: how a hoax on Wikipedia changed a country's history. "Hoax on Wikipedia" is a very
cleverly-phrased title, though; this goes back a bit further than you might think.
- Paige Elliott talks about the most beautiful thing she's ever made: sewing through grief, as she repurposes one of her late father's shirts into a
coat. This is vulnerable: talking about death is never easy, and this feels like one of those videos where someone has shared a piece of their soul with the world. (Thanks to Charlotte for the suggestion!)
- Frank Watkinson covers Maggie Reilly's, and later Cascada's, "Everytime We Touch". There's a reason this has gone far: it's a beautiful cover, and a complete tonal shift that recontextualises a Standard Club Anthem into something very different.
Now, around the rest of the web, we start with an odd one: last week, a lot of
newsletter readers got in touch to say that the tone-matching game I linked to sent them to some very questionable adverts. It even seemed to set off some email providers' defenses! I assumed that the site had been hijacked between writing the newsletter and sending it, but no. Thanks to reader Ian for solving the mystery: it turns out that popular web games now get LLM-cloned, launched on lookalike sites with misleading domain names, and then have dodgy ads injected once they become popular.
The link I found was one of those, which is disappointing and a bit embarrassing.
Of course, there's nothing I can do about links like that, or any other typos or mistakes, once the newsletter's gone out. But for safety, I've removed the dodgy link from the archived version of the newsletter on my site, and instead, today's first
link is the original!
- "How good is your ear", a tone-matching game from Dialed that, happily, I can still brag that I'm good at. Now, I did consider linking to Dailed's colour-matching game a while back, but I
found the always-sarcastic, jerk persona that the writers used to be so offputting that I avoided mentioning it. Happily, they've made this tone game less cynical -- and it's a better version than the cloned version that I accidentally linked to.
- The canary resuscitator was something I knew about because of filming with the Mines Rescue Service last year, but that fact unfortunately didn't make it into the video. Never fear: the Science and Industry Museum will tell you all about it.
- And you know what? Let's have another little web toy this week. Eyeball doesn't involve any eyeballs: it's a very simple numbers game... but it also feels like it's training a skill that might be worth developing.
And finally, on TikTok: a Yorkshireman speaks Japanese. (Alternate link for desktop.) And it wasn't until I clicked on the profile that I realised: this guy's a lot younger than he appears, he's just using a temporally coherent and
surprisingly convincing filter.
All the best,
— Tom
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