This week: videos that were far more interesting than I first thought.

• Why don't you sing opera like a normal person? Scores Unleashed is a small channel talking about music theory, and has nailed the modern, slightly-unhinged "sticking things to walls" video essay style. But! She's also an opera singer, and the video leads up to a wonderful demonstration of steadily removing the "opera" attributes from an aria, and adding them back to a pop song. This kept me interested throughout. (Contains one precision-guided F-bomb; thanks Niso for sending this over!)
   
• Rex Kreuger normally makes tutorials about woodworking, but his recent video about raised panels has found much wider appeal. Do try to get past the clickbait title of "the amazing invisible detail" -- the detail isn't invisible, just ignored! And to be fair, I can't think of a better title, because: yes, the video taught me about something very common, with an interesting history, that I'd never even noticed or thought about. (Thanks Collin for the suggestion!)
   
• "Hello, this is Sanago, a 3D pen master". A bold claim to start a video, and one that's entirely justified. This is a restful crafts video, with the days -- weeks? -- of work required abstracted away not by timelapse, but with cuts and deadpan one-liners that punctuate the video with the same sort of well-placed attention to detail as the craft itself. Sanago makes a model of Gromit, from Wallace and Gromit, and you should let this one build: it starts slowly and then it just keeps getting more and more complicated. (The video itself is in Korean, but there are full English subtitles.)

• A freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Or in other words: Google Maps for medieval times.
   
• After last week's inventor-of-the-trampoline stage routine, thanks to David (previously: Gisnep, Doomscroll) for sending over this article he wrote about the trampoline on the Great Pyramid, which includes the beautifully understated caption "I'm pretty sure this isn't allowed anymore".
   
• And after last week's daily-puzzle recommendation, there was a flurry of additional similar quizzes sent in reply. I think the best one was sent over by Robbie, who suggested Raddle, a word-linking quiz. It's a great format once you get the hang of it; my only complaint is that it's sometimes infuriatingly American. One of their puzzles asked me to solve an anagram to find the name of a baseball player!
   

And finally: if you'd like your own Fraggle, many of the Jim Henson company's puppets are up for auction, but they're not cheap.

All the best,

— Tom