This week: nested bullet points. Also lighthouses!

• High-speed X-ray video using something I'd not heard of before: a photon-counting detector! An extremely expensive and borrowed camera, propped up on a small roll of electrical tape, seeing inside things at hundreds of frames a second.
   
• It feels like everyone knows about the Tram Driving World Championships these days. So instead, I present to you: the Forklift World Championships.
   
• "Game show on a train" was a hastily-typed note on my ideas board a few years ago, and it never materialised -- both for obvious logistical reasons, and also because there are very few reasons to actually have a show on a train. Almost anything you can do on a train, you can do in a studio, cheaper and better. But it turns out, when you have nearly twenty million subscribers and one of the biggest channels in France: you can indeed Stop The Train. (Langage grossier.) I have a lot of things to say about this, so it's time for nested bullet points:
  • I'm not expecting most newsletter readers to watch this in full -- enjoying it will require too much knowledge of French YouTubeurs and their friendship circles. But it's worth a skim through, just to see how it's all put together. The editing manages to be modern and fast-paced, without going all the way over to "clearly aimed at caffeinated children with zero attention span". (Unrelated sidebar but since I'm using too many words this week anyway, and I smiled at "YouTubeurs" in the title: why did the world go with "YouTubers", anyway?! We don't call television presenters "BBCers" or "PBSers". And no musician is a "Spotifier". Tying someone's description to a company they happen to be involved with has never sat right with me. I don't think YouTuber is an accurate description for me -- after all, my main professional output right now is hosting Lateral and writing this newsletter -- and I'd push back against it.)
     
  • Unlike a lot of big-budget English-language challenge videos, this doesn't fall into the trap of "it's big so it must be interesting" or "there's arbitrary conflict therefore it must be interesting", at least not at first. The first three challenges use the setting really well! Even as an outsider, they're good to watch! It's a delight to see some decent challenge design and execution in a show like this. Maybe someone even actually playtested things?!
     
  • You can use YouTube's automated subtitle translation for this, and it works really, really well. I am angry that YouTube prioritised awful-sounding AI dubbing over improving the existing, working subtitle translation that's hidden behind five clicks and a menu that lists every language in alphabetical order. But alas, no Google employee ever gets kudos from management for fixing or maintaining old stuff, only for creating shiny new things. This could have been such an easy and quick win for them, but no, Must Use AI instead.
     
  • Every player is wearing a 360 camera on their shoulder. At all times! This must have been an editing nightmare, both for filesizes and for framing up every shot in post. But they've clearly got the team to deal with it, and it works well: they can pick up every possible angle. It's the first time I've seen anyone do that, and I don't think even people with old-school television budgets are pulling off that sort of thing yet.
     
  • It's just a shame that, after the third challenge, the design gets lazy: there's no use of the train, not even windows in most of the "carriages". (Was most of the second half filmed somewhere else? They're already compositing in a moving background when entering each carriage, presumably because they're not really detaching the cars, which starts to cast doubt on the whole thing...) Ending on a dull quiz and then a vote for who wins, filmed "indoors", is such an anticlimax that I do wonder if something went wrong during production and this was the best fix they had. Still, at least they didn't do "split or steal", the laziest possible manufactured-drama ending to any reality or game show.
     
  • Anyway: wonderful effort, didn't stick the landing, but a reminder that there's a whole world of non-English-speaking channels out there -- literally -- who are often making better stuff than the English-speaking ones are.
     

• The Lighthouse Directory is exactly the sort of thing the web was built for, and while I recognise there are many enormous advantages to modern technology, I do miss the times when most sites were like this. (Thanks to Alex for the suggestion!)
   
• A potential Ig Nobel prize here, I think: herring gulls react differently to men speaking versus men shouting. "When attempting to deter gulls from exploiting anthropogenic resources, talking might stop them from foraging, but shouting is more effective at making them flee."
   
• TrafficVision is a global list and map of speed cameras with a fun interface, and not, as you might hope, archive footage of the Chuckle Brothers stuck in traffic.

And finally: just a really long tyre roll. (Thanks to David for sending this over!)

All the best,

— Tom