Things I Have Enjoyed & Learnt 016
Welcome to Season 02.
In Season 01 I wanted to convince myself that I could do an entire year of newsletters, and I succeeded, so S02 is going to emphasise quality over quantity.
That said, this is a bumper edition.
Things I Have Enjoyed
Big One by Flyana Boss. I like this one more than the other one which was so popular on TikTok.
Disney is just literally making actual droids now.
Reading screenplays on the Kindle Scribe. Maybe I mentioned this one before, but I've been working my way through this year's Black List and the Scribe is perfect for scripts.
The Air Current is excellent, and its reporting on Alaska 1282 and JAL 516 has been particularly good. I especially like that they make all of their safety-related reporting available without a subscription.
Adeel Akhtar in the latest Harlan Coben thing on Netflix. The show itself went completely off the rails towards the end, but Aktar is excellent and there was a bit with him in a car chase that makes me want to see him do a Liam Neeson-esque turn as an action star.
Tharshan Selvarajah, the Sri Lankan who makes the best baguettes in Paris.
Paku Paku, Pac-Man in 1D.
Glorb's videos. This is very hard to explain but bear with me: basically there's someone out there who makes SpongeBob SquarePants rap videos and they're very good. Nobody knows who Glorb really is, but they have a huge following and the consensus is it's someone from the industry, maybe a ghostwriter. I'm not familiar at all with SpongeBob, but these are great. Parental Advisory on the lyrics though.
The Secret Hours, the new Mick Herron book. It's not a Slow Horses book, but it's pretty Slow Horses-adjacent. If you—like me—have read all the Slough House books then you'll remember Anthony Sparrow from Bad Actors, for example.
I like the Pixel Buds, but I don't like that it's hard for people to tell I'm wearing headphones. The number of times I've had to flip up the rim of my beanie to show someone I can't hear them ...
Riptide and Trendsetter from Conor Price. I think he's a good example of new type of hyper-Online-with-a-capital-O artist, where his music and his Instagram and his YouTube and his TikTok are all sorta rolled into one Thing.
My incredibly cursed celsiheit temperature scale is popular on Mastodon again.
Things I Have Learnt
The Car Equivalent Unit which is used to measure the capacity of vehicle carriers, particularly RORO car carriers, is based on the 1966 Toyota Corona and is 4125 × 1550 × 1400 millimetres.
It's so cold in Alberta that you can pour yourself a nice glass of propane.
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Plain Text.
They have special machines at airports just to melt snow. It makes sense now that I think about it, but it had never occured to me before. I don't think I've ever seen one in the UK.
John Romero is still making DOOM levels. He's even working with Buckethead from Guns N' Roses and Thorr.
The cockpit doors in an aeroplane can open as the result of an explosive decompression. Either by design or otherwise. I wonder how long it'll be until we see this in a hijacking scene, or before someone tries it in real life.
The Shipping Forecast turned 100 years old on January 1st 2024. If you don't like the Shipping Forecast I'm not sure we can be friends.
You could buy simple toy-like nuclear fallout detectors in the 1950s and 60s.
Danny Dyer was in an Oscar-winning short film. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp_%282003_film%29
The End
I'd love your feedback if you have any, and please forward this to a friend.
Alby