Another week in quarantine, another issue of this newsletter. Last Monday, Washington instated a similar policy to that of the Bay Area, which they decided to brand as “Stay Home, Stay Healthy”. As a result, I don’t have too much interesting stuff to talk about this week.
As a result of being stuck inside, I’ve been partaking in a few virtual board game nights. We tried playing an online version of Secret Hitler hosted through Tabletopia, but found that manipulating the physical pieces in virtual 3D space made focusing on the actual gameplay pretty difficult. (The physics engine is pretty impressive, though.)
It turns out, a combination of Discord and Jackbox Party Packs works perfectly for quarantine board gaming. Now that Discord allows people to “go live” directly from a voice channel, the person who owns the game just needs to stream what would normally be shown on the TV, and everyone can play on their computer or phone while watching the stream. Push the Button, their take on the social deception game genre, worked really well remotely. Shoutouts to Discord for being one of my favourite pieces of software written in the past few years.
I guess one cool thing is that I did my first technical interview as a Googler last week, which was a nerve-racking experience — now I finally can say I’ve experienced both sides of the interview loop. While I have helped several other people by conducting mock interviews, being the interviewer when there’s something at stake feels significantly more meaningful.
Fortunately, this interview went very well! I managed to decide on a good question beforehand (no, I’m not going to say what it is; I don’t want to have to come up with another one), and the candidate explained their thought process nicely. I’ve been drafting up a blog post on technical interviewing for a while now, and I think after I conduct a few more interviews, I’ll be confident enough in my interviewing tendencies to publish it.
One of my favourite mediums for learning interesting things is the video essay. For most things, I much prefer reading through a written blog post than sitting through a way too drawn out video, but a well-crafted video essay is truly a piece of art. There are a number of YouTube creators that have mastered the art of the video essay, and I’ve been wanting to share a list of some of my favourite ones for a while.
I scrolled through my subscriptions list and, for each creator I really enjoy watching, picked what I feel is one of their best videos, and in no particular order, listed them below. Consider this a sampler pack of video essays (and a small glimpse into how I tend to spend my free time):
- Humans Need Not Apply: This video essay by CGP Grey was released back in 2014, but the ideas regarding the future of automation discussed are still relevant today, possibly even more once we see the full outcome of this pandemic.
- Superhuman Tape Measure Skills DEBUNK: Captain Disillusion makes VFX look more like magic than an art. He demonstrates a mastery of his craft by not only explaining how video effects are employed, but also nonchalantly editing himself into the very clips he is debunking.
- Vancouver Never Plays Itself: I’m especially sad that Every Frame a Painting isn’t an active channel anymore, as it was in my opinion the pinnacle of video essays about movies. Personal bias for picking this one with Vancouver being the main topic, but it’s so easy to binge all the videos on this channel.
- The Billion Ant Mega Colony and the Biggest War on Earth: Kurzgesagt is infamous for the fact their videos often delve into topics that tend to induce existential crises for the remainder of the day. This video is not one of those ones, luckily.
- Parasite – The Power of Symbols: Lessons from the Screenplay is another cinema-focused video essay channel. For obvious reasons, the video essay format lends itself very nicely to covering films, and their recent video about Parasite is excellent.
- The Real Fake Cameras of Toy Story 4: Nerdwriter doesn’t exclusively cover movies in their video essays, but they do tend to be a common subject. Toy Story 4 was a movie that I had low expectations for (“Toy Story 3 was perfect way to end the series”) but ended up being a masterpiece, as all Pixar films are.
- Pac-Man Ghost AI Explained: Retro Game Mechanics Explained takes deep dives into the world of old video games, and why things worked they way they did. This often involves looking at the assembly code of the games themselves.
- The History of Blindfolded Punch-Out: Summoning Salt has become the channel on YouTube for detailing the evolution of the progression of popular video game speedruns. The idea of beating a game completely blindfolded is crazy in and of itself, so I feel this is an interesting jumping off point into the world of speedrunning.
- Will YouTube Ever Run Out Of Video IDs?: Tom Scott has a knack for walking through London and breaking down complex topics in a digestible manner, all in a single take.
- How Overnight Shipping Works: Wendover Productions makes a disproportionately high number of videos about airplanes and other large modes of transportation. The logistics of how we are able to mail things across the continent within 24 hours are mind-boggling.
- Why Every Map of China Is Just Slightly Wrong: Wendover Productions also runs an alternate channel, Half as Interesting, where they post shorter and more light-hearted videos. This one about differences in coordinate systems resulting Google Maps displaying nonsensical satellite maps in China.
I really ought to turn this list into an ever-growing page on my website. I’ve been toying around with the idea of creating some sort of “list site engine” powered by GitHub Issues (so you could mutate the list by opening/closing issues); sooner or later I’ll get around to it.
Hopefully I’ll have more to share next time. Until then, stay safe out there!