rts

A video essay arguing that the next major real-time strategy game will fail unless it gets the fundamentals right. It covers the playerbase and demographics, what older RTS games did well, and the roles of the engine, spectacle, development tools and player-generated content.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on daily fantasy sports, arguing the sites are effectively gambling operations despite their claims. It mocks their advertising and the skill-versus-chance defence.

Medlife Crisis examines why some elite endurance athletes die in their sleep, covering extremely slow heart rates and the effects of performance-enhancing drugs that thicken blood. It uses cyclist Marco Pantani as an example.

Tom Scott visits Peachtree City, Georgia, which has about a hundred miles of dedicated golf cart paths that serve as an alternative to driving. He explains how the network works as a quasi-transit system that keeps cars off the roads.

An update from the Strange Parts YouTuber on his recovery from a brain injury caused by a metal pipe while filming, and his plans for the channel.

A five-minute Sky News interview clip from June 2016 in which Michael Gove says Britons have had enough of experts. It was archived for use in a news report.

Douglas Crockford's 2009 Google tech talk on the good and bad parts of JavaScript, based on his book. He argues for using a reliable subset of the language and avoiding its flawed features.

A Last Week Tonight segment on credit reports, explaining their outsized role in people's lives and how often they contain critical errors.

A one-minute clip of Max Headroom's fictional 'Blipverts', ultra-short ads so stimulating that they make viewers explode. It is a snippet of 1980s sci-fi satire about advertising.

CGTN coverage of the 2026 Spring Festival Gala, in which humanoid robots perform synchronized martial arts routines alongside children.

A Consumer Reports and IIHS crash test pitting a 2009 Chevy Malibu against a 1959 Bel Air. It shows how much better modern cars protect occupants.

A Vox Strikethrough video arguing that CNN models its political coverage on sports shows like First Take, pitting pundits against each other. It claims this favors drama over truth and degrades public understanding.

David Graeber's RSA lecture on bullshit jobs, expanding on his essay about why so many people do work they believe is pointless. He discusses what this says about the modern economy and the way society values work.

Philip Roberts explains the JavaScript event loop, call stack, callbacks and asynchronous behavior with live visualizations using a tool he built. It demystifies terms like non-blocking and single-threaded.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.

Douglas Crockford's Nordic.js 2014 talk on 'the better parts' of JavaScript and programming in general. He argues against `this`, `new` and ES6 classes, and for classless, composition-based object patterns, with some broader remarks on building better structures for the future.

Martin Kleppmann surveys current research on CRDTs, the algorithms for merging concurrent edits across offline replicas. He covers the hard parts such as rich text, moves and merge results that are technically correct but poor.

Destin Sandlin tours a progressive metal stamping factory, showing machines that stamp millions of metal parts and the tooling behind them.

Chris Seaton talks about JRuby+Truffle, explaining how the Truffle and Graal combination optimises the tricky parts of Ruby and why it outperforms other Ruby implementations.

Numberphile talks with Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown about a darts puzzle with a shrinking bullseye. Solving it takes the volumes of high-dimensional spheres, and the answer turns up Euler's number.

Amateur footage from the 2009 Sasquatch music festival in which one person starts dancing alone and a crowd gradually joins in, turning it into a dance party.

A scene from Children of Men in which Theo visits Nigel in the Ark of the Arts to get transit papers. It features Nigel's line "I just don't think about it" and a one-handed chorded keyboard.

A 1953 US Navy training film explaining the basic mechanisms in mechanical fire control computers aboard ships. It shows how gears, differentials and cams solved mathematical problems in permanent mechanical form.

Java Language Architect Brian Goetz talks at a Clojure conference about the challenges of evolving a mature language like Java while preserving compatibility with existing code and developer expectations. It also gives a look at where the platform is headed.

Allan Savory's TED talk arguing that desertification of grasslands can be reversed with holistic managed grazing, which he says would also help reverse climate change. TED notes that other scientists have challenged his claims.

The first 3.5 hours of Tony Alicea's Udemy course on JavaScript's inner workings, covering topics such as first-class functions, closures, prototypal inheritance and how the language behaves under the hood.

Jon Bentley walks through three implementations of Hoare's Quicksort, from a dozen-line C function to a series of systematic code transformations that make the program ever simpler and more powerful. It is a Google Tech Talk on code elegance and program derivation.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day fires .22 Magnum and .38 Special bullets at Prince Rupert's drops, filmed at 170,000 frames per second. The slow-motion footage shows the bullet shattering against the glass tadpole while the drop initially survives.

A five-minute C-SPAN clip of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testifying to a US Senate committee that screen time, including in schools, harms children's learning and cognitive development.

A short clip of Linus Torvalds giving Nvidia the finger and telling the company off over its Linux support. It is the well-known soundbite from a Q&A.

A kiai master offers a 5000 dollar challenge that he can beat any MMA fighter, and his supposed energy techniques have no effect on the fighter.

Valve's feature-length documentary following three professional gamers competing in the first Dota 2 International tournament for a million dollar prize. It shows the sacrifices and pressures of top-level esports.

David Epstein argues in this TED talk that improving athletic records owe much to technology, training and the selection of specialized body types, not just humans getting inherently better. He gives counter-intuitive examples across sports.

Day9 gives a passionate first look at what his StarCraft: Brood War Remastered series will teach. He argues Brood War is primarily a real-time game and only secondarily a strategy game, making the commander fantasy a matter of mechanics.

Mark Ferrari, the LucasArts background artist, explains in a GDC 2016 talk how he draws 8-bit graphics. He covers color cycling and palette shifting to create complex animated scenery without frame animation.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on the NCAA, arguing that the organization profits enormously from college athletes while insisting they remain unpaid amateurs. It covers the money in college sports, including big-school athletic spending, and the case for paying athletes.

A short film of Alex Honnold free soloing El Sendero Luminoso, a 2,500-foot route in El Potrero Chico, Mexico, in a little over three hours with no rope. It was made by The North Face with climbing footage and music.

Victor Hugo Morales's famous radio commentary of Maradona's second goal against England at the 1986 World Cup. The emotional call is for many Argentines inseparable from the goal itself.

A short GoPro film of Uli Emanuele's wingsuit BASE jump through a roughly 2 meter wide cave opening, after three years of preparation. It follows his climb to the exit point and the flight itself, shot on a HERO2 camera.

Hugh Jeffreys tests the iPhone 14 Pro and finds that swapping genuine parts between phones disables features, concluding that third-party repair is not really viable despite Apple's Self Service Repair program.