“Bionic Reading”, Solar-Panel-Bred Sheep, and Electrical Fashion From The 1800s
I bring you the finest reading on the Internet, every week
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Tuesday’s done!
You deserve a break.
Which is why I have carefully scoured the backrooms of the Internet to find the finest reading material, in my weekly Linkfest.
Let’s begin …
1) 🕹️ Moody photos of present-day retro arcades
Video-game arcades make for inherently dramatic photos: The chiaroscuro of faces in a darkened room, lit up as they crowd around a cathode-ray tube — with the particularly engaged expressions that appear when people are playing games, or watching others do it — are little symphonies of emotion.
Franck Bohbot has produced a terrific series of photos of arcades and their arcadegoers. It’s a modern-day arcade, but it contains enough retro games that you can squint and it looks like 1982.
As Bohbot’s web site describes it …
… there is a feeling of criminality here as if you’ve found your way into a speakeasy, where acts are taking place that is both hidden and fringe, yet celebrated by those lucky enough to have produced the password to the doorman. And in the midst of this are the machines themselves: grouped together in collections by those obsessed with them, tantalizing to touch, to play.
2) 🐦 Why animal scientists are scouring YouTube for cool animal tricks
“Animals doing cool stuff” is solid gold on YouTube; a video with a really fascinating animal-behavior hook can rack up millions of views.
Apparently scientists are now some of those viewers. A BBC story notes that animal scientists these days spend a lot of time poking around YouTube, because they find videos showing animals doing things so unusual that they might be scientifically significant.
