Five things on Friday #264

LOOK AT THIS AMAZING PLANE!

The AIRBUS Beluga XL is a thing of beauty (and you’re an idiot if you think otherwise) – it shouldn’t even fly, but it does!

Brilliant.

Via.

Stay with me, this isn’t completely gaming related. Honest.

This piece appeared in my newsfeed last week and I opened it to read later as I thought it’d be dead interesting. It’s gamer related and I was intrigued as to what kind of ‘press kits’ could be so secret.

I used to work in this world – a little bit – when I was at my previous agency (we made all sorts of magical kits/boxes/experiences for influencers so I can appreciate the effort that goes into them).

Imagine my surprise when I went to re-open the link to read it and it 404’d on me. ‘Damn’, I thought ‘Those secrets must’ve been pretty secret!’

Thankfully, the internet rarely forgets. The Wayback Machine managed to get a snapshot of said post and you can read the original post here.

So what happened?

Having read the article, it turns out it’s basically an interview between Push Square and one of PlayStation Europe’s agencies. Not only does said agency reveal pretty much the entire working process as to how long they take to make these things, they ALSO casually mention a few of the others that they’re working on in the future.

*shocked face*

Can you imagine the angry email from Sony screaming at their agency to GET THAT ARTICLE DOWN RIGHT NOW? I can.

Ha.

If you’re in ‘the industry’ give it a read.

And smile and be thankful that you weren’t on the receiving end of that email.

Brilliant.

Between the World Cup and Wimbledon, the BBC had its hands full with a ton of sport to choose from. On top of that, it decided to use these two massive sporting event to stress-test its UHD capabilities, something that it has been playing with since the UHD trial went live on iPlayer last year.

James O Malley at Gizmodo was invited into the Beeb to find out how it all worked (this is a great read, btw – super interesting).

As ever with these kinds of stories, it’s not the disaster that makes for brilliant reading - it’s what they did next that makes it happen. Ed Catmull’s response to it all is distinctly wow-inducing.

Go read.

Antony Ribot has been running his design agency for 11yrs. For its 11th anniversary, Ribot wrote a few things on what he’s learnt over the years and you can learn from it too.

This week. 

• Comic-Con.
• Related: The Cosplay Community.
• Photojournalism.
• Devon County Council.

Sidenote: this came up in conversation this weekend: ‘Johnny Depp, John Lasseter, and James Gunn walk into a Disney Studio – which one should get fired?’

• Are you mansplaining?
• The Zuckerberg Interview.
• This Trevor Noah video response to the French US Ambassador has been everywhere this week but if you haven’t seen it, you should.
• ‘I am Racist’
• ‘How the BBC lost the plot’ – this is a great read.
• If you’ve ever played a game called ‘UNCHARTED’ then you’ve probably seen this already but, if you haven’t, here’s Nathan Fillion playing Nathan Drake in a phenomenally good fan movie of the above-named video game
• Strong passive aggressive note response game (the follow up is great too) – I bet she didn’t get kicked from a WhatsApp group for calling it out…
• Reminds me of a note I had to leave once (you’ll find it in the comments, after the story).

Bonus bonus section of new movie trailers. 

• Bohemian Rhapsody – yeah, up for this.
• SHAZAM! (just remember some of us nerds have been saying SHAZAM for ages, not just because a film made it popular).
• AQUAMAN – oh my God this looks TERRIBLE.
• GLASS – YES! (if you’ve not seen SPLIT, do so – also: UNBREAKABLE).
• Star Trek: Discovery S2 (not a film but I’m in for this).
• Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald.

On a related note to the intro of this week’s newsletter, The Fantastic Beasts VR experience on the Google Play store – the full experience, not the demo that rolled out with Daydream, has had an incredible 500 downloads.

Cray cray.