Hello and welcome to the new and improved newsletter! Long story short, the look is a bit different, the name is now The Birchtree Newsletter, and I'm posting every issue to the blog as well, but everything else remains the same.

1. If you already subscribe via email, you don't have to do anything.
2. If you don't get the emails yet, you can subscribe using the button at the bottom of this page.
3. If you want to get these via RSS, just subscribe to Birchtree's normal RSS feed and you'll get this in your reader every(ish) Friday morning.

This issue is also being released like normal to email subscribers, but next week's issue will be sent via Ghost rather than Substack. I'll probably write something quick about why I made some changes, but they're mostly interesting to me only, so who knows.

Anyway, cheers, and merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

The Links

• Must read: Well, this is one way to deal with misinformation. Birds aren't real, we all know that.
• The Washington Post's top posts in 2019 were almost always politics-related. In 2021? Waaaaay less. How news orgs maintain growth in a (mercifully) less insane U.S. political situation (now just normal bad instead of we've-never-had-something-like-this-before bad) is going to be interesting to see.
• The flu basically disappeared last year, and the numbers are absolutely staggering. New behaviors slowed covid a bit, but they stomped the flu nearly out of existence.
• Jason Snell has been making a bunch of posts like this, but I'm sharing his favorite iOS apps article because it had the most apps that were new to me.

The Tweets

I know these don't look as good in the email (they look great on the web version) as they used to…I'm working on a solution, though!

The Videos

First up is the second video from No Octothorpe and their love for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. I never got into this game much myself, but this video makes me want to give it another shot. Not your average video game review.

This guy's got a bunch of videos like this, but he recently did "what if Blink-182 wrote Wonderwall" and it's simultaneously wonderful and terrible, but mostly wonderful 🙂

As a very notable thousandaire, I was not really familiar with Billionaires' Row, but apparently it's a thing! This is an amazingly well-done video even if you don't think you're interested either.

Dunkey echos my thoughts on Halo Infinite quite well here. Fun gameplay with a story that almost feels like it's trying to be as boring as possible.

And a new Mark Rober video means it has to be included in this newsletter.