If you happen to have a slow internet connection, you're used to seeing a spinning circle on Youtube while it loads, and loads, and loads, and finally really loads a video. That's the bane of my existence when I'm on WiFi (3G and LTE are much faster in Lebanon, but also more expensive, so we endure WiFi). But YouTube has recently implemented a castle animation, which is a lot more fun and playful. It doesn't make the wait any shorter, but it sure feels like it is.

The animation has been showing for several weeks, if not more than a month for me, but we've recently started getting more frequent tips about it, so we thought we'd let you know that yes, we have seen it before, and yes this is relatively new, and yes it is indeed cute. And for those of you who never ever run into any loading animation and are used to videos just playing without a millisecond of buffer, first, I hate you, and second, here's a screengrab captured by @imnagateja of the animation so you can know what it feels like to be a mere mortal and wait for a video to load.

The animation only seems to show up when a video is loading, not when it's buffering in the middle, so that's where you should be looking for it if you haven't seen it before. I suggest you switch your phone over to Edge then tap a YouTube video.

Thanks: Rony Mishchuk, @imnagateja, Črtomir