thread of youtubers whomst are not terrible

a place to talk Contrapoints, Lindsay Ellis, and anyone else anyone cares to recommend or complain about, prompted by the former's newfound level of popularity, but pls feel free to talk about any cool #content providers, not just politics folx

thx comrade

also there was some discussion on the second thoughts thread of Natalie being problematic in some way but I couldn't really follow it, so pls hash that out here if you are so inclined

I've heard good things abou hbomberguy but can't really bring myself to click on someone who uses formulations like "x is terrible and here's why", regardless of what the x is (well, maybe if it's capitalism).

hbomberguy is tight with the other two youtubers already mentioned so he tends to get lumped in as well, but my big problem with his videos is they're too damn long. if you care about the politics of gaming you could do a lot worse and he is quite funny and charming at times, but he could really take a page from Contra when it comes to concision

For anyone who's curious about Lindsay Ellis, her three-parter on the Hobbit films is a bit of a form-buster when it comes to YouTube video essays, particularly for the way it blossoms from an essay into an actual documentary partway through

danielfromsl has popped up on ILG plenty but I think he potentially has mass appeal. Kind of the Nathan Fielder/Eric Andre of online gaming, reliably hilarious.

Kinda wish this thread was a video game-free zone but whatever, that's just me. Carry on.

I wish that too, but it's kind of an impossible wish given how everyone plays video games obsessively

Anyway, I have lots of quasi-viable options for this thread but I don't know which ones to foreground

I'll say that Jon Bois >>>>>>>

Well, NB, the only other game-related videos I really watch are Skate 3 glitch compilations so clearly I'm mostly just in it for the lols.

how did I not know that Jon Bois has an entire channel

speaking of which, let's begin the actual youtubing with the best video on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK2anpoKeNM

(although really his Pretty Good and Chart Party series are MANDATORY viewing)

Stevem does pretty good videos about Japanese music (from Jazz to City Pop to Japanese Hip-Hop) and the more respectable end of anime (Miyazaki etc.)

Vinilteca is good if you want to get a grasp on the Brazilian music canon but it's in Portuguese.

Strictly Dumpling is my guilty pleasure food go-to. It's pretty vapid, dude doesn't have a ton of charisma and the music's terrible BUT he does seem to know his shit and has a stomach of steal, so seeing him eat prodigious amounts of grub throughout South East Asia is pretty entertaining. I'm sure accounts like that are a dime a dozen but this one's at least well edited and doesn't have too many calls to action.

incidentally, since you mentioned calls to action, if anyone doesn't know what that means, the most recent Lindsay Ellis video is a meta meditation on the youtuber business model that gets into all this stuff and it's a good overview of the madnesses inherent to the platform

Yeah, that's where I learned the term :)

I go back and forth on whether to just block Youtube entirely. As much as I like Contrapoints and free music, it's a site that activates my worst internet compulsions. Like she put it in the CTH interview, "Youtube forced me to watch it."

Not crazy about how this conflates Disney and Warner Bros but whatever, I guess both could be equally restrictive in their own ways:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8-09DbxHBU

Primitive Technology, in which a man makes all kinds of things using pretty much only what he finds in the woods:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE

You Suck at Cooking, a fine decoction of deadpan self-deprecation and sheer absurdity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHF2hDuH5HE

Michael New is a guy who teaches music theory & composition basics in a very accessible way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBhJsShMF2g

scott brown carpentry & the MRE man

I assume people know about Simone Giertz and her intentionally-shitty robots but if not well then there you go.

Someone tried to get me into asmr videos because he thought it would totally be my thing. IT IS TOTALLY NOT MY THING.

I like this funny South African woman who does car reviews that contain some great real life info and also bad singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCw6N5iNV8g (that statium is in Cape Town, by the way)

http://www.youtube.com/user/julietmcguire/videos

cool channel having weirdos guide you through their tiny weirdo houses
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXRJE2caPNY

in a way, it's anti-youtuber in that it's more errol morris than the "me-me-me-me i have a take on everything!" approach that youtube seems to encourage. speaking of which, I think errol morris's son has a channel where it's just him taking a bunch of drugs.

you suck at cooking was a great call

oh yeah scott brown carpentry

kiwami japan's latest bestrides youtube like a colossus

Polygon did a list of best video essays of 2018, with the usual suspects (ContraPoints, Linsday Ellis) present. The last one about a scene from Tarkovsky's Nostalgia felt to me like a bunch of interesting ideas that never really came together; now I'm in the madness of the two hour video about parasocial relationships.

lol, forgot to link: https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/28/18156334/best-youtube-video-essays-2018-watch

Noah Caldwell-Gervais deserves a mention.

Ostensibly long, literate and humane retrospective reviews of video games by someone who toiled in pizza delivery, but he's also adopted a vagabond lifestyle out of a restored VW bus with his new wife, and his video essays on their journeys through the US West put the rest of his work in perspective.

Todd in the Shadows reviews pop music, and recently, 1 hit wonders. Wouldn't be surprised in the slightest to find he lurks here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwl9xmM3IuQ&t=758s

I watched some of the parasocial relationships series. V interesting but yeah crazy long.

todd in the shadows does lurk here or at least has before. one of his videos directly cited an ilm thread in the description (a compilation of songs that actually stop when the singer says stop, like the ilm thread on the same subject).

found the parasocial relationship video basically unwatchable. it was heavily rt'd by that whole circle of #content creators (a comically large proportion of ppl on that list are friends and frequent collaborators -- the fellow who wrote the list might as well have had it served up to him by algorithmically generated recommendations) so i tried to watch it around the time it came out. her intro video on the subject was good/interesting but the rest was just tediously extended to an absurd degree not at all justified by the insight provided in the commentary or the ridiculous number of clips of bo burnham. i don't think i would have even found it necessary if i were stoned.

anyway that circle of creators is sometimes informally referred to as 'leftube' or similar by its audience due to i guess being leftists and/or critical of the worryingly visible far-right factions of the site. i am personally very unimpressed by this collective's obvious awareness of, and apparent lack of interest in directly addressing, a phenomenon that any leftist viewing them will have noticed: virtually all of these creators are white, and given that most if not all of them rely heavily on cultural touchstones and memes to illustrate their broader theses, the narrowness of the cultural literacy that's evident in their work (this includes both lindsay ellis and todd in the shadows btw) will serve as a significant handicap to creating a space on youtube representing their political leanings that does not also reproduce racial separation and hierarchy. contemporary online meme culture is spawned in enormous part within black culture, so their utter cluelessness about, say, the work of any currently active black musician who isn't favorably covered on pitchfork and explicitly 'political' enough to make sense to them, coupled with their inability to include anyone who does have this level of cultural literacy in their frequent collaborative efforts is disappointing to say the least.

when this obvious phenomenon was brought up on twitter, the response from these creators was merely to retweet contrapoints's quote-tweet of a user's list of left-leaning creators of color along with the message "let's make leftube more representative!" or somesuch. meanwhile i am not especially hopeful that they won't continue to collaborate exclusively with one another, continue to congregate only with one another at fan meet-and-greets, #content creator conferences and the like, etc. etc. maybe one of them will retweet kat blaque or the1janitor once every month or something.

i have unsubscribed from both of the 'leftube' creators to whom i'd previously subscribed (contrapoints and hbomberguy). while i will probably continue to enjoy their work when i do come across it, i would rather spend whatever time i use actively seeking out content looking for creators who are not creating networks (because these creators are not just creating content, but networks of content!) that are so insular.

that's a fair criticism. I would hope that in time the network becomes less insular but at the same time I'm happy to throw some $$ at anyone fighting the RW content machine and doing so in a way that's engaging

this has 1.1k *replies* so far

Have my videos helped to change your viewpoint (about the Alt-Right, trans issues, whatever else)? Are you willing to talk to a journalist about it? Respond to this tweet if so! 🙏🙏🙏

— Natalie Wynn 🦋 (@ContraPoints) January 10, 2019

I'm a bit less fond of Hbomber because I think he makes less effort to be approachable to the opposition, very different from Contra and Shaun the skull.

learned a lot from the latest Contra video

has anyone else noticed a marked uptick in complaining about the garbage YouTube recommendations?

and speaking of Hbomberguy, he's currently like 27 hours into a Twitch charity stream for Mermaids and is up to $100k, so I think it's safe to say the community is growing

Retail Archaeology
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR2LNeZSqINp0WTd_eWCIGg

Dead malls, zombie retail stores, etc

Harris is still going, $133k / 33hrs

youtube's sidebar recommendations are inexcusably shit and compromised and i feel guilty about continuing to use youtube knowing sidebar recs still exist but honestly i find youtube too useful to seriously consider quitting.

hey so @AOC HAS JOINED THE STREAM GO WATCH AND DONATE https://t.co/Fz8plugN5y

— Mary Ellen (@alissacaliente) January 20, 2019

I just caught the very end. Crazy.

I can't see it well on my phone, what's the $$ up to?

Over $221k. Since I clicked a few minutes ago they've made about five thousand.

I don't feel old until I see how popular twitch streams are.

I wonder whether AOC is a gamer.

I would say not because it is a total time suck and she seems actually really productive.

Good enough for me.

Here’s @aoc talking about how Nintendo 64 was the best system. She’s on @twitch helping to raise money for trans kids. pic.twitter.com/cJIfUif1mv

— New Super Blood Wolf Moon Bros. U Deluxe (@GenePark) January 20, 2019

Loved the Youtube episode, Simon. You each found your way to a different circle of hell.

Ha, thanks! We suffered for your entertainment.

Ash Sarkar interviewed Harris

https://novaramedia.com/2019/01/23/donkey-kong-is-beautiful-ash-meets-hbomberguy/

I like The Ushanka Show, about life in the Soviet Union. This video is about Soviet TV in the early 80's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9NhsDoZPsU

rants about bad meals
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/LLCFZQhPawQ"; frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

whoops

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCFZQhPawQ

I enjoy Lost in Vegas reaction/review videos quite a bit. Just a couple of guys who love music and are trying to expand their horizons from r&b/hip-hop into metal, country, and elsewhere. Occasionally a little corny but always genuine and often hilarious.

Their reaction to War Pigs is what got me hooked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6osfNi1HcY

i like those dudes a lot, pretty much the only reaction videos i've ever gotten anything out of

they've reviewed a few deftones songs where they link abe cunningham's drumming to quiet storm and it's so delightful

I've watched a few of theirs and the only thing that bothered me is that they pause the song to comment.

Music reaction channels are a funny ecosystem. An awful lot of them seem to be about validating classic rock and metal. I also wonder just how genuine many of the 'first time' reactions are, especially for huge songs like Bohemian Rhapsody.

I definitely think the rock and metal videos are the money-makers (?) for Lost in Vegas, but their hip hop reviews/reactions are great too and have introduced me to new stuff I likely wouldn't have heard otherwise.

Tons of kids in my son's middle school watch PewDiePie and there is even a concerted "get PewDiePie the most followers" campaign there. Do I have to specifically keep my kid off PewDiePie? Am I right in understanding it's a potential vector for him to be exposed to racist YouTube?

10000%

No more than online gaming culture in general, though.

I mean, there are good pockets of culture in the gaming world (see a few posts ago) but imo PDP is particularly awful and v likely to link out to even more obviously horrible things

That campaign is much wider than his school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PewDiePie_vs_T-Series

PewDiePie's already basically racist Youtube, so stay away if you can. But it's hard to completely escape that side of Youtube no matter what you do. Simon H. just did a really funny podcast episode on how quickly you can get from innocuous Thomas the Tank Engine videos to the alt-right just by following recommendations.

I watched a few Bill Burr stand-up clips and that's all it took for Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson to start showing up in recommendations.

keep your kids off youtube at all costs imo

^^^

yikes ok, i talked to him about it, he seems to think that being really into YouTube is "stupid" (he thinks that about a lot of things) so for the moment I think I'm OK, there is not really a context at home where he'd be seeing YouTube without me knowing but obv. I can't control what he sees at school

Lindsay Ellis now nominated for a Hugo!

this guy is becoming an mvp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ8orIurGxw

I'm stoked someone else has already mentioned The Ushanka Show! That's one of the YT channels I subscribe to.

Another great channel I've gotten into is about linguistics and is called Langfocus. This video taught me why French is such a different type of language to the other Romance languages:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfxf4pV-zJg&t=727s

Then there's List25, which is an educational AND entertainment channel. This is one of their more recent serious/educational videos, though they'll also make more lighthearted videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgBec0KfJkg

On a much lighter note (vs. the last video), there are The Try Guys, which features a Ned! (Except this Ned is a Yale grad and would probably not be BFFs with Dan the Harvard man.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwLxTWzvSkw

(Why didn't the Langfocus link work? Hm, let me try again.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfxf4pV-zJg

Then there's this fascinating channel called the After Prison Show, which has been an eye-opening insight into what it's like to be imprisoned (a reality I had zero idea about) (caution: this guy gets a little shouty, so you might want to lower the volume if you're listening through headphones):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUdOyz8EsAk

the ridiculous number of clips of bo burnham

From way upthread: I can now say that, having watched Burnham's special, the clips excerpted in the parasocial video are literally the only parts worth bothering with.

Yeah, the After Prison Show is good, there's a few similar channels of that type, he's definitely engaging. I thought what was most striking about his content is the feeling of inevitability of prison time, just accepted as a fact of life. Its almost too banal for him to even raise as a topic, its just there all the time

man the Bois two-parter on the Bobs of sport is just amazing

so so good

knew this bump would be for Bois. saving the second part for tonight...

Don't we have a thread for youtubers who are in fact terrible?

Bois' second part isn't out yet actually

Start the terrible Youtubers thread already!

a. jon bois keeps excelling himself

b. what is this Nebula thing, anyone else fancy it?

as stanned by real life lore: https://watchnebula.com/

This guy is the snarky English version of Vsauce, IMO, and that's just about the best thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_PhGi3_JQc

ah yes, simon whis-a-ler. good fellow, entertaining and with a fine zingy streak. at his best on Today I Found Out

The latest Contrapoints is great. One of the least character-driven in quite some time.

ah yes, simon whis-a-ler. good fellow, entertaining and with a fine zingy streak. at his best on Today I Found Out

I agree with you wholeheartedly.

i don't usually watch youtube videos but i did feel obligated to watch the latest contrapoints video. it was interesting. being an internet celebrity seems like a fairly brutal life.

It was sly of her to drop this in the middle of the Youtube beauty influencer apocalypse (which I totally haven't been sucked into following, no sir.)

Seems like a coincidence to me? I guess I'm lucky in that "beauty" has always been fairly unattainable for me - with my particular physiognomy I suspect well-meaning people would describe me as "brave" if I tried - and by this point I'm at an age where it's not even honestly expected of me.

the Youtube beauty influencer apocalypse

Go on....

with my particular physiognomy ... I'm at an age where it's not even honestly expected of me.

Fran Blanche makes some similar points and references the Contrapoints video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PoKz4vW-Mo

Having listened to that podcast, I don't know, I'm probably more on board with Natalie than I am with Fran! The point that Natalie gets to, eventually, is that beauty isn't forever, that "looking good" isn't just about being beautiful but about _style_, which is a form of positive self-expression. It does matter to me what people think of me, how people look at me, and just because my control of that (particularly as a non-cis person) is extremely limited doesn't mean that it's futile or wrong for me to try and look good!

Listening to trans voices is a hugely double-edged sword (I guess like one of those Castlevania swords?) for me. On the one hand it's hugely affirming, is great for helping me feel less alone, but on the other hand it makes me aware how hurt and damaged pretty much all of us have been by what we've been through. I am a little jealous of these young trans people because as superficial and naive as they can be about a lot of things, and as much open hostility and hatred as they have to put up with for being who they are, they don't have the internalized self-loathing that people of my age and older all seem to, they haven't been deformed by it the way we have.

Having gone through decades of chronic mental illness, self-harm, suicidal ideation, suicidal intent, crippling panic attacks, drug addiction, and somehow having not just survived all that but made it to being a well-adjusted, happy, and successful human being, I'm absolutely terrified of throwing that all away, which it sometimes seems like I'm doing. I'm not actually, though. Being a well-adjusted, happy, and successful human being requires me to accept myself for who I am, even if it means being hated and scorned by other people.

Kat Blaque on the subject of LeftTube's whiteness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JxbjvvpDNQ&feature=youtu.be

https://youtu.be/_P52G4Kyq5M

I never dug into Jon Bois non-sports videos but some of these are fantastic

GeoWIzard (né GeoguesserWizard) is currently releasing, bit by bit, the best British documentary of our age

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7w986ni7_g

Some of the military channels are pretty great. Even those who aren't naval affictionados will enjoy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mdi_Fh9_Ag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGN5N4vn5Bs

Jomboy's baseball breakdowns are the best thing on Youtube ATM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCeXEa0Ouk8

is he just describing some baseball or am I not getting it

Commentary, lip-reading, internal monologues

Maybe more representative
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO8KxqTU4pw

jomboy is great. his breakdown of the big fight last week (pitcher tries to take on the whole team) was good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU-ESpiwV4o

that Jon Bois video about 24 linked above is so great

ts: jomboy vs jon bois

Really enjoying that 'walking in a straight line across Wales' series, thanks imago. I've not encountered the channel before.

Really enjoy the Techmoan channel, revisiting and reviewing old hifi and other consumer tech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRTLGjWyxTw

Really enjoying that 'walking in a straight line across Wales' series, thanks imago. I've not encountered the channel before.

Same, I binged the first three yesterday. Part where he dedicates his attempt to swim across a river to his mate that got stabbed is very Real England, too.

these are totally delightful thank you

There's a new one!

"Those Tesco hard gums would be paramount to my survival later that day"

The craziest thing is that I've been following his channel for two years and only now has he unleashed this insane content on us. Prior to this he was a comfort-watch as he'd just record himself playing Geoguesser. A startling evolution! I guess all that virtual globetrotting inspired him...

...to compose a sort of cross between Free Solo and Withnail & I

I"m learning so much about british culture

started on instagram, so a bit of a cheat, but it's available on youtube, too: Tiny Chef is wonderful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OWDgbCM8qc&list=UUwbLD07XxWfEw0OIHZKM7lw&index=7

dang
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OWDgbCM8qc&list=UUwbLD07XxWfEw0OIHZKM7lw&index=7

try as I might I can't make heads or tails of this Contrapoints "cancellation"

Is she canceled though?

She quit twitter, right? But she got as much support as criticism. Its hard to see her really losing subscribers on this? I don't quite now how to judge but a high profile person is always going to come under attack, and from all directions. If some people were unhappy with her I think thats generally ok if thats their take

Its tangentially related but I was thinking about the concepts of "the left eats their own" vs "why are there no left wing grifters", and whether 'cancellation culture' is actually that bad.

Right wing media tends to be more personality driven, so cancellation doesn't really happen, and leftist media tends to be more issue driven, so taking a position on an issue can be more divisive. (but then the right has fractious splits, PJW vs Shapiro, but then seems personality led fallout)

I just can't even tell what the actual controversy was, by the time I heard about it she was off twitter

I guess I could trawl through her mentions to figure it out but I'd really really rather not

oh, basically she said in 'hyperwoke' spaces everyone is giving their pronouns (leading to bizarre situation where an entirely cis group is doing this, and then Natalie has to do it and then situation where a passing trans has to explain when they might just like to be accepted)

and then she can go into a sports bar in NC and no one gaf, no one misgenders her, and she's called ma'am and miss all night

backlash being, well great for you who can pass

I might sorta have that wrong, could be deeper about the concept of 'passing', and that some non-binary people resented the possible implication that pronoun announcing is bad (or merely irritating to Natalie?)

it isn't the first time that she has kinda said stuff that made nb folks say "hey but uhhhhhhh" and i think the most recent super personal "if not for nb ppl i'd have an easier time" admission kinda made a whole bunch of people say "ok can we stop deifying this person" and she never signed on to be deified in the first place and other ppl took the opportunity to say she's been a lib the whole time and it's a real mess and a bunch of well-meaning people have been hurt by words of other well-meaning people

when in doubt, stan contrapoints tbh

anyway my latest discovery is TwoSetViolin, a charming young pair of Sino-Australian violinists who share the remarkable quality of being actually funny. they appear to have devoured Classical Music Youtube whole, and deservedly so

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-yfZn5iYJE

what's jon done now

A guy walking around for 1-2 hours (mostly in the rain in big cities all over the world) and it's like weirdly relaxing even though there's a lot of noise and people (especially in Manhattan and Tokyo, for instance) : http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqRTj-Nu_8to3jIBlXptOtA

how is this walking around in cities so fascinating? I'm hooked -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3jf95Rh1Ew

I love it

I've been enjoying these videos ("Sad Reality a series where i vlog about dead or dying retailers") kind of like a sombre American version of Beno

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1jJ08DYDls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgENz7cxfEw

https://themazatlanpost.com/2019/09/27/mexican-grandmother-creates-a-youtube-channel-to-teach-homemade-recipes-it-already-has-265-thousand-subscribers/

Looks interesting

Meanwhile in England, Kay's Good Cooking hasn't updated in over a year, hope she's ok

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeKWgImK1RAD9IGjWZqxmIw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI

45 seconds into this, have given it a like and posted it here

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGPB2ZA4096SESz_VZVzHoA

Lockdown 23and1

Prison and after prison stuff

does ILX like Jreg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuopBeaUN24

Similar to StanM's post, this guy films lots of rural Japan in 4K with no music or dumb graphics. I cannot get enough of wandering through temples, tea houses or little backstreets, he even crossfades the sound for headphone listeners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeEIHRjFYNw

Australia really is Land Of The Youtuber right now, but I think "I did a thing" is now the best of all. Behold

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQEIrNSPoQE

I hope the (entirely too long) new Contrapoints on cancel culture starts some reasonable discussions on the subject. probably not tho

nice, looking forward to that

GeoWizard's new series has started incredibly well btw

he truly is the last flaneur

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOyWpE-Jx0A

Bryan Brutons's Prison Channel is good. Did 11 years in the Florida Prison System

I hope the (entirely too long) new Contrapoints on cancel culture starts some reasonable discussions on the subject. probably not tho

― bold caucasian eroticism (Simon H.)

wrong thread

oh wait you started this thread, can a mod please change the title of this thread to "thread of youtubers whomst are now terrible", thank you

what's yer beef rusho

it would take a long time to explain and i'm not sure it's worth it (am coming to the conclusion that the nature of youtube is such that one cannot be a not-terrible youtuber, at least not while talking about politics/subscribing to "influencer" culture), but in lieu of an actually considered response, i'll just say "buck angel" and leave it at that

fwiw that controversy is discussed in agonizing detail (I was previously unfamiliar)

I thought about trying to summarize that section but there's really no substitute for just watching it, which is of course a huge part of a problem with The Discourse when it comes to this sort of thing

The US Chemical Safety Board account posts really detailed 3D animation re-enactments of chemical explosions and stuff, it’s cool.

Honestly, I don't think I'm going to watch it. I think I'm done with Natalie. I'm tired her explaining and analyzing everything at length, I'm tired of her Influencer thing where she feels like she has to speak for everyone instead of just letting people speak for themselves. I'm tired of people who praise Natalie's videos and kind of implicitly assume that she respresents the Trans Perspective and going on to ignore that an extremely large number of trans people - I can't give you an exact number, but it's not rare and it's getting less rare as time goes on - aren't comfortable with her statements, don't agree with her soapboxing. I dread the day Natalie puts out a new video because it just starts up a whole new round of arguments all over again, and in any discussion the brilliant, gorgeous white girl Influencer with the bully pulpit is going to have a certain advantage.

idk why people can't watch things, think they're fine, and have minor disagreements with parts of it

everything has to be an epic comment battle. just like, watch things at take them at face value, maybe articulate a disagreement, let others disagree

an online nation of stans

It's not really my place to parse/argue rusho's specific objections, but the video was well timed for me witnessing the shitstorm that has fallen on k@m @ust1n c0ll1ns over a dumb joke that he made and apologized for within a very short timespan and is still getting pilloried for beyond simple "do better" criticism despite having, AFAIK, absolutely no history of problematic behavior or speech whatsoever. (the whole thing went down so fast I didn't even get to see the original post!)

anyway some combo of the video and this mini controversy inspired me to finally deactivate my twitter account so that's something good

i've really gotten into this channel called "Drain Addict". it's this australian dude who has a job unclogging drains with a high-pressure water jet with various head attachments. he has minimal commentary. if you like work/process/job progress type content, or gross stuff (old sewage etc) but can't do medical body horror stuff like your dr pimple poppers or w/e, check it out! he has hundreds of videos. hundreds. combo of nasty, infrastructural and kind of asmr chill. occasional jarring australian wildlife sounds.

there's an american guy "post 10" who does similar stuff, but frankly seems mentally not all right. he really likes unblocking storm drains and culverts, but just as a very overly serious local do-gooder. lots of commentary about being ignored by city government when he calls to discuss these issues.

anyway some combo of the video and this mini controversy inspired me to finally deactivate my twitter account so that's something good

― bold caucasian eroticism (Simon H.), Thursday, January 2, 2020 12:04 PM (forty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

bless you for stepping into the light

feels good man

oh, man, there’s also the dude who set up a webcam for the “can opener” overpass in connecticut that slices the tops off of heavy trucks like once a month: https://11foot8.com

https://11foot8.com/speeding-semi-gets-smashed-up-at-the-11foot8-bridge/

this one is great

i saw this a few months ago, fuming

The city of Durham, North Carolina is finally raising an 11-foot-8 bridge nicknamed "The Can Opener" for shaving the tops off trucks in more than a decade's worth of viral videos. Its many fans—myself included—are mourning the loss: https://t.co/YMNL27Sgsi

— Miles Klee (@MilesKlee) October 23, 2019

deactivating your twitter account is good

natalie is smart and clever and persuasive and i'm sure she makes a lot of very good points, depending on your perspective "cancelling" can either be a howling irrational mob or the intersectional voice of marginalized peoples, it's just, i don't know, there are limits to discourse, there are limits to explaining things, there are limits to how many times i can hear someone patiently explain how i've completely misunderstood them and how unfairly i am judging them/taking them out of context. it just reminds me of all those times j.k. rowling insisted she wasn't a terf but just clicked "like" on all those transphobic tweets by "accident", and by and large, you know, it seemed like cis people believed her, and then last week everybody was all like "OH MY GOD J.K. ROWLING IS A TRANSPHOBE WHO KNEW?!?!?"

i can't speak to anything but my own experience. maybe there are trans communities where people are all "oh, cool, another contrapoints video!" like i used to be instead of "oh, god, another contrapoints video", which has, over the past year, become the dominant reaction to her videos from the trans communities i hang out in.

they locked my twitter account cos I told rupert murdoch I hope he dies this year

he should know that you want him to die, immortality is a huge burden

Damn that would have been a more productive way to cap off my twitter career

folks, folks, there are finer things

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNE2y1gOVvE

second one just went up too

I will never know if Contrapoints is good or bad because fuck watching an hour+ youtube video.

I like her videos a lot but I made it about 40 minutes into this one and decided I just don't care. "Cancel culture" is for people in their 20s with way too much free time. Hearing about it is like hearing about something that was discussed for 17000 posts on Reddit one day. None of those people will ever accomplish anything in their worthless lives, because they're...on Reddit all goddamn day.

(N.B.: even the 40 minutes I "watched" were as background audio while writing.)

concision does not seem to be the praxis of "influencers" on youtube

lol, i post something here and then read like the third post here

"hbomberguy is tight with the other two youtubers already mentioned so he tends to get lumped in as well, but my big problem with his videos is they're too damn long. if you care about the politics of gaming you could do a lot worse and he is quite funny and charming at times, but he could really take a page from Contra when it comes to concision

― wayne trotsky (Simon H.)"

only thing that would be funnier is if hbomberguy was now doing 10 minute videos

I give Contrapoints more slack regarding long videos than most other youtubers because she makes a conscious effort to make her videos visually and dramatically interesting. But yeah, hour plus is a bit much.

Very proud that out of the three ppl who gave GeoWizard and mate lifts in the first video two were portuguese.

My belief is that, in the long run, there are no Youtubers who are not terrible. That communicating, or attempting to communicate, on Youtube, on Twitter, on Facebook, will inevitably make you a worse person. My belief is that there is a sort of Gresham's Law of Discourse - bad speech drives out good. My belief is that there is, in fact, "bad speech" - abuse, threats, bullying - and that its presence creates an emotional environment that renders all other considerations irrelevant.

none of the videos posted in this thread contain abuse, threats, or bullying that I can recall (I guess the geowizard guy is a little suspicious towards the farmer population)

I guess what Jon Bois does to sports statistics could be considered a form of abuse, but strictly self-abuse

last i heard youtube still had a comments section

so does the NYT. who cares?

Yeah, you'll get no argument from me that YT comments are on average worse than in most other internet places and that the platform as a whole is mostly a force of evil, but the idea that it forcibly makes you a worse person feels like it's making it too much of a monolith; there are innumerable channels that're just people nerding out over their favourite hobbies or esoteric interests, and there's not much bullying or abuse happening on them, not even in the comments.

I have literally never purposely read a YT comment other than the "pinned" one left by the channel (with the exception of the grand old Sad YouTube collection). They're very easy not to read. You can even get a browser extension to hide them forever if you like!

Sure, but if you're an *ahem* content creator I think you're more likely than not to read the comments. But those don't have to be a trash fire, is the thing.

the nyt also makes you a worse person

look, i don't know, maybe you can be like techmoan and post videos about nixie tubes and still be a healthy positive person, but if you go on youtube and talk about incels or the alt right or any of that shit that's going to cause problems for you, in the same way that doing one of those shit jobs as a "content moderator" on facebook is going to cause problems for you.

sure, i have browser extensions to hide comments, to hide those awful fucking videos youtube recommends you, and as a result i can still to some degree watch stuff on there, even though i know i probably should stop doing that.

i believe the deliberate infliction of emotional trauma and perpetuation of cycles of abuse is a key driver of "engagement" in the internet content industry's core business model.

I did watch the entire Contrapoints video although after a certain point it got to be a bit of a personal endurance test like the time I tried and failed to listen to nothing but Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion for two weeks or whatever. She made many good points and I get that part of the point was just the overwhelming nature of what it's like to be on the receiving end of the cancel barrage (via reading tweets about her for 10 minutes straight, etc.), but maybe she could have found a way to shave an hour off somewhere.

One thing that is going to haunt my nightmares is the word "truscum", the concept behind which I'm still a little fuzzy on, but which nevertheless made me shudder.

I like her videos a lot but I made it about 40 minutes into this one and decided I just don't care. "Cancel culture" is for people in their 20s with way too much free time. Hearing about it is like hearing about something that was discussed for 17000 posts on Reddit one day. None of those people will ever accomplish anything in their worthless lives, because they're...on Reddit all goddamn day.

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Thursday, January 2, 2020 7:40 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I made it 20ish minutes in? Once I realized how long it was I decided I needed to get to bed. Anyway, despite your hand-waving as a young people Reddit thing I've definitely seen the phenomenon she laid out happen here on ilx, too.

Also yes some people are on Reddit all day, some people are on ilx all day, twitter whatever. I'm not sure any of us can say we're above having our faces constantly glued to internet conversations in general.

The Lockdown 23and1 guy is good on Prison stuff too, interviews a lot of people who've been inside in various states. Not quite sure why I'm drawn to this stuff

I mean, the "carceral state" in the US is fucking huge and so often subject to cartoonish / not credible representation, so it seems like a pretty normal thing to be curious about imo

carceral culture

This Contra video is mainly confirming for me that I must stay away from both Youtube and Twitter.

Foresty Forest's videos about his living in a converted minivan are wonderful. I'm especially enjoying the more recent ones covering the depths of Canadian winter where he heads out hiking and biking in the snowy wilds alongside talking about the practicalities of his minivan life, but it's worth going back a year or so and watching through them all to see the conversion and development of the van and all the wee niggles he irons out along the way.

http://www.youtube.com/user/forestyforest/

I though it was a channel I picked up from this thread, but I can't spot it here previously.

I'm down for possumtubers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRIVTEBaLkA

just saw the contrapoints video

full stan; all hail

possum psychic!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kznj1NZN90A

Anxiety porn

^this is deeply satisfying

Apparently he has an awful reputation with other restorers and conservators but it's still fascinating.

awful as a restorer or as a person/business? I mean I know <zero abt restoration but I can't imagine someone being more thorough, precautious etc.

every person on youtube must be cancelled

As a restorer. His methods are (supposedly) pretty destructive.

what is this person's reputation

https://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/az9v7bp_460s.jpg

appearing pretty good at something to a layman. while providing a good narrative, makes for good videos

tbh his retouching could be with shit paint that melts the canvas a day later and we’d be none the wiser

surveillance camera man has a new travel channel...and it's pretty much what you expect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOB7wXNwjvo

Rescreened my favorite Jomboy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU-ESpiwV4o

Real life GeoGuesser from thread favourite GeoWizard, excellent stuff!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqe5CjHRmMY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19KbrTpgiEM

Perhaps not as awesome for those not of my background, but I loved this silent tour through a recently closed Portuguese-American restaurant with Fado music in the background

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogvT7hlOJ5Y

TEH ALGORITHMS took me to a video by someone calling himself "The History Guy". slightly craggy older white man with a bowtie, probably thinks quite highly of Bill Nye. the sort of white dude i wanted to be, probably, or at least reminds me of some of my friends who i haven't really talked to since i deactivated my social media.

anyway, i took a look at the stuff he was talking about... he does this strain of history about the things that i find myself reading when i browse wikipedia, sort of an open-minded white man's history canon for people who are tired of fucking Nazis all the time. he does social history, non-military history, although of course he does have your standard video on Able Archer.

of the ones i checked out the one i liked most was his video on Yip Harburg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF2vzftzp7k

he says at the end that it's not about the politics - that's kind of the modus operandi of such people, they want to sound Authoritative and Objective and of course he is as far as that goes but for someone like me, for whom There Is Nothing But The Sociopolitical Context, i think you can tell a lot about someone by what they talk about and how they talk about it. he's obviously really enthusiastic about harburg and it's infectious.

i don't think there are any Good Youtubers because Youtube structurally precludes "goodness", but i enjoyed watching his video on yip harburg and i suspect i would enjoy hanging out with this guy.

conner o'malley has gone nuclear

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeQMxy-Uf3M

I visited the same area. Video is accurate

Did we ever discuss (/r/DeepIntoYoutube?

Not all of its most upvoted picks are solid gold, of course, but as a repository of outsider video art in particular, it's unmatched.

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm22FAXZMw1BaWeFszZxUKw

Following a few RIYL YT suggestions, came across his channel last week and got sucked in. The first few I watched, he uses a voicebox to call telephone scammers, pretending to be an 80 year old granny, and tries to waste as much of their time as possible. Listening to the scammers melt down, his own acting (with tangents and comments respectably suitable to his granny character), and periodic muting of the call to explain the scamming techniques - lots of LOLs and some good info to pass onto elders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2qCFzHvBoc

he has transcended

cw: body horror; extreme humour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4Hw9ZgQBLc

Better than the thumbnail would lead you to believe

when u come to a thread to talk about a conversation months past

Just watched Natalie’s Canceling video. I think, like her other videos, it’s best if it is supplemented with other reading/watching on the topic, but watching it was informative and brought me closer to the issue at hand. I think I come away from all of Natalie’s videos more informed than I was going into them.

To the point of it being too long: I felt that way too, and I assumed it was because she didn’t work with an editor on this video (which may be most crucial when you’re so deeply emotionally invested in a topic).

Anyone know any good travel (and travel-hack) related vlogs by women?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BmGMi0IEx4

does ILX like Jreg

― imago, Saturday, November 16, 2019 2:02 PM (two months ago)

I think of Jreg often while browsing ILX's pol threads.

:)

Cuts both ways though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nu6QEjMXRg

Anyone know any good travel (and travel-hack) related vlogs by women?

I know some that are okay but none I would really go to bat for. I’m seriously considering trying this out as a side project in the coming months. It’s probably really difficult, but I’d still like to try. Will let you know my findings during the research phase.

Mentioned on another thread but End of Sentence is a window into another world. He's very compelling, and his stories of time spent inside are often brutal, but its balanced out with interviews not just with other inmates but mental health professionals and others.

WIth all the recent controversy over Rogan, I coulnd't help think this is someone that should definitely go on there and reach that audience

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAiOTVzNRnFnQTz531DQP9Q/videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjEDvKFs_78

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3xueXaG2rI

Whole channel is great.

glorious content

Oh man, I saw his one at Talladega Superspeedway. Never have I so seriously questioned my belief that ultimately we are all the same species who need to learn how to get along.

AGNB is some top-tier shit

one man alone has captured the true spirit of 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLukCrukESc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53SKZnEojeE

Fractal Jreg:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t__fnnZ-1jU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7DuumkURYQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NWxYnQ3TeA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5Vfd0Dgco4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4eTssxrnqY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX8wplv08PA

haha I wanted to alert ILX to his Sistine Chapel but idk how popular he is on here

How is that guy "not terrible"? I watched about 45 seconds of three different videos and wanted to punch him in the throat.

Technically speaking, imago and I are millennials.

Ageist snark aside, it's funnier if you're already familiar with his anti-centrist shtick.

eugh please no “funny” youtubers

not terrible: 1700s u.s. cooking dude

townsends

officially addicted to all gas no brakes, thanx pom

My pleasure! One of the pandemic's more pernicious side effects is the lack of new AGNB episodes.

i can’t be bothered to see if it’s been posted before, but this is my recent obsession: basically it’s like if pawn stars was filmed by an incompetent documentarian with no budget:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX58yYdB8ns

video titles always a bit sensational, it’s mostly the mundane content and unexpectedly striking details / animal cameos that really make it.

there was literally a new AGNB a couple days ago!

Yeah but that one was already in the pipes.

Apparently he's only got one pre-lockdown reel left to edit.

well, conner o'malley has shown what's still possible out there on the mean streets

Re: lo-fi Pawn Stars, t'would be prime /r/DeepIntoYouTube material if it didn't have more than 100,000 views.

It's not public yet but the new Lindsay Ellis video on Cats is fantastic.

More top-drawer material from AGNB:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOJAddj_SJE

If the rest of his leftovers are on the same level, it should be more than enough to tide me over.

Giggling my ass off.

honestly kinda sounds like an e40 verse

Ivan Dorin

not specific youtubers but watching some stand-up, commenters are surprisingly positive and kind to everyone on stage, even to women and people of color

My pleasure! One of the pandemic's more pernicious side effects is the lack of new AGNB episodes.

― Publius Covidius Naso (pomenitul), Thursday, 2 April 2020 02:49 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

you were saying?

I'll never underestimate him again.

Spiritually related:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/g7l5ta/a_friend_offering_some_advice_to_the_covid/

oh my god that video

love this guy's ludicrous projects

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AecAXinars

thanks for getting me on to all gas no brakes, that shit is amazing.

hah thanks to its appearance in another thread i just watched every one of their youtube videos just now!

Wow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZPeD2miyF8

yeah.

Elvis Travels

I AM A ASSYRIAN ELVIS TRIBUTE ARTIST AND FULL-TIME VAN DWELLER. CHECK OUT MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL CAMPERVAN ELVIS. I AM A FOODIE AND SNOWBIRD TRAVELER. I LIVE IN MY VAN IN CHICAGO IN THE SUMMERTIME AND TRAVEL TO FLORIDA FOR WINTER TIME.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0GXZS-1vHI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-V23BbfvFM

I don't watch him religiously (rubbernecking not being the noblest impulse), but I tuned into one of his livestreams, and at one point an anonymous Canadian guy donated a few hundred dollars to his channel. Elvis didn't even acknowledge the gift, and everyone in the chat was like, "Elvis, you asshole" while implying that this had happened before. his devotees/trolls are almost as bizarre as he is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JCoQ_lI58

money shot safron spill @7:20

damn grampa

the oreo pudding episode is a trip

ty for this glorious content

subbed (by which I mean we have added "grandpa kitchen" to the very short list of channel names we search for on the roku yt app)

Having only watched 3 whole eps so far I'm really impressed by how well these are shot and edited given that they're doing all the cooking outdoors in real time

I love the lack of narration—just naming the ingredients to the sounds of chirping birds

also occasional brief cutaways to a couple goats or chickens

Also whenever the dude announces “vegetable oil!” before dumping half of that big yellow jerry can into the pot

oh man

http://youtu.be/aCTUoBMk-GE

Yeah saw that

Anyone know any good youtubers who focus on women's health and sex/dating with a target audience of teens and young women? Thanks.

Other than Lacy Green. I already know about her, but I'm trying to compile a list.

the grandpa kitchen where he makes cheeseburgers is insane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUq7htzSmGY

this is a not bad comedy video
https://vimeo.com/410469245

Other than Lacy Green. I already know about her, but I'm trying to compile a list.

― peace, man, Friday, 19 June 2020 9:56 PM (one week ago)

she's been alt-right for years now

https://medium.com/the-establishment/the-sad-case-of-laci-green-feminist-hero-turned-anti-feminist-defender-322515344297

Just seen that GeoWizard's second attempt at a straight line mission across Wales is coming on Sunday night (8pm UK time, BST).

... before the 'stay local' restrictions are lifted on monday?

Hooray!

I actually watched one of dude's geoguesser videos and it was impressive. Not enough to watch all of it tho.

I think he filmed it back in March.

at this point AGNB is the only USpol-related content anyone really needs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zthJUf31MA

like, beside all those telling the message like it is, and those drunk on chaos, the guy he finds like 8m in is one of the funniest in AGNB history

All Gas No Brakes wrote and "starred in" a porn video when he did his porn convention video. That's dedication to the bit.

at this point AGNB is the only USpol-related content anyone really needs

otm, this is simply a factual statement.

lol @ Tucker Carlson and his "Biden voters" schtick.

a+ for AGNB

Same again

I could have done with a little less editorializing-via-editing on this one but boy howdy do they ever get some amazing footage and iconic moments with incredible regularity

Is anyone subscribed to AGNB's Patreon? Looks like there's lots of non-Youtube content on there. It's tempting.

I'm listening to the H3 interview. Apparently AGNB has existed in some form for something like 6 years now, first as a print zine with transcriptions of interviews recorded while Andrew was hitch-hiking. Pretty damn cool.

I am not on the AGNB patreon yet but I really should be.

I expected the Burning Man AGNB to be a hit piece but honestly that was a lot sunnier than my experience at Burning Man.

One of the smaller channels

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLoJtlxYJVJwDkxXFvfXa9g/featured

Bongos congas & antique cash register collecting

Nexpo is a good channel for exploring dark/weird media mini-documentaries.

Caveat: It does suffer from the droney, x-files music in the background and the narrator has a really curious habit of adding an 's' to words that end in a 't' (why do some many of these YT guys have such odd voices?), but the content is A+

Nexpo looks right up my alley, thanks!

Brie Larson has a YouTube channel now and it’s not terrible! You all should watch the cooking one.

fairbairns continue to be absolutely hilarious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91EDT_p5iHA

thread of incomprehensibly british youtubers

...and AGNB.

I wish I were a bona fide anglophile, I feel like I'm missing out despite my best efforts.

steady anglin'

Don't forget the saxonin'.

thread of incomprehensibly british youtubers

If that was in relation to the Fairbairns, I think they're Australian, not British.

Tell that to Tony Abbott.

Yeah nobody in the UK wears hats except mark s who has a gold top hat

in my defense, i did say it was incomprehensible

I have a good bit of experience with Aussies and it's comprehensible but but not especially funny imho

Okay, this is super unoriginal, but nothing cheers me more than watching young 'uns absolutely smashing it on their respective instruments, be it solo or in a band set-up.

Yoyoka's got a more solidified internal rhythm than most drummers I've ever played with and the way she leans into the snare and cymbals especially is totally joyful to see.

The way her expression switches from the 'hello' to hearing the count-in and landing on that intro, battering the fuck out of the kit, speaks volumes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tkw57uGnSrs

Have loved that video for awhile. Thanks for reminding me of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaocgWfLeTg

This guy is incredibly Canadian.

New AGNB delivers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK2FBEpmlUo

I love it when he makes people explain their jokes.

I know he's got a mask and mostly does these outside but man I hope he's bathing in sanitizer

yikes

AGNB is doing something with Kenny Beats, gonna be bigger than Zack Fox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DyTXpnFpZU

wow, those guys are amazingly stupid

The soundtrack to his straight line mission across Wales (plus extras) has just released by GeoWizard...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lblipT1O8i8

Ooh ty

It is evoking a pleasant nostalgia of watching the Wales videos.

ann reardon is the best

http://youtu.be/OgHbBUnNfl8

the Geowizard album is very lovely indeed, here's the Bandcamp: https://amynedd.bandcamp.com/album/16-bit-adventure

also, affix new contrapoints to the top of ILE pls

It kind of sucks that he seems to be developing it commercially as a B&B or something but living alone in a ghost town in the Sierra Nevadas is living the (current) dream IMO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlrHLoJVAQ4

having refurbished exactly two (2) homes that were in relatively reasonably condition to begin with... I do not relish that guy's prospect

seems to be going well except for the part where the biggest building burned down when propane tanks exploded (oops)

I revisit this video every couple of years or so to remind myself of what true passion looks like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4iw8Ppo1o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofp26_oc4CA

guy's looking fwd to having his house completely surrounded by raccoons for the rest of his years

those racoons look fat as hell

he probably does this every sunday lol

or, uh, tuesday like it says in the description

The raccoon guy is pretty fascinating because he's been posting these videos for a while and at the beginning there weren't nearly as many raccoons, maybe a dozen or so...they've clearly been telling their friends.

a group of raccoons is called a "gaze," and that is quite ironical given how enjoyable it is to gaze upon these plump-ass weiner-and-grape gobblers

<3 <3 <3 I love raccoons so much

i think he posts them like every day. i was watching him in june. i like the raccoons and they are adorable i just feel bad about feeding wild animals. but i do enjoy his interactions with them and his funny accent.

raccoons are filthy trash eaters by nature though, that is the way God made them. it's better they eat fresh hotdogs and disease-free grapes from the hand of a kindly old man than get their garbage foods from dumpsters full of hypodermic needles and used condoms like they normally do

we have a couple racoons nearby but make sure the condoms they eat are unused

city raccoons need all the nutrition they can get though. maybe just empty the useds into a saucer and set it out for them a few nights a year as a special treat, on holidays or whatever

Good idea I really hadn't though of that, but what are what my cats going to eat now?

gonna sound like a broken record here but I've found pretty much all animals can and will eat human cum if given the opportunity

Fine but you’re talking like I live in some kind of cum factory.

perhaps a cum factory lives in you

listen I feel like this thread has maybe gotten too personal? I'd like to just focus on the raccoons

xp That's what my dad told me as a boy. I guess I just stopped believing.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/raccoon-whisperer-jim-blackwood-1.3894924

https://austinkleon.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/PUpqokK-e1539020529199.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-WjIVxyR5c

has anybody mentioned this guy yet, i enjoy his videos (most of which have less swearing)

the bigfoot all gas no brakes is fucking great
can AGNB get a thread already

50 000!

first AGNB i didn't like tbh

does AGNB only interview people/stuff he doesn't actually like, or is that just an editorial strategy for rackin up the clicks?

he's good at what he does, and godbless ye the COVID for isolating me this year so that I can familiarize myself with the content that I'm probably too old for anyway, but is this really what the kids are approving and wanting more of? from what I can tell it's just Vice but from a more kosher funding source

even when it's not madlads and madlasses he has obvious affection for and it's more expressly political, he'll always give people on the 'progressive' side a platform to speak as well

that said i couldn't watch the bigfoot one

australian youtuber 'I did a thing' remains the best tho

enjoyed bedroom anthropologist and his relationship with his stuffed jay, ty lukas

the great explorer of our age has returned, now with 1x girlfriend on kayak-dragging duties

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDPhdkdR9qI

Great to end the week with some GeoWizard straight line adventures. A promising start, I guess things might get a lot trickier...

boutique vodka infused with greek flavors named Feta Alcohol Syndrome.

This Franco-Ontarian one-man orchestra specializes in mostly acoustic covers that effortlessly capture the lockdown spirit of 2020:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_02vCoxAYP0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEtSSNNp2Gk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEPPAAJhXyw

First one comes with a bonus doggo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FucG0GQrEbU

Really into this guy lately

i love that pump up the jam

not sure what to make of this guy yet, but, he's a hobo. he rides the rails

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TheHoboShoe

i have watched exactly 0 of their vlogs but this goat farm has live barn cams that i put on all the time during the workday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SymanSaysFa

oh i just realized ilx mucks up youtube urls hang on

Hobo Shoestring looking out over Chattanooga:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EYctSLAUC8

Syman Says goat barn LIVE:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmJIvwzgI

if u really need some slowness in ur life, here's the Duluth Harbor Cam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPM2pxCNHlQ

Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration, 187 Flaggy Meadow Rd, Gorham, ME

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBwJ2PnUksY

^ have really enjoyed his videos recently

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that lots of YouTube series in 2020 are nominated in the 2020 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2020 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 29, 2021

If you like any particular series and would like to see them have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

New ContraPoints out. Topic: J. K. Rowling.

this should go great

I haven't watched it yet because it's, well, 1h30 mins long, but I look forward to hearing her deliver the line 'He never said he hated the jews. He is simply concerned about the overrepresentation of Jewish people in media and banking' (quoted in the YT comments).

I'm skipping that one because it's about JK fucking Rowling and I cannot countenance any further promotion (see "Streisand rule") of her or anything related to her fucking media empire, which has poisoned the brains of at least two generations at this point.

anecdotally I have some normie friends who only became aware of trans issues when this Rowling thing exploded and Contra is good at laying out situations in a way that reaches those types so this is good

yeah I'm only a few minutes in and I like her approach already, I think this is actually useful

framing it as "let's use this as a case study to determine the nature, origins and methodology of bigotry" is a pretty good angle, or at least it hooked me, and her videos have been hit or miss for me lately

anecdotally I have some normie friends who only became aware of trans issues when this Rowling thing exploded and Contra is good at laying out situations in a way that reaches those types so this is good

I watched it today.

As an old "normie" ish guy I think she was very good at spelling out the red flags and tropes that I could easily miss.

yes I thought this was one of her best, a lot of the jokes land and she navigates dissection and (the appropriate amount of) empathy as basically no one else I am aware of in the "same field" even cares to try to do

I watched yesterday and totally agree it's one of her best in the last year. She's very good at foregrounding the concerns of the opposing view in her videos in a completely uninflammatory way that (I imagine) disarms those people before they've had a chance to look away from and knee-jerk refute her explication of things. At least some comments seem to suggest this is the case.

Loved the idealism at the end too that Rowling could be the one in a million to change her outlook. If anything could work...

Watched it last night. Don't have anything to add other than: everyone otm.

yep

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rgxQMgw4bA

The Raccoon Whisperer has expanded his horizons and remains extremely wholesome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwuClKryAhQ

lol Zen School Of Motoring got a BBC deal!

I am addicted to a few music reaction youtubers, not in a particularly healthy way, I keep staying up late impulsively going through their channels picking out all the songs I like. if I could stop after 2 or 3 it would be fine, but no, I do not have that kind of self control.

Same. I find it fascinating to watch people react to early Rage Against the Machine for some reason.

I'll watch any reaction video where they do Great Gig in the Sky

yeah I have seen plenty of RATM and Pink Floyd, current favourite is Dave's performance of Black from last year's Brit Awards.

big all gas no brakes energy: nyc edition here
https://www.instagram.com/sidetalknyc/

Did any of his Capitol footage come out?

dude has a tv deal, i'm sure he's either saving it for or to directly promote that, would be hard to imagine more valuable marketing

well, then again... this is from yesterday:

I am no longer associated with All Gas No Brakes.

I no longer receive any of the Patreon crowdfunding, YouTube monetization or any other show income.

Nic and Evan, who lived in the RV and created the original show material, are also no longer involved.

We have no control over the accounts or future of the show.

When was 20, I wrote a book called 'All Gas No Brakes' about hitchhiking around America as a teenager. At 21, I pitched the idea of a video-based road show to a production company, who loaned me an RV to make videos and explore America with my best friends.

I was ecstatic, who I signed an employment contract without reading it.

Lesson learned.

Thank you for supporting me these past years. It's been the time of my life. I can't wait to show you guys what I'm doing next.

This is not the end ..

It's only the beginning to a bright, independent future for the team.

I love y'all.

- Andrew

https://www.instagram.com/p/CMNnFMOsHvg/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/style/all-gas-no-brakes.html

The obvious lesson is of course "read employment contracts before you sign them", but the Doing Things Media people were/are nuts to actually fire them (and absolutely tank the value of the branding they own in the process).

it's hard to imagine that brand surviving without Andrew but I can see Andrew doing just fine working with Abso Lutely

yeah, don't see a scenario where this plays out well for his ex-producers

if they actually try to put out new "AGNB" content with a new host, they're going to get more viciously downvoted/spammed/etc than any youtube content in recent memory

According to people who worked on the show, Mr. Hailey asked Mr. Callaghan to focus on “party content” rather than news. “Reid from Doing Things was constantly pressuring us to make the show less political,” said Mr. Kahn.

It requires an impressive amount of stupidity to not realize what was driving its popularity and how they could have ridden it to no show jobs executive producing a television series instead of praying every day that a change to the Instagram algorithm doesn't zero out their meme accounts.

AGNB is back, kind of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f1aOOIg4Uo

that is quite a cast of characters there

Recommended by Clayton Ashley on a Polygon stream, I'm really enjoying this dude who plays Skylines from a socialist pov.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk

lindsay ellis has been having a rough couple of weeks

oh? I haven't kept up with her or her stuff at all

I saw something a couple weeks ago about a controversy involving her on twitter resulting in her deleting her account, her apparent offense sounded like a benign opinion that was not worth anyone getting upset over but I stopped investigating pretty quickly as it was depressing me.

Answer: She recently tweeted about Raya and the Last Dragon, bringing plot comparisons to Avatar: The Last Airbender.

People became aggravated because it was interpreted that she was saying that Raya copied Avatar thematically as Asian. It got blown up further by the fact that Avatar's primary writers are white and Raya's writers are Asian.

It then began to snowball to include things she had previously been in hot water for, such as a poor joke about Reylo-esque shipping in things like the Harriet Tubman movie; her personal experiences with trans male friends not being so badly harassed after fully transitioning; among other things.

It can be inferred that she started receiving harassment, as all these things eventually devolve into. In response, she probably deactivated her account to get a break from it, and the people that got mad at her took that as a victory, and are taking a lap.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/mef2yg/what_is_going_on_with_lindsay_ellis_being/gsgfz04?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I figured as much.

benign opinion seems about right but people want a fight

I'm really really glad my income is not tied to working publicly online doing anything it seems very bad

1:40 for the response video. Nope.

Rear Window is like eight minutes longer than that.

oh nooooo

20 minutes longer than Killer of Sheep

To be fair, I watched a bit and it's not just her response video, it's more of an overview of the concept of cancelling in general.

Still didn't last long because shortly into it I'd sort of made me mind up that the lessons here were a) don't get into fights on twitter and b) fandoms centred around stuff for children are mostly populated by deranged people and actual children. Obviously I don't have my livelihood tied up into this demographic so things are harder for her.

I LOVE Two Minute Papers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videos

Found a problem with the YouTube parser! I tried to link to a channel above. Sample video instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SJ19OgHi4w

If you posted it as a link it would have been fine :)

ah.

Think there may have been chat about this on ILX before but why are all videos by high profile youtubers so long now? I'm assuming it's market-driven, and can kinda understand that for audiences who just want to halfwatch someone stream some video game for five hours, but why does it work for video essays/explainers?

increased appetite for Content, bigger audience->bigger production budget->ostensibly better videos, gotta take more time out and thank the patreon supporters, etc.

Yeah, I get that with, say, ContraPoints where there is actual set design, but with a lot of others the difference seems to be entirely graduating from "here's me talking to a camera for 20min" to "here's me talking to a camera for 2 hours".

I don’t watch youtubers who make videos that long, but considering YouTube’s upsell pitch is “audio keeps playing even when the video isn’t being displayed” I think a lot of people basically use YouTube as a podcast app

I also assume lockdown has made watching never-ending videos a less off-putting prospect than usual.

Contrapoints has said the algorithm rewards longer videos, I think.

I was aware of this channel (Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't) before but hadn't watched much until a friend sent me a link to the videos he made in the UP of Michigan, where I grew up. Having lived in Chicago I find the heavy accent mostly hilarious, it's like watching one of the Superfans talk about botany and geology. Other people might find it a bit much but I dunno.

This is one of his UP videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfGETxg2ofU

That was awesome.

2 Minute Papers looks entertaining, thanks!

I like to watch old episodes of Only Connect on Youtube -- by far the most fun gameshow I've seen.
Here's a playlist of season 10

An old standard with one of his funniest yet. His brother is like the stoned version of him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrsnnFgHZaA

I mentioned forestyforest in here a bit more than a year ago, but really want to highlight him again as his videos have only gone from strength to strength in that time and he remains the most fantastically awesome and wholesome seeming guy. His drone shots of driving through the Canadian backcountry and from various mountain summits are fantastic to see and his wry sense of humour comes out in his wee edits and interludes. My overall favourite YouTuber nowadays, I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videos

Urgh, I was trying to share link to the channel in general, but that doesn't seem to have worked very well. Try below instead...

forestyforest on YouTube

any particular favorites? there's a lot!

I'll try to find some of the ones with more outdoors and mountain summit stuff, as those are the really good ones for me. Recently quite a few videos have been more van life oriented while he tweaks his new larger 4x4 van, which are probably not the most exciting or indicative introductions to the channel.

This guy is doing some good work, IMO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WeEyncm_jQ

Just a man, his parrot and some tunes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwre2BwRfIs

Important raccoon whisperer news

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I37oyWYOUM

GeoWizard profiled in the Guardian, which spoiled the ending of his Scotland trip despite him asking the reporter not to. People in his patreon getting worried the media coverage might lead to lawsuits - which I think is prob inevitable down the line anyway, if he continues getting more popular? Enjoy it while it lasts is I guess what I'm saying.

Seems like he's recently had a visit from the police, and as a result he's had to edit one of the Scotland videos to remove the part where they cross a railway line.

Genuinely impressive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w30AdwJMVa0

lol i bullshitted my way to getting 4 of those right! (1, 4, 5, and 6) but i would have very little way of explaining why i got them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIe5GKyLPek

I can't decide if he is or isn't terrible tbh

Footage of our future overlords putting us to shame:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH_bEtbfB9U

We worked with Keaton Patti to make a bot watch over 400,000 hours of stand up comedy and then write its own special. Here is the best it could do.

New Contrapoints out today.

Kirsten Dirksen, makes very loose videos about people who have built or renovated unusual homes all over the world, they're very simple and the lack of polish is actually quite complimentary.

They're obviously heavily reliant on the subject so not all of them are zingers, but a lot of them are worth your time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcovbvpRdr4

I've been waiting for Contrapoints to get into more psychoanalytic territory for a while, so was thrilled by the latest video. Amazing as always, though I might have expected a little more Kleinian theory given that she's kind of the authority on the subject. Would have loved to hear Natalie applying split object theory to politics. Being someone who struggles greatly with an even more archly recursive and hostile form of 'not like other girls' syndrome, I was hoping for more of an envy-solving prescription in the summary than say yes to everything!. How does one cultivate such a permissive attitude to oneself and others in the face of an all-consuming paranoia for example, a friend might ask...

The Nietzsche quote about forgiveness being appositive to slave morality (ressentiment) and aligned with master morality felt like a false equivalence. Like, I get that not being compelled to take revenge is less contemptuous and more desirable, but forgiveness feels like a stretch. Is empowered indifference the same as forgiveness? Maybe it is. Maybe I need to read the book. This isn't the thread for this.

Anyway, I hope she gets to take a break now. Who could even edit a video like that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNINWMqxQQc

Harpist who demos guitar pedals

yeah she’s great.

also love contrapoints.

great thread!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U54HRmglYEA

she has some videos of people living in ancient houses in rural spain that are just so pretty

The new Hainbach video on forgotten Italian synths is an absolute delight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ-sVujDlS8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mrdd5-ehb8

The Electrical Audio/Albini educational series is pretty cool

Jacques Pepin has gotten even more soothing with age

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g93sAo2cFM

Andrew is so good at letting his interviewees talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HghwNhrLNP0

andrew's "mm-hm" straight face is all-time

Sohla and Ham's series is good shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybNex3XsgFc

Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't had this out-of-the-ordinary episode recently, many funny moments but the sea shanty is the best part

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uAkqsDRrIw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Featureman

featureman: an old man named tom willett who was for many years an extra in Hollywood (his biggest role was a recurring non-speaking part in the Judd Hirsch sitcom "dear John"). eats food, mainly terrible looking stuff - a can of spaghetti with hunks of onion and spam was the most recent one I watched - and tells stories about his life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCIix6MklfJ

Country Life Vlog. an Azeri couple cooks, and does other things like chop wood, make tea gather berries, in the the outdoors.

yes, i am subscribed to country life vlog and i love it. there is another similar one but i forgot what it was--will probably come up in your recommendations.

Linus Bowman's design YT channel is so hilariously macro but compelling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPmlv7cDk6Q

oh nice thanks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaEQP-SiRlA

Not always a big fan of Benn Jordan’s videos but this one is great.

This one is important.
How A NYTimes Reporter Collects Royalties From Hundreds of Musicians:https://t.co/W6GxIrUPCm

— Benn Jordan (@bennjordan) December 2, 2021

Ian Urbina’s book is legitimately good (assuming the reporting is trustworthy) so it’s wild to see him running something that looks objectively like a massive scam.

Wow, that seems straight-up illegal.

looked up Ian Urbina on apple music and the first thought I had was “well, this page is taking suspiciously long to load”

what a scamming shithead

huge bummer because urbina seems to do genuinely good and important work

Please take some time to read this article in the @NewYorker by @ian_urbina, from The Outlaw Ocean Project, which sheds light on the shadow immigration system stopping migrants before they reach Europe’s shores. https://t.co/Ka5YGPzFlG

— Peter Gabriel (@itspetergabriel) December 3, 2021

yeah, I don’t know how things got to this point, but it’s just… a really weird situation?

I ran across a profile on the project where he seemed to imply that the music project would help fund his investigative reporting work, which would be cool if everyone was on board with that, but it sounds like the musicians were told something much different.

I think the only thing that really pushed me from “kind of dodgy” to actually irritated was this second project’s webpage:
https://thenoamchomskymusicproject.com/

So did they license Chomsky lectures and interview clips or… what’s the deal here

And if you click through to the EPs for that project, once again Urbina is named as a co-artist - presumably for supplying the Chomsky clips?

yeah, that is the really weird angle!

like it’s become the concept + samples thing, but he didn’t do the samples

Gotta say I'm not familiar with many of the musicians caught out by this but benoit pioulard just tweeted that he was

well, regardless of how the rest of this goes, this seems uncool

They disabled my tracks on the streaming services without notice ; pretty cool

— Benoît Pioulard (@pioulard) December 4, 2021

A statement from Synesthesia Media. pic.twitter.com/1dCyv0wUmX

— Synesthesia Media (@Synesthesia_Med) December 4, 2021

meanwhile urbina is just straight blocking everyone who calls him out, including artists who he seems to have ripped off

Okay. Final Tweet of the day regarding this.

Here's a FAQ they uploaded (just today, after my video was released, as you can see clearly via Waybackmachine) that I've been accused of not referencing in my video. https://t.co/rrggSxKaOB pic.twitter.com/gErfC5YzaM

— Benn Jordan (@bennjordan) December 5, 2021

This might merit an ILM thread?

YouTube has started turning off the comments on my channel. I tried to find out why but nothing really makes sense. I upload songs from lounge records that most people don't care about. Is the issue the original songwriter credit?

that’s a shame

This sounds fascinating but I still can't really bring myself to watch one of these Rick Beato ass Fantano ass videos where some dude talks at you.

(I guess I did watch one or two Ott videos, but that's p much it)

That video showed up in my Twitter timeline, and I made a snarky reply to the effect that I'd rather read an article than watch a video, and a bunch of Jordan's fans(?) called me rude and ungrateful. The video seems like it is probably good, but I don't know who tf Benn Jordan is.

I watched that whole video because of you guys. I suppose in prnciple I'm supposed to care about musicians not being given a shitty deal. Never heard of him either but he clearly put a lot of time (the value of which being the point) into filming himself talking in front blinken iights euroack and a green screen. I guess that's what he does and prodution values help to get views.

Years ago I licensed a track for a softcore b-movie spoof and was pretty cautious about the contract. I've never seen a penny for that but fuck it.

I had the thought that I’d rather read an article but then reversed it and thought about what I’d think if I saw someone saying “could you make this a video? I’d prefer it to an article” and I kept quiet

inevitably someone will probably write an article and probably have better excerpts of the contract, etc.

there's an article about it here:
https://www.inputmag.com/culture/ian-urbina-new-york-times-spotify-music-royalties-benn-jordan-youtube

the video is much better than any of the articles so far

tbh tho i suspect urbina's own photos of himself are doing at least some of the heavy lifting in his disfavour

https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/fact-checking-the-ian-urbina-music

🤷🏻‍♂️

the tl;dr of that piece is p much yes urbina did everything ppl say he did but if you assume he did it in good faith then it's clear he did it in good faith!

fair. both actors here seem untrustworthy. the journalist for obvious reasons (his own photos!) and then the youtube guy for his rather febrile twitter account. i guess i could dig into the facts but on the other hand i don't care haha.

this jeremy arnold character is irritating

he rules

is this the guy who wrote a furious defense of billionaires against ProPublica and just fucked up over and over

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) December 7, 2021

ah yes, that's the one. hilarious number of corrections on this guy https://t.co/jkwxahz6kK

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) December 7, 2021

I’ve been mildly prodding him on twitter and he’s really obstinate

should I ask him if he ran his substack terms and conditions past a lawyer before publishing on that platform?

I’ve been mildly prodding him on twitter and he’s really obstinate

should I ask him if he ran his substack terms and conditions past a lawyer before publishing on that platform?

somewhat glib youtuber: so! all this opacity! it might hide nothing, i'm not at all saying something suss is going on, but if nothing suss is going on, why all the opacity? very easy to clear this up ian!
easily nettled urbina defenders: the opacity means we cannot see if anything bad is going on so nothing bad can be going on, no of course we did not ask follow-up questions why is that relevant
ian urbina: *the maddening mask-like smile of the most prolific song-composer in history intensifies*
massed freelance plebs of the internet (me) all too familiar with how this always goes: !!! #️⃣ ⚡️ 💣 !!!

otm

anyone got any new recs? not of tubers strictly but anything good on tube

i've been really into this wisconsin dude who trims injured and infected cow hooves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NatetheHoof

generally not into gross stuff or body horror video, it's not really like that (there's also a scot who does the same thing but he's insufferable and puts crap music on his shit)