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/

^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.