favorite youtube videos

[meri]

what are some long-form youtube videos you really like. like, like well enough to consider them art? something that makes you say "why is this even on youtube"

i'll start



tim goes on a life long anecdote disguised as a game review. most of his videos can be described this way. i'm really humbled by his ways. this one sticks out to me



this is also an anecdote. exurb1a makes... pretty average philosophical videos.. and books? this is his second channel. he goes backpacking the appalachian trail to find purpose, and does not find purpose



dan of folding ideas explores how HUD programming in world of warcraft turned it into a different game entirely. also contains a full history of world of warcraft

based on a dm i had with <a href='index.php?showuser=1' rel='nofollow' alt='profile link' class='user-tagged mgroup-4'>@maru</a>

[maru]

In terms of "things I actually watched, front to back, and they're long"...

This expose on the Star Wars Hotel. Thanks @chc4.



The nature documentary on invisible walls.



This nice Alan Kay talk.



I actually watch a lot of lectures. This one is on Origen and his weird ideas about reincarnation and universal salvation that I think are super cool but probably not orthodox.

[chc4]

I think this five hour long in-depth explanation of every entry on a Magic: the Gathering meme about extremely niche rules interactions is probably one of my favorite videos ever. <a href='https://www.youtube.com/live/QKOS4fFKlAw' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>https://www.youtube.com/live/QKOS4fFKlAw</a>

Likewise this hour long talk about how modern computer processors are made (11 years ago) is extremely interesting and I've linked to people a handful of times <a href='https://youtu.be/NGFhc8R_uO4' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>https://youtu.be/NGFhc8R_uO4</a>

I also really like in-depth video game review videos. <a href='https://youtu.be/cI7LUbKZtfM' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>https://youtu.be/cI7LUbKZtfM</a> is really good, along with his Rusted Moss review, even though I never played either game.

[watermoon]

already there are a lot of good ones in here, and a lot for me to queue up later. tim rogers is good as hell and i wonder when he'll come back, that invisible walls video was super charming and i'm glad pannen came back, that star wars hotel was utterly absurd and i hope it doesn't come back…
i somehow missed that folding ideas video, but i do like his stuff; personally the one that hit hardest for me was his flat earth video, if only for having family members who at that time had fallen hard into qanon too.

i don't know if my taste is especially sophisticated – like, i still comfort-watch ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 every so often – but here's some that came to mind…

LONG-FORM



jon bois is one of those creators who i've been following since before he was making videos, and i adore the way he is able to weave together these compassionate and beautiful stories out of stuff like sports statistics. i'm definitely not alone in this adoration here either, since his video creation style and ethos has inspired an unusually large number of other video creators.

this video is my favorite one he's been involved in to date, and is in the running for my favorite video essay on youtube. it sets up its conceit so strongly that i couldn't help but be hooked from the start.



speaking of videos where something human and touching is drawn out of a place one wouldn't normally expect, here's a video about competitive melee. i do feel like the editing in this video is on another level, like, it takes real skill and dedication to go so far as to recreate examples in the original game's engine for illustration. plus watching competitive smash might just be hype?



i sent this video around to a handful of people after i watched it, because i feel like this really explains what it's like… when watching it, i felt like i just got hot-read to an incredible degree, and had all of my early-trans feelings thrown back into my face – some i thought i'd worked through since then, and some i'm still dealing with nearly a decade later…

---

SHORT-FORM



also in the running for my favorite video on youtube. this one consistently makes me laugh so hard that i start crying, but i'm also a double cancer so the crying was inevitable no matter what.



a media analysis of a youtube poop that i still quote to this day? sure i'll watch that.

Mako Ray: Femboys are the Cure to Incels (age-restricted)

a more blunt and glib taken on the incel-to-trans pipeline, for those who don't have time to watch the other one.
this video altered my brain chemistry.

(2024-06-11 edit: fixed formatting)

[sinku]

I watch a lot of dumb videos but the one that I probably love the most, that feels most weird and surreal, is this scambaiting video where <a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFTE5WK_tlc' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Kitboga wastes a scammer's time for three hours using Windows RG</a>

I do not know if this is a real call or not, Kitboga has hours of these videos across his channels and many many livestreams where he calls these people in real time. That makes me believe it is authentic and not staged. But it is a weird call, because the scammer is either fooled or not fooled, which makes the time wasted very confusing. Either knows something is up and is playing along, or does not know and is stupid, or does not know much about computers, or knows something is up but is choosing to stay on the phone and try and run his scam. Maybe because he thinks the old lady on the other end is a good mark. I have no idea. I have watched it a bunch of times.

[watermoon]

moony is an interesting one for me. like, i do think his videos are comfy and i think he carved out a fun niche as "the gamer's lawyer." i also find his latest videos tracing modern east asian pop culture phenomena to their historical roots to be really interesting. i don't know if i fully buy them – my training in historical methods has made me skeptical of anything that explains macro-level events with straightforward causal chains – but it's also not like i'm expecting a peer-review-passing level of rigor from my memey youtube videos.

anyway this video was fun because it made me think about what it means that i bought into modern japanese culture to an identity-defining scale

[maru]

anyway this video was fun because it made me think about what it means that i bought into modern japanese culture to an identity-defining scale

Can't it just mean something for its own sake, because it's yours? It enabled an escape from what you would've gotten from your home country. I feel similarly: it allowed me to access a more sincere, more "beautiful" mode of expressing myself...

[watermoon]

Can't it just mean something for its own sake, because it's yours? It enabled an escape from what you would've gotten from your home country. I feel similarly: it allowed me to access a more sincere, more "beautiful" mode of expressing myself...

realistically any chance of me ending up otherwise went out the window the instant my family got dance dance revolution supernova. there was just something about it that piqued my interest – it was stylish and quirky and fascinating in a way that nothing else i'd experienced quite was… and i wanted more. and i kept wanting more.

it's weird to call it a comfort culture, but it kinda is. i feel like i could immerse myself in its media endlessly and be happy here, with there always being something new to discover. and i feel like it has shaped how i create, what i want from music and art, my speech patterns, my goddamn name… but it's also a culture that i'll always be somewhat distant from, which cannot be helped.

[JennyDog]

All of Noah Caldwell Gervais' work is very nice, he does travelogues and video game full on-reviews, often times looking at entire series:
Channel

My personal favorite of the travelogues are Atomic Pilgrimage, which is visiting lots of sites that were important for the history and development of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, but honestly all of them are good listening in the background.

My favorite video-game review is probably his (at the time) almost complete Resident Evil Retrospective.. It's almost an entire full workday of content, but the amount spent on each game is fairly manageable -- at most half an hour. Stuff like SNES Drunk's Channel form something similar in total, but not as a complete intertextual video/document.

TehSnarker's Channeo is the other last remaining long form video I watch, I love his quiet and contemplative vibe and his voice. Personal favorites are A review/place of Yakuza 2 and Playing Classic Sonic Wrong.

This Beautiful Corpse style music video of Dan Deacon's When I Was Done Dying (Flasing Light Warning!!) is something fun I keep in back of my head.

[sinku]

Noah Caldwell Gervais' work is very nice

I LOVE his videos. they are so good, esp his Blair Witch and Quake vids, and the dead space one. jeez ive watched a lot of his videos actually.

Sharing time:
Flesh Simulator is this nut who does a lot of conspiracy related videos but also videos about cameras or other stuff. Hes also a musician and does awesome background music too! The videos are kept to the point and are not flashy or highly produced. He is competent with a camera but his whole ramble vibe isnt for everybody even though I find him to be good at painting word pictures.



Bob Gymlan is a bigfoot truther who does videos about bigfoot, historical animal attacks and sometimes other cryptids or even aliens. I've watched his videos for at least a few years. His latest is a personal telling of his childhood experience of seeing 'Longneck Grey Aliens' and a conversation with a grey alien at his bedside. I think they are good videos, but I feel like his affect when hes speaking could easily come off as goofy, especially in his much earlier videos. Something about the low quality mic just makes some lines come off as super super funny.

[watermoon]

i still can't get over this video… the dude managed to take a game that i'd never heard of and probably wouldn't care about if i had and, in an hour, make it something that i now care deeply about the survival of and which i kinda wanna try out for myself now too. it feels like the sort of meme-drenched video that would spur on a subcultural renaissance of the game – hey, i've seen it happen before – but so far the metrics seem to be against that happening… a shame, really (maybe).