I did not know, until this year, that ‘Cover Youtube’ was a thing. I was vaguely aware that ‘original gaming music’ youtube was a thing, thanks to Miracle of Sound, who I found from the Escapist, and boy, isn’t that a rollercoaster.

Anyway, this year I’ve been enjoying discovering the music of a couple of different Youtube creators. Particularly, this year I found The Stupendium:

The Stupendium apparently considers himself a animator primarily, and like, well, great to have this as a side gig.

I also learned about Annapantsu:

Who in turn got me to check out Cami-Cat;

Where I learned that she also worked with the Stupendium on one of my favourite songs of his:

And also had me checking out Caleb Hyles and Jonathan Young;

And then I learned that these all also intersect with the work of Christina Vee;

Who I also know as a Sailor Moon voice actress, and oh, yeah, also, this:

There is also the work of Calliope Mori, but I’ve only really liked one of her songs, but I have enjoyed seeing bits of her working on music as a vtuber.

So yeah! There’s some stuff I listened to and liked this year! Check them out, subscribe to them and if you can, buy their music or tip them on ko-fi/patreon or whatever if you like their stuff.

Hermitcraft is a thing I kind of discovered, properly, last year. I found some random videos, thought they were interesting, started watching to put it all in context, and I even recommended Mumbo Jumbo and Grian as wholesome sources of good content for people who wanted to connect to kids who are into minecraft and didn’t necessarily have any chance of, you know, throwing out slurs or encouraging genocides like other Big Name Youtube Minecrafters.

As with all such things, after I sampled the main stream, I got over them and moved on to the really cool underground stuff. Now, part of this is that Mumbo Jumbo and Grian have audiences of literally millions of fans and those fans, together, are kind of, uh, enthusiastic children at best, and sometimes, hooting donguses the rest of the time. The great news about Hermitcraft is that when you have twenty four active players reacting to one another, you can have samples of the world and the experiences of it, without necessarily needing to focus on the four or five most popular ones.

Here then are some of my favourite Hermits, who are all under half a million subscribers!

Tinfoil Chef has had a heck of a year. He lost a bunch of weight, but it was because he lost a foot and a piece of his leg as well. TFC started the year living somewhere rural and isolated.

Check him out if you want to watch step-by-step, trial-and-error chill versions of Minecraft videos. How to build things, the kind of person who leaves in his mistakes and explains his process.

Joe Hills. Joe Hills does a lot of long streams. He’s fond of puns and poetry, so you can tune in to him and listen to some of that kind of thing. Two things about Joe: First, he interacts with Zombie Cleo a lot (and she’s great). Second, this season of Hermitcraft, Joe has set himself the rule that he will not use Diamonds. That results in some interesting behaviour.

Zedaph is in my opinion, the Moon Knight of the Hermits. It’s not that he doesn’t get involved in other people’s stuff, per se, but it tends to be more discrete things, like a lava bucket challenge with Tango (who isn’t being covered here, but he’s probably my favourite millionaire league subscriber hermit, wait, no, Etho is a millionaire now never mind this diversion is unnecessary). Zedaph is working on one large project, making a single cave that’s full of weird, interesting contraptions and devices that do interesting stuff.

Watch Zedaph if you like goofy British comedy. Lots of Goodies-league style comedic attitudes.

Stressmonster is… a lot.

Look, I like Stressmonster, I really do. I don’t tend to watch her videos regularly; I am more likely to see something odd that happened in another video, then go back and watch four or five episodes of Stressmonster back to back. I do it that way because she’s very high energy, but she also has a schedule that gets interrupted by life a lot.

Stress is honestly a really cool Youtuber, in that she has done and tried a lot of things, which, unfortunately, have not succeeded as much as Hermitcraft. But it’s great to see the different things she’s tried and if you can, throw her a subscribe to see what she tries next.

XBCrafted. Extremely oldschool as far as Hermitcraft goes, he’s been around for a long time. He’s doing a big project too, much like Zedaph is, where he’s building a post-apocalyptic district. One thing I like that he does is perching a camera account, and just watching himself as he putters around building something, out of bits and pieces. If you like the sort of slow, meditative crafting of Minecraft and seeing how it looks when people make.

Oh holy heeeeck, it’s Zombie Cleeeeooo I love Cleeoooo she has a great sense of humour, she has an amazing affect, she works on all sorts of projects with armour stands. In Hermitcraft they run a data pack that adds all sorts of in-game-doable stuff with armour stands, by using special commands through a book. It’s really cool, and Cleo is doing these amazing things to work on them to make a zoo. She’s very funny, I love what she builds, and she’s got a very sensible, teacherly kind of timing.

Oh and she got all the Hermits to slaughter one another this season early on.

Hypno! Hypno is one of the earliest Hermits to return, and I really like how his videos don’t tend to intersect with The Big Names. Hypno is engaged in the hermitcraft space, he’s talking with friends like Beef and XB and Cleo, but you’re not going to see him roping in on the latest Great Big Event that’s going on between the Big Name Subscriber folks that are happening over there.

Hypno is also patient in a way that other bigger names aren’t. One of his projects in this season was to build a little island home – and when he found that island wasn’t properly lining up with the biome he filled it in and rebuilt the entire island. That’s really cool!

Finally

FalseSymmetry! You probably see her in other Hermit videos a fair bit because she has the strange reputation of being a PVP Battle godddess, which also, based on this season… seems to be true? She’s just very good at competitive Minecraft, and I don’t know how to explain that, or what that means? But she’s also doing a lot of big builds and the kind of farm design that isn’t elaborate redstone contraptions and is much more about making big objects that do their job properly. She does great stuff, you should check it out.

The best sign of media is when a line, or a phrase, or an expression of an idea transforms the way you think about things. These two youtube channels both, this year, gave me a nice, tight, clear way to grapple with some big ideas that I already knew, but which had not yet been crystallised, been turned into memes for me to easily and readily share.

First up: Atun’Shei Films. Dude is a history nerd and former tour guide who makes videos about the Civil War, about American war history that isn’t just the civil war, about the history of places that are often obscured because of the simplified language of the civil war, about Nazi ideology informing our views of history and also makes fun fictionalised public performance things like going to Mardis Gras roleplaying a witchfinder general. He’s a real nerd’s nerd. Oh, and a fun video about cannibalism.

In this video, after the break from the kayfabe, he lays out a simple, excellent phrase that I feel does an great job of breaking the mind from a need it had to justify a connection to our figures from history:

These old dead racists are not your friends.

There is a need, a yearning, to put ourselves in a connected thread to our histories. There is a want to see people whose lives led to our lives, who were related to us, to be humanised to be people, but people as we can handle them. And when you remember that no, old dead people are old and dead and not your friends, you can more easily handle the fact that yeah, they were pretty abhorrent.

The other person who did something in this vein is Quinton, of Quinton Reviews:

Now, as a non-American, the hagiography of American foundationalism is just… odious as hell to me. It’s basically one country jerking itself off about how its founding was a unique and interesting story when it was, largely, just a rearrangement of the fancy chairs at the big tables. Still, Americans, largely, love Hamilton and they love the mythology of Hamilton and they love the idea of there being, again, a connection to that meaningful legacy of people borne by high ideals and not just the latest upper class ponces.

The crystalliser in this one was: I wonder what Alexander Hamilton would say, if he could see this, and all I can think is that he’d say something extremely racist.

It’s a bit, it’s a gag, it’s a punchline for a paragraph, but it is also extremely interesting when you’re thinking about the narrative we tell ourselves about these characters. It helps you shake the brain a little, and remember that these people lived and breathed and ate and they were okay with the racists in their midst. If you met an actual slave owner and you had the right to shoot them if you felt offended by their presence, wouldn’t you? Or would you just be okay with them and just hope they never brought it up at your mutual fancy dinners?

Both Atun’Shei and Quinton are working on building subscriber counts. So hey, go check them out. I like their work.

EDIT: There are four times in this post that I used Quinton’s name, and somehow I did not notice when I originally posted this that literally none of them were spelled correctly.

Look, I’m going to tell you up front a harsh truth: Your Australian accent sucks.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a chance you’re an Australian and you’re reading this, okay, you know I don’t mean you. I mean, my Australian accent sucks, but that’s a weird cult artifact. Point is, for the majority of my audience, that think they do an ‘Australian accent,’ no, you don’t, and your attempts to do so don’t sound like an Australian accent. I can be very confident about this, statistically.

It means when you do hear an Australian accent in other sources, it often stands out. Now, you might know already that Brady Haran, who I will always know by his Google Name that I use to find that surname, “Brady Numberphile” is Australian, but most of his work in his establishing days was being done up in Nottingham University and surrounds. That meant chemistry work and physics works with an array of United Kingdom accents, and of course, people who came to Nottingham to study.

And then, I saw that he did videos with Simon Pampena.

Now look, I don’t know Simon. Not personally. It’s a big island, we haven’t bumped into each other. He’s an Australian Mathematics Ambassador. It is literally his job to make media that gets people interested in mathematics, to see how numbers and systems relate to one another, and… I just really like his work? There’s a range of stuff he does, podcasts and presentations and TV shows and whatnot, and like…

This is just something I find really fun. Interesting stories about events in mathematics (like the Legend of Question Six, presented here) and ways that straight lines can slowly be transformed into circles and ways that primes and sets can be manipulated around one another. He does stuff with Brady Google The Surname Again over on Numberphile, he does long form explainers, and he’s really interesting.

Plus, you probably won’t hear an accent like his very often.

In a year that’s been full of not a lot happening, I have been spending time making sure I contact people, share my time with them, and just generally reassure them that they’re doing okay, even if they’re not doing a lot. This means a lot more small conversations.

Freyja did help inspire one of my shirts this year, but a lot of this year has mostly been small conversations before I go to bed and just before she does, two people effectively on opposite sides of the world sharing a few minutes of a shift. Freyja’s working on her projects, I on mine, and we both do a lot of our work in public. That can be interesting and sometimes it means we both look at the other’s work, shrug, and go ‘eh, not for me, but whatever.’ Freyja’s always just been good to talk to all year.

Also, her audience are really engaged? If she shares a link, it gets clicked.

Continue Reading →

This is her twitter avatar as of… like… when I wrote this. If she’s changed it, well, now you can date this blog post like a fuckin’ coin in a coal mine.

Anyway, hey, Nixie. Nixie is my friend. Nixie is also one of those many folk who I think of as ‘unqualified experts,’ on two major fields, with a lot of related knowledge in other, connected fields. Like a girl who knows firearms and watch repair probably knows a thing or two about lockpicking, or at least, knows who to ask. The areas of expertise I talk to Nixie about are planes and guns, with an occasional consult about elegant gothic lolita fashion, because if you haven’t been around my friends, this is an extremely normal overlapping set of interests.

Nixie is…

Nixie is hard to promote.

It’s hard to promote her because she has all these fascinating interests and these great ideas and these cool projects, but, due to Life and Brains and How They Interact, they’re not like, stored up in a great big blog spot where you can just jam there, or a youtube channel. Instead, I have a huge fragmented pile of conversations and a patreon (that I do currently pay into), but I can’t exactly do much more beyond point you at her twitter.

Nixie, this year, has been bounced around through a lot of rough stuff – both happening to her directly, and happening to her friends and partners around her. It’s not ‘private,’ in that she’s spoken about it in public, but I don’t mean to go over this in a big public way.

Nixie is a wonderful, thoughtful, interesting person, someone who I can talk to about a lot of topics that I don’t normally have a handle on, and she recommended to me the excellent Ai: The Somnium Files. Plus, she understands the way anxiety affects the brain, and how important it is that we hang together, you know?

I think Nixie is great, and while she hasn’t made a ton of content this year that you can easily grasp, the stuff she’s making, physical props and extensive threads on ideas like the importance of empire or the way guns actually work, are valuable reading in atypical forms. Sometimes the only way you can tell someone you love them and you’re proud of them these days is to make it really obvious in a third person kinda way.

She’s also a very good writer. Just to explicate that.

Get a load of this Ettin guy!

Ettin has had a weird year, from what I can say observing him at a distance, through a telescope and several layers of masking and that’s before we got the pandemic going.

Ettin is a creator who hovers in this really weird space for me in that we can both recognise that we are immense dorks, but somehow I’m always left wondering if I’m his boring uncool friend. Like he’s successful on a level I’ve never dreamt of, yet he comes to talk to me sometimes.

Ettin spent most of this year doing what he could, under lockdown, obviously. There’s been a lot of weird stuff going on, and that means that some projects, like Hard Wired Island kickstarted last year, have been getting done and worked on, as best they can when there’s a literal actual global pandemic.

There was also some legal stuff this year? But it was the kind of legal stuff where you go: Oh, what a fucksmith. So some fucksmith sued Ettin and that led to Ettin doing something weird. Don’t know what to say about that. Moving on.

Ettin is someone I’m still very proud to know and proud to help when I can. The entire project, the idea of the project, has had this sort of delightful ridiculousness where he can use his ongoing project as a reason to make fun of people who are getting paid much more than him to deliver a project with a weaker soul.

I talked about him last year, but I felt like it deserved mentioning this year that Ettin’s pretty cool. Not because he’s doing something amazing or revolutionary or even something I want. I just appreciate the kind of person Ettin wants to be and the things he wants to stop doing as he works on making his projects as excellent as he can.

So, Ettin? Ettin’s still a cool bean.

Okay, look, not everything I’m going to bring up is going to be something deeply enrichening or uplifting. It’s not all about necessarily learning an extra language or promoting artists of colour in a marginalised field. Sometimes, what you want is some brain-off youtube content that you can tune in and tune out of, and that does something to remind you of stuff you like, without necessarily demanding you put that thing straight in the forefront of your attention.

And to that, I offer the work of one Certifiably Ingame, who, unfortunate name aside, seems to be one of those wonderful nerds who wants to talk about science fiction a lot but is doing it with a pause and mute button on hand.

The work presented by the channel has a bunch of different types of feature. If you want something to mull over after watching some new Trek but don’t want to like, go to reddit or anything like that, Rick’s channel produces a bunch of stuff about the shows, but it’s all done through a fairly affable ‘I liked this’ or ‘I didn’t like this’ lens. Despite being a channel about overwhelming attention to detail on Trek Lore – and there are playlists of this stuff – the channel is very firmly in the ‘it is a story told by people for money, and things change’ camp. 

I find that sometimes there’s something very comforting about these lists that remind me of things, and it’s a really good way to approach an enormous continuity that’s mostly available on streaming services. The episodic nature of Trek means that if I want to go look for ‘the good episodes’ of a thing, there’s just an enormous list of readings that people want me to do. But if instead, I, say, put on a listicle of ‘ten big creatures in Star Trek’ and I get two episodes from Voyager, one from TNG, one from TOS and so on, that’s an interesting linked list to kick off a bit of a watch.

I dunno, it mixes stuff I know and remember with stuff I don’t yet, and I think that’s pretty cool. It’s certainly more approachable an a holistic, top-down approach when it comes to Trek lore.

2020 was the year of the archive binge for me. It meant looking into spaces where I’d considered checking something out, and not really delved and see what worked out for me.

Youtube archives are always awkward because now the site is so old and channels are similarly vintage, you can run into channels where, at start six or seven years ago, the people who made content for them may have been shitlordy.

Fortunately, in this case, Overly Sarcastic Productions aren’t shitlordy; five years ago, they were just less-elegant in their generally good attitudes about, like, people. Mythology is a fraught space full of conservative takes and tangled up visions of how we record history, and uh, so is history, so a channel full of those things where they’re happy to mention how rapey and creepy things were in the past without dwelling on it is appreciated.

They’ve been at it for a long time and I love the animatic style of simple, personality-driven, wonderful art, and also Blue is there.

Go check it out. Particularly I like their Dionysus explainer:

Which feels like a blueprint for the kind of ‘innocuous-seeming, deeply terrifying’ characters I love to play and read about.

We live our lives surrounded by stuff. It’s something of a rule that you don’t understand how the stuff that surrounds you works. That’s okay, you don’t have to be into it, you don’t have to want to, but there are interesting side effects of this.

There’s this idea that capitalism engenders innovation. That a lot of different people competing for attention will try different ways to earn our attention, and that effort results in a greater variety of quality products at the lowest, competitive price. Good ideas become expected parts of standards and over times, the markets form an idealised optimal vision of the best products possible. Always forward, always advancing ideas better and better.

This is, of course, fantastically stupid, because it clearly doesn’t. Advertising mostly hammers on the same four or five ideas and is done by companies that are rolling the dice endlessly, and when they roll double sixes, proudly proclaim that that was what they meant to do.

Capitalism doesn’t give us better products. We know that because all the best versions of products seem to have been made, then their great ideas were ignored and discarded, because greater profit could be extracted from them being worse. One great way to learn about this story, about the ways that toasters, microwaves, rice cookers and headlights work, and were made better than we can buy now, and those improvements were discarded.

Technology we live with is made by people and those people make choices. Understand them and understand what they think of you. This channel, Technology Connections is a lot of gentle, very positive, mildly-funny in that exhale-through-the-nose huh-never-thought-of-it funny way, but never gutbusters, presents an educational vision of things that get made.

What I’m saying is that you should let your microwave radicalise you.

This year, lots of stuff didn’t get finished.

It’s okay.

There’s a way to frame this post, a sort of meanspirited ‘hey, my friend wrote a whole book under lockdown, what did you do with your time,’ but that’s not really helpful, nor is it interesting, nor is it reasonable. We have all worked at our own rate, with our own complex relationships to pressure and isolation.

but,

One of my friends finished a book.

Now, Nothing But The Blood is basically a story about ‘what if the people who think they’re Jesus’ biggest fans and the defense against the devil met the actual devil?’ If you’re looking for something to read, you can totally do that, and should go check it out over on the author’s tumblr.