favorite youtube video essays? bonus points for niche deep dives and pop culture commentary… i want to learn about random things

Question

Dylan · Answer

Anna Howard: Wild Geese: one of my fave youtube channels. podcasts you watch. i love her visual accompaniments and expert use of tumblr references and niche memes. very smart, very interesting, very much my current vibe. research as a leisure activity core.

Dylan · Answer

Shannon Kim - YouTube: this diva is SMART as hell

kim · Answer

Why Medieval People (Probably) Had Autism: i give this video 10 levitating franciscan monks out of 10

Ari Boyer · Answer

How Did The World Get So Ugly? (Sheehan Quirke): Fascinating and beautifully shot and deeply resonates if you long for beauty in the world aka if you’re a human being.

Steve M · Answer

What Happened to the World's Largest Tube TV?: An interesting deep dive into perhaps the world’s only surviving example of the largest CRT ever made.

clownmommy · Answer

The Devastating Cost of America's Favorite Plant: we live in an anti-lawn household and this video made our stance even stronger. fuck grass!!! it’s beautifully shot and edited as a bonus to the great research and data. inspired my husband especially to continue his mission of prioritizing native plants in our front garden!

jmd · Answer

The Movie Rabbit Hole YouTube channel: Professional visual effects artist Jonas Ussing launched his terrific “No CGI” Is Really Just Invisible CGI series a couple years ago to explain how CGI is incorporated into moviemaking and, in particular, to debunk marketing that revolves around claims that such-and-such movie “didn’t use CGI” even when it did. He doesn’t post new videos all that often (there are only seven total over the past two years), but when he does, it’s always great, and over the weekend he dropped an hour-plus look at CGI in Christopher Nolan’s filmography. And CGI-specific stuff aside, it’s also just really cool to get a glimpse into how shots are planned and constructed out of a mix of all sorts of different techniques.

jmd · Answer

The Lorem Ipsum Mystery, by Emily Zhang: A 25-minute YouTube video in which Emily Zhang shows off some incredible research chops and tracks down the origins of lorem ipsum.

jmd · Answer

The History of Tetris World Records, by Summoning Salt: You might've heard the news a couple years ago that a kid finally beat Tetris. The story of the world records leading up to that, the development of the controller techniques that the top players use, the bizarre ways that the game starts to degrade when you get into the really high levels, and the very specific circumstances that cause the game to crash at the end so that it's possible to "win" turn out to be fascinating.

The video is feature-length (almost two hours long!), but after I watched this awhile ago, I put it on the TV so my kids could watch it because I thought they'd find it interesting, and then I ended up just sitting down with them and watching the entire thing a second time. It's that good.

(He also has another very good video about the quest to beat Mike Tyson at the end of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out as fast as possible, which involves incredible frame-by-frame precision and is also full of fascinating details about how the game, and the mechanics of that fight in particular, actually works.)

Eric F · Answer

Eddy Burback: I Ate at Every Rainforest Cafe 🦍: A wild place to shop and eat.