Tag: youtube

My Mini-YouTube Movies Arc

TiberiusLeave a comment

Still ongoing, still finding new films to view

Although I’m as much a piracy advocate as Gol D. Roger, it’s not like the legacy services don’t occasionally give us something worth viewing. The way I got into watching movies primarily on YouTube (before looking elsewhere if what I wanted wasn’t available) began with that time I started to binge all the Terminator movies in rapid succession, next to a viewing of Saving Private Ryan.

For Saving Private Ryan, I recall in middle and high school how whenever the history classes progressed to World War II and eventually to the Allied Landings, they almost always showed the Normandy landings and it became something of a tradition to show the brutality of battle from the Omaha landings, the deadliest landing of just that day. But if you’re American, you’re history lessons probably stopped short of the fall of the wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Out of curiosity, I went to look up the entire movie and someone was ballsy enough to have it fully uploaded onto YouTube at the time, before there were ads and before YouTube started to turn to s[pop!]t.

And as regular viewers would know, this was the same setup for at least the first Terminator movie. The original channel I watched it on a decade ago is most certainly deleted (and I highly doubt I can look up my YouTube history from ten years ago), but even to this day dastardly (read: heroic) YouTube channels with only about 20 people in their audience are uploading the full movie, risks notwithstanding. Like this channel:

Channel: INDY CAT PLAY

The graphic content will of course lock the movie to YouTube, but this is an acceptable sacrifice.

After that, it was down to looking for multiple different movies on multiple different pirate and torrenting sites. Gangster Squad, the 300 movies, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, and several more. It was an occasional thing to do prior to community college and during the summer of 2017, it started to ramp up alongside that time I checked up on the Naruto series to discover that Boruto was a thing.

Maybe it’s because I took a break from Naruto that I grew to appreciate the successor series as well. But criticism still exists.

In between choosing my courses, I was on the hunt for new movies to watch, and prior to this, I had expressed an interest in military service by the end of high school. Unfortunately, I was 17 when I graduated and wasn’t able to convince my mom that even part-time service had its merits. “Try college first,” everyone said. You know how the classroom setting doesn’t mesh with everyone? That’s me. Learning by myself was always better than learning in a classroom setting, and there was always a pressure to get the highest scores. My average was usually a B- to B, tops. Except for Art, English and Foreign Languages which got me consistent A’s. The push for A’s across the board led me to lightly defy those expectations due to how Icarian and hubristic it felt. Also, every smart kid was a know-it-all with an attitude.

So I went from slightly above average high schooler to slightly below average college student. Seriously, my GPA took a hit due to my piss poor math scores. But away from that, a section of my free time was devoted to movies with a military slant, as a means to hype myself up. I was still determined to join the Army, and if I’m being honest, I probably wouldn’t have had that break in service from 2021 to ’24 if I had kept it a bit more realistic.

As for the movies I was looking for, there was never a single one-size-fits-all website for me to watch them all on, and as you’d expect, popup ads. Popup ads everywhere. But I was able to fight through the mess and make some pretty neat discoveries. The one website that I was able to watch my movies on was called MegaShare. I’m going off memory alone, but as I recall, the site had its server in Vietnam and momentarily went under in late 2020. A Google search during this draft reveals that as of writing this it’s still up and still functional, with TV series included in its lineup.

Watching anything on this site is a bit tricky without a VPN so good luck streaming Paddington 2 or Jigsaw for instance. These days, the majority of the content that I don’t always pirate comes from my subscriptions to Crunchyroll, Netflix, and Tubi, and for free viewing, there’s YouTube Movies and the Internet Archive, God’s gift to the internet.

Which brings me to the arc of YouTube movies made free with ads in between. It started in early June 2020. In the aftermath of the George Floyd riots, movies promoting primarily black casts and stories were made free with ads, and one of them was the saga of Philly detective Virgil Tibbs:

Filmed in 1967, starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, this movie was about a murder of an influential man in tiny Sparta, Mississippi. The racist police department not only suspects this out-of-town Yankee Negro of doing the deed, they point a gun at him while taking him in. However, when Det. Tibbs reveals that he’s also a cop, his superiors assign him to this murder case and his expertise wins over both the police, the victim’s next of kin, and even select townsfolk. A great movie that to those who’re old enough may have a few things to say about how segregation worked at the time, though probably a smaller net would need to be cast for on-duty cops from back then. My grandmother certainly has some surviving memories of Virginia. Not as far south, but still influenced by the Jim Crow laws.

Afterward, there was a blank period where I didn’t watch that many movies, until the last half of 2022. In the Army, if you can’t continue on in basic training, you’d still be allowed to graduate just at a later date. They’ll recycle you into another company either at the beginning or slightly behind depending on certain factors. I was getting tired of medical issues f[clank!]ing me over and I called it quits… which I was regretting. Playing the waiting game for the entirety of 2022 gave me a lot of time to kill as I couldn’t get a job. Eagerly awaiting the initial rejection, I just watched a handful of movies, two of which that stood out were The Mask and Tombstone. Fast-forward to the last quarter of 2023, where my second attempt at joining the Army bore fruit. Much of my time was divided between watching Lucky Star and Azumanga Daioh on YouTube through unlisted playlists and playing CoD: MW 2019 and House Flipper. This was also after my grandmother moved out to an elder’s home in Baltimore, so for the first time in my life I had my own room… at 24 years old…

The recruiter I was talking with through Reddit (true story) told me that my waiver had been approved and I was set for training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri the following January. With that out of the way, I watched as many of the movies as YouTube would make available. The list of movies I’ve seen is extensive, so instead I’ll grab three of the movies that I recall watching on YouTube. Not necessarily before the second attempt at Army life, but just on YouTube Movies

1. Black Hawk Down

I was more than a little hyped up getting back into the Army, and one of the movies I watched was Black Hawk Down. The dramatic retelling of Delta Force’s worst day in Somalia in 1993. To gloss over some of the history, numerous factors helped contribute to the breakdown of the Somali government and instability in the leadership thanks in no small part to colonialism and the clan system. By the early 1990s, the Somali government hit the road indefinitely and numerous warlords rose up dousing the flames with gasoline. One of them, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, had been antagonizing UN Peacekeepers from Pakistan, and President Bill Clinton authorized military action to take him out. The tip of the spear had no idea what they were fighting, a trend that would curse the U.S. military, starting arguably in Vietnam, but continuing on after Somalia.

Channel: Armchair Historian

This video explains it in further detail.

A Black Hawk helicopter was blasted out of the sky and the new mission was to find the soldiers and get them out intact. Easier said than done, when the population of Mogadishu, radicalized and armed with small arms and machetes comes barreling down on your position. Delta lost two of their operators, Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart, and it became a race to get the f[gunshot]k out of Mogadishu without losing anymore people. Mission failed. We won’t get them next time. Somalia is a failed state, yadda yadda…

I’ve talked about this last year, but that was to observe different military practices that are still in use today. For content, 90% of the movie is obviously focused on events from that fateful day, with 10% dedicated to the history and politics of the event. Completely historically accurate? Well, this website fills in the gaps that were scrubbed from the movie for brevity’s sake, but it’s not like there was a fictional account of a flying Pegasus so to that I’d say it’s 95% accurate.

2. Tropic Thunder

This one I hadn’t seen since I was a kid, and its content shows that, on the one hand, it’s best when things age to show the difference between the culture of media then and now, but on the other hand, biting satire like this is sorely missed in this day and age, especially with social media companies making idiot moves in recent history. Cancel culture anyone?

The premise of this comedic masterpiece is that four actors are joined together to adapt a novel of a Vietnam war movie and the production goes awry at every turn. Not because they can’t get film rights, but because of on-set clashes between not just the actors, but also the producers. The studio decides to throw them into Indochina and film them with hidden cameras, failing to realize that they were dropped into the Golden Triangle, a region swaddling Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar where much of the world’s opium is cultivated, typically under the thumb of the nastiest gangs in Asia, to include Triad groups.

Of course, the actors find themselves somewhat held hostage by these guys and the movie turns into an impromptu rescue mission that harkens back to the Project 100,000 policy during the Vietnam War. As for the directors, they have a very clouded “show must go on” mentality and fail to realize who has their stars hostage.

The comedy comes from all the politically incorrect writing and satire. This movie pulls zero punches in taking the piss out of everything. Hollywood’s controversial casting choices, the portrayal of disabled characters by able-bodied actors, the drug use among the Hollywood elites, the draconian control of select studio execs, directors, and other production staff; in an alternate universe, Tropic Thunder would’ve been a documentary. I’ve made jokes elsewhere online that comedy is prophetic and I’ve been seeing it less as a joke and more as the truth these days. No matter your beliefs on a variety of topics, I can’t encourage you to watch this enough. If you’ve seen it before, like I have, give it another watch.

3. No Country for Old Men

Based on the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, in 1980, West Texas hunter, Llewelyn Moss stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong and takes the money for himself and his wife. Knowing an agent of chaos is after him, he goes through numerous lengths to avoid this amoral hitman, all while an aging sheriff tries to reach him before cartel bullets do.

This movie is called by some the pinnacle of the western genre brought to the modern age. Changing world, untamed land, conflict between nature, society, and mankind; I can think of different media that fit this mold.

No Country requires an elevated level of thinking. It gets a lot of flak from some for the way it ends, which I attribute to a misunderstanding of the western genre. Moss may have been the protagonist, but he’s not necessarily a good guy. His adversary, Anton Chigurh, is both an antagonist and a bad guy and the sheriff Bell is honestly at a loss. When the camera pans to him, he feels like he’s useless and out of his element. Things made sense ages ago, but that age is no more and there’s not much he feels he can do. Moss and Chigurh move at a comparably breakneck pace in their search for the money. Most analyses of the movie are about Chigurh, but not a lot mention Sheriff Bell at all. The movie introduces his character several minutes in, but he has the first and last lines in the movie. I don’t have the analytical expertise to talk about Bell’s place in the movie or the novel (which I haven’t read), but I say he deserves some exposure himself.

YouTube movies can expose you to some films you didn’t know you would like and with a healthy library to show for it, you could easily get lost looking for something to see. No, really, it’s a labyrinth, bring a map… and maybe something to distract the minotaur. For a fourth surprise recommendation to complement the three here, have this:

No staff members were sacked in the production of this classic.

My Brief Experience with Stop-Motion

TiberiusLeave a comment

One of the tougher things I’ve tried

We’re down to the wire with a new year on the horizon and I’ve kept this blog strictly professional with personal information kept to a minimum. But for today, we’re venturing back into the vault to show another side to myself, one that I wouldn’t mind revisiting with new information and knowledge. There used to be a time in my childhood when I consumed a giant swathe of brickfilms.

I’ve explained this before, but for a quick refresher, a brickfilm is a stop-motion animation where the primary pieces to be animated are Lego bricks, the animator moving the pieces individually between each picture taken to give the illusion of motion. It’s like traditional hand-drawn animation but typically uses less writing or drawing utensils, though depending on the props used in the animation, can drill holes into your wallet.

Many of the brickfilms I’d watched at the time came from numerous channels, some of which are now practically defunct, and many of them venture on the slapstick side of things. Others involve action set pieces similar to what could be found in The Lego Movie series. It’s been dog’s years since I’ve seen some of them, but I’d like to share one of my all time favorites from this era.

Channel: Keshen8

Stop-motion itself has a storied history. If you’ve ever seen some of the old 1950s or 60s swords and sandals epics, you probably saw how janky and wild the mythical creatures may have looked. The process involved an interlacing of two different styles of film to make into one, something we did even when 3D movies were all the rage; put the live-action footage with the 3D animation and keep animating in a way that objects looked like they’d fly at the audience.

On YouTube specifically, it’s hard to trace when it started to gain popularity on the platform, but as I’ve stated in another post it began with Lego themselves in the 1960s as part of a TV advert, but later gained fame online when Keshen8 uploaded Lindsay Fleay’s The Magic Portal to YouTube in 2008. Filmed over the course of four years when Fleay was in college between 1985 and 1989, the project incorporated Lego bricks but didn’t necessarily limit itself to just that. The video can also be found on Keshen8’s channel.

Channel: Keshen8

Interestingly, the film was showed by Fleay himself to the leadership at Lego. Personally, they were delighted, but the tried to monopolize it by issuing a cease and desist. Thankfully they have since softened their stance on the matter and it has inspired burgeoning and amateur animators, myself included, to try their hand at a craft that isn’t as devil may care as it looks.

Yahtzee Croshaw said it best in his review of Saint’s Row 4: it takes a lot of care to make [something] look completely care-free. I don’t know about you but the processing that comes with animation in general was mostly lost on me as a viewer because when a cartoon goes to air, it’s the fruits of the combined efforts of a studio’s labor that I’m seeing. Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network do take their viewers under the hood to see how the sausage is made, but not always. When you begin to animate yourself, you start to realize how involved the process is.

For the sake of just this topic, I’ll go into what made me think I too can do this. Some of the channels I’d been watching were making back-to-back stop-motion videos, again of a comedic, slapstick style. Other times of an action set piece or even of a dramatic reenactment of a film or even a love letter to popular film genres. In some cases, channels like LCM Brick Show used the building toys to make historical documentaries covering war and geopolitical topics (revolutions, world wars, empires rising and falling, etc.).

Some of the channels I’d watched were various different love letters to established film and TV genres or tropes, and my earliest stop-motion was cut from a similar stock. I began filming it on a stick camera I got as a gift for my birthday as I recall. Playing around with that plus another camera I had was pretty cool, but they weren’t practical for what I planned on using them for. Then again, this was my first time using a camera and while digital cameras were available and smartphone cameras were getting near-professional, what we had in 2011 wasn’t up to snuff compared to what’s in your pocket right now.

By the way, this model of Droid was one of my first ever phones in 2013.

Someone with more experience than me can probably explain that it was possible to do it at the time, but keep in my mind, my knowledge of filming techniques was limited and it would be a while before I learned that just because a thing is done a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it: a mantra repeated by any speedrunner.

Fortunately, part of the filming equipment I got included a tripod for me to set up with extendable legs. As for educating myself on brickfilming, there were video tutorials breaking them down from frame rate to filming technique to snafus that could trip up amateur animators. Either way, it wasn’t as easy as it looked or sounded. One of the hurdles I faced was the camera quality. Not the picture, but the camera itself. The pictures were taken over the course of just a night, but stretched out over at least five or six hours as I recall and that was because it conked out and needed to recharge for three hours.

I probably could’ve planned it out a bit better, but it was the equivalent of a rough draft for me that night. Experiment with some ideas before getting down to business. Once the camera was done charging and the animating continued, another hurdle I realized quite late was editing, specifically sound effects. Loads of stock sounds exist on the internet but aren’t exactly cheap. As for producing the sounds yourself, I admire that approach as a cost-effective measure, but some tools necessary to make these sounds weren’t always available, especially to a 13-year-old back then.

Voices and dialogue on the other hand was easier to come by and still is. At the time, and to this day, the free program Audacity has been many creators’ go-to method for voice recording and sound design due to its ease of access. With some time spent learning to script and write dialogue, anyone can do it, but only a few turn it into a profession.

Funny enough, the editing software I had, Adobe Premiere Elements 11, wasn’t all that hard to learn. If I had a budget of some kind, and could afford to license the sound effects I could see how it could be done: let the footage run, install the downloaded sound effects into the editor, input some special effects where applicable, and voila! A brickfilm is ready to be published.

That said, this much involvement necessitated tips and tricks that I wouldn’t have been able to find through means at my own disposal. So by the time I got to brickfilming as a hobby on YouTube, I was making do with the first few videos being filmed on a camera that evidently couldn’t be trusted to stay still.

I launched my channel in June 2012 under the name “legoworksstudios1.” The vision I had was to make many brickfilms for years to come, improve, and join the ranks of some of the channels I looked up to at the time. About a month or two later into the existence of the channel, I had switched from using a push-button stick camera to using a stationary webcam. A Logitech C310.

Personally, this is better used for making Skype calls to relatives or have a long-distance relationship. If you ever choose to do this yourself, I highly recommend getting a camera that allows you to control the focus feature. Auto-focus is not the way to go, especially for filming something as small as Lego bricks or even action figures. I did have the C525 which was remarkably better and in just about no time flat, my shaky animations became more stable and fluidic.

I filmed off and on until my last video around Christmas Eve 2012. I tried to think of something silly for New Year 2013, but nothing manifested and I had put the hobby to rest until recently. I still viewed brickfilms and whatnot over the years, but my taste in YouTube content shifted largely to video game Let’s Plays, live-action content, documentaries, clips taken from anime, and curiously enough full anime shows. I have no idea about the science behind it, but I know that some people have uploaded anime to YouTube by way of keeping them unlisted. They can’t be found through conventional means. If they’re still around past the New Year, then there may be a form of piracy that’s hiding in plain sight.

As for stop-motion animation, the film technique is still available and readily used. Sometime last year, one of the channels I follow up on periodically, Emirichu, had a recommendation for a video from the channel MOONSHINE ANIMATIONS. The video in question took audio files from a game played between its creator and real life friends, Emirichu, Daidus, and Moonshine’s girlfriend during gameplay of the horror video game Phasmophobia. It made use of Japanese-made action figures under the brands of Figma and S.H. Figuarts, though custom made to resemble the channels’ avatars/profile pictures.

Channel: MOONSHINE ANIMATIONS

This one video introduced or reintroduced me to several things. As a viewer of the show Robot Chicken, I already knew that stop-motion props weren’t limited to just Lego, but because of the reputation and budget behind an Adult Swim production, it didn’t dawn on me until I got this recommendation that any old schmoe can pick a camera and start animating. Seth Green did it with Cyborg Poultry, Trey Parker and Matt Stone did it with North Playground, and I did it when I was 13-turning-14 with my building block toys.

With the knowledge I have now about how involved and time consuming animations can get (recall that The Magic Portal took 4 years to produce on 16mm film), I want to say that I could pick up a camera and get back to animating again. How I’ll be able to achieve this, I can’t say yet, but it would be awesome to get back into the fold, be it with my Legos or some Figma figures. Shouldn’t be too hard since my channel is still up.

This week’s channel recommendation is the channel William Spaniel.

https://www.youtube.com/@Gametheory101/videos

An associate political science professor, Spaniel’s main specialty is game theory and geopolitical issues and conflicts. His videos as of recent have focused on modern conflicts and potential flashpoints, including but not limited to the international relations of China, the Russo-Ukrainian War post-escalation, the Israel-Hamas War and several others. And when I say he’s a professor, I’m being serious. He has a textbook available for purchase and teaches political science at the University of Pittsburgh, and is a University of Rochester alumni.

Even if political science or, as Prof. Spaniel would put it, “lines on maps” isn’t your forte, Spaniel’s content offers a lot of insight for many modern conflicts largely from the political side than the military side, so you can get a better grasp of what everyone wants when it comes to conflict. If this sounds interesting to you or you see yourself practicing political science in the future, you can’t go wrong with William Spaniel.

Update: (December 23, 2023)

It’s come to my attention that for the section mentioning brickfilming, I’d stumbled upon a series of videos documenting the animation style in a fittingly familiar manner, but hadn’t placed a link for those who’re interested. The playlist consists of videos published by the YouTube channels sillypenta and Bricks in Motion. They’ve both done hard work researching some of the earliest brickfilms in history, the evolution of the practice over the years and many other aspects of the style. Here’s the link to the playlist:

Channels: sillypenta, Bricks in Motion

The Escapist’s Dire Straits

Tiberius1 Comment

Bad luck for Escapist Magazine

I planned on making a post about this soon after the news came out, but I was waiting on more information relating to the news to come out. I was also busy with other real-world stuff, so if I’m able, this should be up either late Monday night or early Tuesday morning.

If you hadn’t heard yet, The Escapist’s video team resigned en masse following the firing of their editor-in-chief Nick Calandra. Nick’s firing was preceded by The Escapist’s parent company Gamurs placing impossible deadlines and goals for him and the team to meet and when he didn’t live up to those standards, he got the sack. Everyone, myself included, sees corporate avarice biting them in the ass with this since Nick oversaw a close-knit ship since most of his coworkers quit to join him for greener pastures. For more information on the situation from last week, see this video by YongYea:

Channel: YongYea

Gamurs bought the site in 2022 and seem to now be regretting their decision to axe Nick and by extension the entire video team. Some of The Escapist’s recent additions like Cold Take, Stuff of Legends, and other stuff is still available to view on the channel and seem to predate the The Escapist as told by some of the video team’s recently resigned members, but one of the major casualties out of this was the popular review series Zero Punctuation. Yahtzee explained in a stream last week that he was going to continue reviewing video games on his site, Fully Ramblomatic, which also predates ZP’s lineup in The Escapist, but whether The Escapist under Gamurs’ wing is gonna toss it for good or try something with the ZP license, I can’t say with certainty. All I know is what everyone knows about it in that Yahtzee couldn’t take ZP with him which is why he’s reviewing on Fully Ramblomatic. It might retain the Wednesday noon schedule as ZP but again it remains to be seen.

As for where it’s all going to go, the team relaunched and got back to business as usual by launching Second Wind.

https://twitter.com/nickjcal/status/1721947986735812769
Account: @nickjcal

This isn’t sponsored or anything. I’m making this to say that as a fan of ZP and of The Escapist’s other shows, like Jimquisition, the aforementioned, Stuff of Legends, Cold Take, 3 Minute Review, their livestreams, etc. that it’s terrible that the owners were so tunnel visioned that they’d axe a well-beloved member of the team, but looking at how well they bounced back into the fold on their own, I’m happy that they haven’t been too badly affected by the surprise changes.

Also, I’m putting this up as a YouTube recommendation. After the controversy earlier this year with Blair Zon of the iilluminaughtii, I expected another redacted recommendation to be controversy related or if the channel was mysteriously vanished. While I will keep my recommendation up for The Escapist until further notice, mainly as an archive, I’m also recommending Second Wind because the main video personalities have migrated their to continue their craft unimpeded.

https://www.youtube.com/@SecondWindGroup/featured

As it stands, the channel has yet to set everything up, but by December or even January, it should start looking like a proper YouTube channel so get ready for that.

How and Why I Recommend YouTube Channels

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Jumping from channel to channel

Since it’s a month that’s divisible by 2, and I’ve gotten into the habit of recommending interesting YouTube channels every other month, I figure I shed some light on how such a system came to be. In the last quarter of 2022, I had come across a channel called The4thSnake, dedicated mainly to video game lore, but most importantly the Mortal Kombat series. For the 20th anniversary of the release of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, the British YouTuber released a video that went into detail explaining every single nook and cranny hidden within the game, sort of like a visual love letter to the 3D era when for the most part, WB Games — who now holds the MK franchise — won’t or can’t re-release the 3D era games. Other videos like this of his heap praise on the old MK games while criticizing NetherRealm and wishing Ed Boon and the Mortal Kombat team in the modern day would do more or at least change some things from the established canon in the reboot series. Towards the end of these videos, The4thSnake would recommend a video that also talked about Mortal Kombat, but in different aspects, and not all of those channels or videos were very big. Sometimes these are small channels with a sub count only a few hundred strong.

Here’s the video in question:

The video is over 40 minutes, so grab some snacks and a drink.

Part of why I love this video so much is because it taps into what I remember most about this era of Mortal Kombat. The nostalgia of the PS2 and Xbox days were strong in these types of games. The hardware limitations of both at the time allowed for more creativity in some areas, but now that I think about it, it also meant more work which is why most entertainment has fallen back on algorithms and computers.

As for the recommendation itself, I like to take in information without their being an expectation that I have to recite what I learned. Miniature rant: presentations were what bugged me so much about school. From my own observations, YouTubers who make informational videos with extra content or information tend to leave a video card up in the description or a pinned comment in the comments section below. History YouTubers like Cynical Historian put in a bunch of information citing sources and such and corrections wherever applicable if there was an error that slipped by until the editing process.

Additionally, there’s a sort of unofficial collaborative effort in the recommendations. Unlike the system YouTube uses, which is a glorified time sink, YouTubers recommending other channels/videos slightly differs since the recommendation will relate to what the recommending YouTuber was talking about in said video. For instance, a historian recommending a mythology video for context behind a cult/religion in an ancient civilization makes sense at the outset, whereas a recommendation for something completely unrelated may rely mostly on the context.

The way I’ve done it doesn’t necessarily relate to entertainment as this blog does, or rather the channels I recommend are people I subbed to or I just like to watch even occasionally. It’s also one of the ways you can tap into what I like at the moment, though the last three words in that phrase are the most important. I’ve been on YouTube since at least 2009, back when entertainment boiled down to trolling the viewer by way of putting a jump scare over stock footage of a sedan driving down a winding highway. I didn’t officially start on YouTube until June 2012 and the videos I watched and at times made were all Lego stop-motion films or brickfilms. A term coined in 1989 by the independently filmed and produced short-film The Magic Portal by Australian filmmaker Lindsay Fleay, presented below:

Production on this film began in 1985 and despite being completed in four years, it clocked in at over 16 minutes long. Over the years, brickfilms have surpassed that video length and have taken considerably less time to film and edit, bar a few individual cases of technical difficulties. At the time, I collected Lego sets and I even dabbled in brickfilming myself. From the outside looking in, the illusion of making inanimate objects walk was amazing, and easier to absorb as a concept for me than hand-drawn animation. However, when I did it myself as a 13-14-year-old I discovered several problems that can make the process a nightmare.

As noted above, the process is very time-consuming. There are methods to make sure continuity in animation is consistent with each passing frame, like the onion-skinning method, though some errors still slip through the cracks and can be noticed in the final product. Unless you’re an editing master, you’ll have to redo a scene or even the entire animation. Over time, my interests evolved. With YouTube channels like pantsahat or Moonshine Animations expanding to action figures, Figma, and S.H. Figuarts, new limits have been achieved, though in that small circle I was briefly involved in, it was limited to Lego and only Lego. That community had no love for Duplo or Mega Bloks and likely still doesn’t. Mega Bloks to us were Tiger Electronic handhelds for video games; a cheap imitation ripping off what’s popular without understanding the why.

Ever since, I’d come to watch and even subscribe to YouTubers who covered a variety of different topics, though staying within the same entertainment umbrella. Video games, TV shows, movies, comics to a lesser extent, and by 2017 around the same time I was in college, anime and manga, which I had gradually come back into since. Of course, there was Toonami, but it was around this time that I realized backdoor shenanigans were largely responsible for why some TV shows aired episodes either out of order or simply stopped without warning. So imagine how let down I was when Toonami ended in 2008, or when Nicktoons put Invader Zim or The Legend of Korra in the dead zone of TV, or when Disney XD just stopped airing the dubbed episodes of Naruto: Shippuden in 2009. Fitting something into your schedule and then having it disappear from beneath you is the one surprise I never wanted to face. And on that note, I really feel for the current iteration of Toonami being unable to air the second season of Mob Psycho 100.

I also don’t think I’m alone on that front. A variety of studies have since come out to announce that cable TV has fallen out of favor with YouTube largely replacing it over the years. What started as a video-sharing sight in 2005 has grown into a huge network that after 18 years has begun to inherit the problems that were already there with cable television. Think about it: ads (skippable or not), sponsors, individual channels, verification systems, a form of monetary support for the channel in question, a ratings system; YouTube is pretty much television made for a modern audience. And they also seem to agree with the introduction of Original shows, Premium, and TV, three systems I don’t see myself supporting because I don’t even have that kind of money to spend on entertainment.

Having said that, most YouTubers appreciate support even if the most you’re capable of giving is viewership, likes, and subscriptions, all of which are for free. The same thing goes for sharing and linking videos across the web. Since I use reddit regularly, these links are all over comment threads on the site, typically as memes and reference humor but also for some interesting finds. Holding for a phone call may have cost us our time and caused us grief waiting for an operator to connect us to a business, but of all the choices for generic hold music, Tim Carleton’s Opus No. 1, when you actually listen to it uninterrupted, is a solid soundtrack. Personally, I’d choose it over elevator music.

All things considered, my bimonthly recommendations might as well be a share button in a fancy suit, and so far only once have I had to retract one due to backdoor misconduct. A single slip up can sully a YouTuber’s reputation and the platform will deem it necessary to write an entirely new set of guidelines to keep every content creator from making an already bad image even worse, sometimes at the cost of content.

PewDiePie dropping a slur by accident or Logan Paul filming a suicide victim in Japan are two examples of recklessness leading to a near-total disaster, but if I have to throw them a bone, they’ve at least learned from their mistakes to be more careful if there’s ever a next time. Regarding the redacted recommendation, Blair Zon of iilluminaughtii fame has garnered slight after slight and the more information that gets out the worse she looks. When I retracted the recommendation back in April in favor of two others who were slated for later dates, the initial controversy was in its infancy. Looking at video essays now, some of which clock in at over two-and-a-half hours, it’s gotten much worse. And the self-awareness is in another castle. The view may be excellent from a glass house, but if you want to keep it that way, don’t throw stones.

Then again, stuff like this is hard to predict. Even if you do pay attention, the signs of trouble can be very hard to see, from a distance or even up close. Which brings back awful memories of when Rooster Teeth booted one of theirs a few years ago for grooming allegations. For what it’s worth, my recommendations don’t have to be adhered to very strongly. They’re there for those who are interested or who want to know more about XYZ. I have no way of knowing how helpful they are, but as I wrote above I like to think of the recommendations on this blog as a share button in a set of new clothes.

And for this week’s recommendation, the YouTube channel The Professional.

https://www.youtube.com/@theprofessional155/about

The Professional is a gaming and current events channel that focuses primarily on action and stealth games. His chief areas of focus are the GTA and Red Dead series, but also Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Hitman, and several others. Additionally, there are lore and explanation videos on individual topics and subjects around the games played and occasionally current events, some of which may have crossed your news radar in recent memory. I recommend this channel for the games and the information about the games in question.