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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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