Ask Lemmy

I am not normally a fan of long form videos unless I'm in the mood for it, but Philosophy Tube is my go to. Thanks to her, she (he before she transitioned) actually taught me what liberal really means, socially progressive but economically conservative.

Technology Connections

Well There's Your Problem - Engineering disaster podcast, with slides! And the hosts vary from left, to very left.

JunkyardDigs/PoleBarnGarage - Two separate channels. Love them both for just fucking around with old cars/farm equipment/vintage snowmobiles

Well ... My go-to is still Hbomberguy. Eben if I don't know/care about the topic I know every vid of bis will be interesting and worth the time investment. The jokes are really funny (even on rewatches) and I've learned a lot. I watch old Hbomb videos to Fall asleep to almost every night.

Main issue: there's one video every 1-2 years ... However if you've never seen one you'll have the back log to get through.

Science and futurism with Isaac Arthur.

Bobby Fingers

Clay sculpting with humorous narration.

Watch 30 seconds to get the feel. One of the best.

Jenny Nickelson does.. nerd stuff? Highlights include:

"Church cinimatic universe" where she becomes a sommelier of art and walks you through a decade or so of some church in Canada's Easter plays, which are delightfully technical and imaginative while also being a beautiful form of cringe.

And a 4+ hour documentary/review/commentary on her visit to the short lived "star wars hotel"

I'm not big into star wars or Disneyworld/land wherever it was, but I watched that whole thing.

Potholer54, does very good scientific debunking videos

PBS spacetime, physics that you'll understand for 60% yet it keeps being super interesting

Thunderf00t, does good debunking videos. Has a bit of an attitude but so far always is right on piint. already has been bashing musk since a decade ago

How long-form?

I absolutely love “More Kitboga”, videos where a fella calls scammers and uses a Roland VT3-3 voice transformer to improv. Video lengths range from a few hours to… I believe his record fucking with the same call center (like two or three specific people) is 54 hours. I put it on when I’m working from home. He is HILARIOUS. He and his team have whole fake websites, fake banks, and a fake Google Play store where he can redeem fake Google play cards into his account and it works as the actual play store would. People go insane when they see they “lost” thousands of dollars because an “old lady” redeemed the codes they wanted.

True crime: Explore With Us is a channel my partner recently found. Lots of FOIA’d videos and pictures that have never been seen before they made their videos. Very interesting.

Hoovies Garage for some car comedy. The guy buys dump cars that need repairs and he let the local mechanic fix them. He makes dumb choices for entertainment.

"Stuff made here" is an excellent channel about crazy fun engineering projects, such as a pool cuestick that always pockets the ball and so on.

Drain Addict.

He's a weird plumber. From Australia. He unclogs drains. When he walks, he moves his arms like a player character in an FPS. He has a toy rat and crocodile that help him. Sometimes it's hard to tell what's a sound effect and what's a real sound.

It seems like it shouldn't work but somehow it does.

I'm sure I have a bunch but two I haven't seen here:

OrdinaryThings - has shifted to MUCH longer form current-events / documentarian content. Humorous and pundit-y but also informative about world news I likely missed. His yearly "The ___ Business of 20__" videos are great recaps.

Harke - Found this channel basically by accident and fell in love with it. Admittedly pretty niche about a VERY specific kind of retro, but it's stuff I grew up with so I'm all about it. Retro adventure games and music and that kind of thing. Super underrated!

This Old Tony: home machinist that fixes stuff and makes other stuff in his garage, but does everything very well thought out. Humorous and good editing.

I like longer form sailing channels that avoid the more obvious place or lack basic sailing skills and are frankly dangerous. I don't get to sail as much as I like so this is a good look and what I would rather be doing.

Maddison Boat Works their recent videos are of their epic tour of the Pacific Ocean, the road less travelled. Beautifully shot and narrated.

NBJS single-handed sailing in the North Sea, often in bad weather.

Alluring Arctic depending what time period you pick there is a wide range of mostly arctic sailing. They recently did the North West passage and are currently over wintering in Greenland.

Along with Technology Connections, Philosophy Tube, and Primitive Technology, here are my "must watch" subs

Climate Town - Excellent videos about climate change and environmental impact that are insightful and funny

Contrapoints - Well written and meticulous deconstructions of philosophical concepts in media, pop culture and society with a dry wit

Every Frame a Painting - Amazing content on film-making. No longer active, but if you haven't seen it yet, lucky you, enjoy.

Pop Culture Detective - Interesting meta analyses of popular tropes in pop culture

Because I'm into historical clothing and fashion, Bernadette Banner and Abby Cox both do great videos on costuming, history and creating cool stuff

Trying not to put duplicates:

• ViceGripGrage - finds old shitty cars and gets them running and drives them home
• MightyCarMods - as the name suggests, building/fixing/modifying cars
• Savagegeese - very detailed car reviews, no bullshit
• B1M - talks about mega projects and there issues
• ItchyBoots - Badass motorcyclist that has traveled solo across the world
• shiey - Explores abandoned places, hops trains, insane lack of fear of heights
• The Proper People - also explores abandoned buildings
• Rick Beato - music producer that analyzes songs and talks about various music related topics

in addition to a lot of others already mentioned (there's a lot of overlap)

History:

• Step Back History

culture/politics:

• Shanspeare
• FD Signifier

writing/education:

• Zoe Bee

media/ect:

• Tale Foundry (technically about writing fiction, but they also discuss media in general along with its themes, character archetypes, ect. it's more interesting than it sounds)

• Pop Culture Detective

• Jacob Geller (mostly video games)

• My Little Thought Tree (also psychology)

• Broey Deschanel

Depends on my mood, and some creators have come and go from my rotation, some random ones: Krystal Kyle and Friends (left leaning politics podcast) Warfronts (more medium form, but I think it's a good balance) The Right Opinion (long form documentaries, generally around controversial internet figures) Jim Can't Swim (JCS Criminal Psychology) Fredrick Knudsen (down the rabbit hole series) Karl Jobst (speed running documentaries essentially) Radking (Fallout lore stuff) SmoughTown (Elden Ring lore stuff) Ymfah (ridiculous video game challenges with humorous editing)

There's tons more ofc

melodysheep - quality animations about universe, earth

thinmatrix - cozy, solo gamedev videos

I've recently caught up on About Oliver's second season of Minecraft streams. He's an astrophysicist who never played Minecraft before 2022 and documented his entire blind playthrough. No reading chat, no googling etc. He only knew that he could get to credits somehow, but didn't even know how.

I highly recommend the entire playthrough, but there is a 6 hour Compilation of season 1 if you want to catch up to current day. Season 2 is about 40 episodes in, with about 4-5h per episode.

I really like my weekly hour long defense/economics powerpoint from Perun.

I don't watch YouTube to often but I used to like to watch some content from Yes Theory.

My partner watches a few others though, I see her watching Smosh, which sometimes is good, she always watches good mythical stuff, but I am not as much of a fan of them.

I think I avoid YouTube mostly, but if Yes Theory fits your question, I like their underlying message (it started off as a saying Yes to life and taking chances and believing that people were inherently good and try to get communities and the world to come together it seems) and I was actually afraid to say it because I figured someone would come out and tell me how they are actually terrible people somehow. Hopefully not. (Fingers crossed)