Now for something completely different?
MyHouse.WAD - Inside Doom's Most Terrifying Mod by PowerPak, 1 hour 42 minutes. From this video I learned that you can make whole new maps, monsters, etc for the old 90s first-person shooter game Doom, and that in fact there is a thirty-year-old fannish subculture built around doing this very thing. Which is super cool! What's even cooler is that an absolute legend dropped this particular map into a forum with zero fanfare, saying it would take about ten minutes. Spoiler, it takes the gamer/youtuber who made this video a lot longer than ten minutes.
I found this video absolutely enthralling, to the point that I've now watched it twice in two weeks. The game has great elements of architectural and existential horror and an incredibly tangled, twisty narrative. There are a lot of aspects that remind me of statements from The Magnus Archives. Frequently the game is just batshit insane. PowerPak explores all this with wonder, curiosity, and plenty of context for Doom noobs such as myself.
I would not say the video itself is horrifying, unless you get freaked out by low-res monsters and uncanny-valley 90s-era renditions of physical space. If any of this sounds appealing at all, I heartily recommend giving it a watch.
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This is Financial Advice by Folding Ideas, 2 hours 31 minutes. You may have been vaguely aware of the whole weird Gamestop stock debacle of 2020, but did you know that in the aftermath, the main subreddit involved basically turned into a cult? That is not hyperbole. This entire video is fucking wild, and Dan Olson of Folding Ideas lays it all out in a clear, logical, satisfying way while somehow maintaining a ton of narrative tension and drama.
I've watched a bunch of Olson's stuff now, including the "what the fuck is an NFT" one that I think he's most famous for, but this one is far and away my favorite because of the subculture he's exploring is just such a fascinating trainwreck.
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We Don't Talk About Dan Schneider by Quinton Reviews, 1 hour 54 minutes. Quinton has been working through the biggest shows in the Dan Schneider Nickelodeon Universe for a while, at length. (AT LENGTH). All along he's kept up a shtick that Schneider, fired a few years ago for rampant, long-running emotional abuse of everyone he worked with but most especially his child actors, didn't exist and played no part in the success of those shows. This video is Quinton's big finale, where he explains how Schneider got his start, what we know he's been creditably accused of, and what all this means for his victims and for the people who liked those shows.
I'm reccing this because Quinton is so careful and thoughtful about his arguments and his conclusions. There are so, so many ways to go wrong with material like this, and Quinton went the right direction pretty much every time, in my read. He has a lot to say about the culture of the entertainment industry, the systemic injustices, and the effects all this has on the kids. Despite sitting through many hours of his iCarly analysis (a show I have never watched), I did not expect his big conclusion to be anywhere near this good.
Also there's a lot about Dan Schneider and feet. What IS it with men and feet? No, please, don't tell me. comments