Not linking (reasons obvious) but it's the first time in a while that I've not immediately recognised the more reactionary impulses of a creator like this. It snuck up on me.
I've been expanding my YouTube horizons a bit, checking out people who've clearly gotten popular while I wasn't looking and seeing if I like what they have to say. Not in a place to start promoting them or anything, but it does seem like there's a relatively solid current of new people rising to the surface, and it's particularly nice to see some folks talking about old topics (we're talking Mass Effect, Last of us) with a view I haven't seen a million times already.
Anyway in this spirit I watched a video outlining the artistic issues with the Oblivion remaster, and after nodding along for the first 10-15 minutes about how desaturated and characterless it all is, how generic the enemies look mmhmm very good, there was a little diversion about how using "body type 1/2" or whatever is actually more bioessentialist than "Male/Female" and also a binary ackshually, without any real elaboration. Hmm.
He talks about the removal of gendered outfits and how clunkily executed it all is, and I'm broadly back agreeing. He's clear - some of the originals were tasteless and a redesign would have been a good idea, but the removal and subsequent implementation of just "the dude gear on a different body" doesn't work - hell, they don't work well on the "body type 2" they're designed for. Cool! That's a good little point.
There was a genuinely interminable diversion into societal control through media, including quoting foundational texts on propoganda and referring to people who think it doesn't matter as "golems" and like...
Look, I can give benefit of the doubt to an extent. I'm summarising what he says here and in doing so it makes it probably look worse than it is, but even if the writer doesn't intend to do antisemitism, the comments know because there's more than a handful of people doing antisemitism down there, with big SOLIDARITY messages.
Anyway I wasn't kidding about that diversion being interminable, he juxtaposes a bunch of clips of black employment activists explaining how they pressure companies to improve diversity practices against billionaires saying they force DEI on the companies they invest in because it's the financially savvy thing to do. This is so colossally disingenuous that I don't feel any need to give him the benefit of the doubt here. This dude's fucked. Please don't recommend anything else by him, YouTube, thanks.
Why can't someone normal write about this bloody game lmao
It's just wild to me how even someone with a feed as curated and carefully managed as mine can have this kind of rhetoric actively recommended after a previous version of the same video was apparently taken down for unspecified reasons ofc).
I'm just trying to learn what the zoomers have to say about jade empire guys I don't want rants about the deep state please tune your algorithm accordingly.
Something about using YouTube these days just feels hostile. Ads seem to have been cranked to 11, the content algorithm is relentless in showing me stuff I don't care about, and more and more it seems like new channels that do seem to interest me are all sizzle no sausage (as it were).
But that's content stuff - today I'm nitpicking the UI.
Basically, I might look at a thumbnail like this one:
And expect that I can click, broadly, anywhere on it to get to the video. Something like this:
Where the blue boxes take me to the video, and the green ones get me to the person's channel. Nothing complicated, everything visible and obvious.
But as soon as your cursor touches the image, everything changes, and the truth becomes this:
I've had to change the colour scheme to remove the actual "gets you to the video" parts - it's easier to just omit that.
Green gets you to the channel.
Purple stuff mostly appears when you hover over and they are controls rather than links - the preview video player necessitates all this and just makes the whole YouTube experience worse.
The little gold band is a gap between the thumbnail and the title for some reason? I've clicked on that gap more times than is reasonable, in attempting to avoid clicking on the progress bar and skipping half the video.
And the red part takes you to a page explaining what a paid promotion is for some reason.
Guys I just want to click on the video, why are you making this such a ball-ache? It's a full 10% (possible hyperbole, I'm not counting pixels) of the section allotted to the video, just wasted on cruft.
This is one of many UI/UX complaints I have about the site, but I'll leave it at that for now. I don't think anyone would choose to design a website like this from scratch, this stinks of iterative ruination.
Angela Collier posted a great (long) video about Richard Feynman, and specifically the version of Feynman that exists in the public consciousness. I'm not going to crib or spoil her notes on this, she has a far more insightful and well-researched set of opinions than I'm capable of writing all this off the top of my head, but while watching I was really intrigued by how it mirrored and differed from my own view of Feynman over the last couple decades based on the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!"
Early on Angela discusses how if you're a young American with an interest in physics, some adult will eventually encourage you to read Surely You're Joking because it's the only point of reference they have for "entertaining physics stuff". She was one of these young people, started reading it and thought "what an asshole" and never went back. Later she dealt with a lot of young men who loved Feynman's stories and were also massive assholes, so that view stuck. A big theme of this section is that stories of Feynman's misogyny - harrassing women, embarrassing a waitress, etc - are the ones that stuck. What I find interesting is that they're not what stuck for me.
A little background, I was a Physics student myself - not American, but online enough that Feynman was someone I was aware of as a character, such that I read Surely You're Joking when I was 16 or so. The various stories of him being a dipshit to and about women didn't really stay in my mind after reading- I was something of a dipshit myself, as a teenager, but not enough so that I thought they were cool - so my view on the man wasn't quite so dim, but it also wasn't pure admiration like is common. It's also worth noting that I was a pretty shitty student, so I also don't have a full appreciation for the man's work as a theorist.
For all the anecdotes in the book, only 2 really stayed in my mind after reading, enough that they're what I think of when I think of Feynman. I'm purposely not re-reading them to verify because I want this to be about my impressions of him, not a measurable truth.
The first is about his time at Los Alamos, where they were developing the atomic bomb, and his experience of finding that untrained maintenance people were storing waste in a potentially catastrophically dangerous way. As I recall, they were stacking things close together in a way that could potentially cause a meltdown. Crucially, these folks had no training or understanding of nuclear waste, didn't know that's what they were dealing with, and didn't know that Los Alamos was even working on such things - as far as they were concerned, this was just rubbish to be stored. I think his main point in telling this story was about how unfair it was to expect them to do better without proper information, and that the secrecy of the Manhattan Project was putting them in serious danger. I liked this story - it paints Feynman as quite aware of the people around him, and of his position in the machine he's operating. That even as a theoretical physicist, his work was putting real people in practical danger. That feels like a good lesson.
The second was about how, during one summer at college, he asked to intern-or-whatever in another department, Biology I think. While there he was basically a lab-assistant, helping with their work and learning how they do things. In this he spent most of his time handling test-tubes, and in doing so he became very adept at uncapping them one-handed, and jokes that because of that he gets to save a little bit of time every day when he brushes his teeth, because he can uncap and re-cap his toothpaste with one hand. I'm sure he had more to say about it, but that's what stuck with me. I think what he's getting at here is that if he had always been Physics-Physics-Physics, he'd never have learned this silly little thing that he enjoys and benefits from, and you should always be ready to broaden your horizons.
I'll be honest, I hated this story. It felt incredibly silly, and I was a Big Theory Boy so why would I want to spend that much time in a lab? This was a really silly view, but I was a teenager. Then I went to university, this story still rolling about in my mind, and I got a new negative insight: what kind of biology lab is letting a physics student get this valuable lab experience over one of their own students? It's simple, a 1930s lab. That's when it really clicked for me. Feynman's life lessons barely applied because he went to college in a completely different universe, where just going to university already made you an extreme outlier. You were worthy of the university's time simply because you were there. This isn't to say Feynman wasn't an incredible talent, but it just felt like the bar was immensely higher in the post-2008 era. I was seeing UK tuition fees quintuple for my younger friends, and a huge number of my peers were getting a degree out of necessity rather than passion. As students in we were gristle in the university machine, competition was fierce, and the expectation was that we'd get our 2:1 and fuck off.
To be clear, as I said I was a terrible student. Classic "gifted child doesn't know how to study" shit. Between anxiety, depression, and a life-threatening infection my motivation for academia waned hugely over time. I don't know that it'd be any different if degrees "meant more", whatever that means, but I do wonder if things might have gone differently if I had been born into the pre-inflationary era of academia. I was certainly born for higher education, extremely likely in any era to have studied for a Maths or Physics degree, so maybe I'd be an academic in the 30s?
Of course, in the 1930s I wouldn't have spent hundreds of hours playing Super Mario 64, so that might also have helped.
Anyway, I highly recommend the acollierastro video linked above. It got me thinking a lot about things I'd taken for granted about myself despite having changed a lot since I came to believe them. A funny idea in the context of the video itself, actually.
I know it's cringe to enjoy things with sincerity, but the pacing and arrangement of these clips works extremely well, made me genuinely emotional having so many classic early RLCS goals where I knew the exact movements ahead of time, against the utterly disgusting mechanics of the modern game.
Garrett's fake while Fireburner gets the demo, I did a little hop in my seat right as Garrett does the double jump - it was just a move to make sure the ball stayed clear of his teammate, but it's a genuinely iconic button-press embedded in my psyche.
Really recommend the whole thing even if you're not wild about RL, it's a great video.
I've got nothing directly against Tom, I've watched a couple of his videos and they're very good, I just don't like his style of writing/speaking. No big deal, but enough that I basically decided to skip his videos unless they covered something particularly interesting or important.
But motherfuckers I feel a deep compulsion to click on this video. This seemingly pointless video about a tiny aesthetic trend, that I've already noticed and strongly dislike.
Because why is it an hour long???
Bravo Tom, well played.
Yeah I got weak and watched it
It's decent. It's like 20 minutes too long, he reiterates the same points more than I think was necessary. He also got entirely bodied by a comment raising a much more interesting angle - Tom focuses a ton on the idea that it's a cultural response to overproduced interlopers, but I think it's more about not appearing "out of touch" with their peers, and holding the mic is a simple way to look less professional while also saving yourself some work (and having to figure out what to do with your hands). Being a try-hard is good until you're successful, then it becomes cringe.
Anyway, the comment rules and feels like it gets closer to the point than the whole hour long video.
for what my opinion on the youtube plagiarism thing is worth (nothing, but I'll take it), I really enjoyed the slow dawning realisation that pretty much ever word somerton's own creative mind put in his videos has the voice of an asshole.
like, that's how you spot his original writing - is it snarky, flippant, or mean? probably him
he has the writing voice of someone who learned what sarcasm is from a friend's older brother and just ran with that as a personality
it's just so amazingly unappealing to listen to, i'm amazed this guy survived doing livestreams for any length of time
Razbuten has a lot to say here, and kind of comes to the "idk man there's no perfect answer" conclusion, entirely fair imo. I've never really bought into the "just add difficulty settings to Dark Souls" idea because like, cool, now you have 3 games to balance, that'll be fun to make.
I think it's fine and also good for some games to require more from the player than they initially want to give, and I also think it's fine for players to bounce off of that. "Not everything should be made for everyone" is a bit trite, but if games are on any level an artistic expression it should be acceptable to design them in a way that repels some portion of its potential audience.
What I really want to get into though is the way this always centres around real-time combat mechanics as difficulty - that makes sense, it's the most obvious thing that will stop a player continuing with a game they otherwise enjoy - but there are other barriers to entry that don't get the same kind of attention.
My brother is on his 3rd playthrough of Disco Elysium. I cannot play that game. I know it's a masterpiece, I love the aesthetic, and the writing is frankly delicious. But each of the 4 times I've tried to get into it, I've got an hour in and my brain is melting from all the text. There's just so much writing. And you have to read all of it or you're not really playing Disco Elysium. I'm enjoying what's written, but after a couple thousands words of text-on-screen I have a near-medical need to do something purely mechanical like play Rocket League before I'll even consider going back to read some more, and that could take days to recover.
This isn't a dyslexia thing, it's maybe something of an attention disorder thing, but it is nonetheless a barrier to entry that I could only overcome by playing the game in a way that's either not fun or antithetical to the design.
These aren't so much a coherent argument or conclusion in themselves, but a bunch of axioms that inform my thinking about it.
We all know video streaming is prohibitively expensive, in a way that scales fairly linearly with bitrate and usage. Storing video is generally expensive, but distributing it is moreso because you have to pay every single time it's viewed.
bitrate scales very unfavourably with resolution, and successful youtubers have an unhealthy obsession with pushing higher resolutions because (heavy opinion) "video """quality""" " is an easy metric to improve without relying on algorithms to push videos.
YouTube should never have offered hosting video greater than 1080p for free - they started allowing 4k video in 2010, when their annual revenue was <$1B. They were already the de facto video hosting site.
An extension of the above - YouTube already has to transcode 4K to its lower resolutions as it stands, this could have easily been integrated into their uploader - "Your video is too high resolution for a free account - we'll still host it at 1080p but if you upgrade you can keep the original quality!" Easy upsell.
Hell, they could have even offered to trade 4K hosting for a 100% ad-revenue share. We'll host it, but you essentially give up the commercial control of it - if it goes massively viral you lose out, which would probably be enough to stop people posting 4K video where it isn't needed.
The key point is that they didn't need to do much here, and this is a cost to the user directly associated to the cost to the provider. It's normal commerce.
YouTube's approach to monetisation has never been to link the user cost to the platform cost. YouTube Premium offers nothing that makes the service more expensive to provide, just basic quality of life things on mobile that other services were able to provide for free before Google sued them.
Arguably, being able to download videos for offline viewing makes things cheaper for YouTube compared to streaming a video in multiple sessions and potentially duplicating work, and they have people paying for the privilege of reducing a megacorporation's overheads.
YouTube doesn't need to be directly profitable to be worthwhile to Google, for the same kind of reasons that public transit doesn't need to be profitable - their usage benefits the ecosystem as a whole.
To that point, if YouTube suddenly made $0 revenue, would google shut it down? I'm not entirely convinced they would, because it's worth too much to them as a brand.
The trends mean nothing unless you want to imply that before the change things were already trending towards upwards towards what would become "the post-QI normal". Why would it be upward initially, then downward/flat after? Did Scrabble stop improving suddenly? Or maybe...
The sample is fucking tiny. You have thousands of matches over decades well recorded. Why are you only looking at weekly averages for a single year?
Using the simple uncertainty calculation built into ggplot really oversells the confidence of the trend - 20+ point variations week-on-week make a <3pt uncertainty academic at best.
There are clear high-leverage outliers in the data, which obscure the real story when you focus on means and trends - adding QI to the dictionary made it less likely for players to get shafted by bad luck - it made it a more consistent game, rather than a simply higher scoring one. Bulk averages are far less interesting than the distribution - which the plot could be highlighting with the exact same data.
Par for the course with 538, I know, but still annoying to see it referenced elsewhere.
I've had to change the colour scheme to remove the actual "gets you to the video" parts - it's easier to just omit that.
Green gets you to the channel.
Purple stuff mostly appears when you hover over and they are controls rather than links - the preview video player necessitates all this and just makes the whole YouTube experience worse.
The little gold band is a gap between the thumbnail and the title for some reason? I've clicked on that gap more times than is reasonable, in attempting to avoid clicking on the progress bar and skipping half the video.
And the red part takes you to a 
