videos
Breadtube if it didn't suck.
Post videos you genuinely enjoy and want to share, duh. Celebrate the diversity of interests shared by chapochatters by posting a deep dive into Venetian kelp farming, I dunno. Also media criticism, bite-sized versions of left-wing theory, all the stuff you expected. But I am curious about that kelp farming thing now that you mentioned it.
Low effort / spam videos might be removed, especially weeb content.
There is a cytube that you can paste videos into and watch with whoever happens to be around. It's open submission unless there's something important to commandeer it with at the time.
A weekly watch party happens every Saturday (Sunday down under), with video nominations Saturday-Monday, voting Monday-Thursday. See the pin for whatever stage it's currently in.
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I can’t tell if you’re trying to be funny or are being an asshole.
What does he talk about for 4 hours? I sincerely do not understand why anybody watches a Youtube that goes on and on and on for hours and there isn't even a summary in the Youtube description. There's only this...
If somebody told me I should travel 4 hours to eat the most delicious meal I ever had but would only say "It's delicious," to describe it - I'm not going. I don't care if the meal is free.
Personally I love it because I hate being alone with my thoughts and listening to someone talk about some bullshit I don't really care about directly into my ears for four hours at a time while I do other things tends to help my anxiety. Also great for falling asleep.
That said, this isn't any kind of endorsement of the guy's content or anything. If someone said this about some kind of essay or analysis I wrote I'd be pretty sad about that lmao
This is wild to me. Of course I'm going, are you serious?! What if they're right and it's the most delicious meal I ever had? I wouldn't want to chance missing that. Even if the meal isn't particularly good, it's an adventure. You get to remember the time you trusted some weirdo about a delicious meal and then they were extremely wrong and you got a bit of a road trip out of it. Maybe the difference is that 4 hours of travel time just doesn't seem like that much to me? I used to live in the desert southwest, everything is hours from everything else.
Also, this is how I suggest games to people sometimes, especially something like Outer Wilds. I can't explain to someone why Outer Wilds is good without ruining at least a little bit of its magic, so I'm not going to explain why it's good, I'll just insist that it is one of the best games I've ever played and an absolute masterpiece that I think everyone should play.
You know you can like watch in in chunks right? It's not like you have to down the thing in one sitting.
The video consists of like 2 hours of some examples of youtube plagiarism, with discussion of content mills and the beginning of an interesting point about how plagiarists view the people they steal from as lesser, which is not expanded upon as much as it should IMO.
The other 2 hours are about James Somerston, a gay video essayist that basically Frakensteined a bunch (if not all) of his videos from queer authors, some well known, a lot of them not. By the end Hbomb makes a good point about erasure, and how young queer people don't understand their history in part because of people like Somerston.
I'm generally not annoyed by length since I'm a zoomer and watch everything at 2x or more, but in this case I get the point because it actually took me 2 real time hours to watch and I felt there was a lot that could have been cut. I still won't watch the 3 hour scorcese movie, fuck all of you, movies ARE too long now.
I went on a ramble about the video that should probably be a separate comment, feel free to ignore
So regarding video length I think there's some value in going into detail about how plagiarism takes place. Some of this context is also relevant as a way to preempt any shitty response (for example he took the time to explain that Somerston's assistant writer is most likely not in on it and how his boss has shown signs of setting him up as a scapegoat).
He also seems to genuinely care about James's plagiarism because he's bi himself. I'm currently having a bout of insomnia, and was reading The Gentrification of the Mind before making the mistake of opening hexbear and seeing a new hbomb video was out, and while these two are not comparable in content, I found it interesting to experience them back to back, and since a bit of the vibe is there, I believe Harris is sincere about why he cares about it (also Vito Russo's name popped up in both, so I guess this is a sign that I should add The Celluloid Closet to my reading list).
However, the video does feel petty. Hbomb has this mean streak to him that served him really well when he was directly responding to right wing talking points, but is a lot less useful when talking about stuff like this, which becomes a problem when it's a large chunk of the video. He kind of recognizes it too, saying this feels like a drama video, and how he's donating all ad revenue to people James plagiarized from.
It does feel more appropriate when you consider that most of these people are reactionary pieces of shit and that should have been a much larger part of the video. He mentions it a bit (the first guy is a chud, internet historian tries to hide that he's a chud, Somerston came from business school and seems to hate women) and talks about contempt for the people they copy from, but I feel there's a lot more to dig into. What about contempt for the audience? What is the frame of mind of people that trend chase for years, sometimes decades, in order to garner an audience? That think regurtitating Wikipedia is worthy of other people's time? He says it was always like this mentioning AVGN copycats, but was it really? While the incentive structure didn't change how plagiarism takes place, didn't the kind of people that did the plagiarizing change? I think exploring this thoroughly is a lot more interesting than "showing the receipts" by comparing the copied work to the original for most of the runtime.
I still think it was worth a watch, but that's because I was already familiar with Somerston and some of the other people and they gave me the video essay equivalent of the ick. This should have been 2 hours at most.
One time I traveled four hours to and from a job site where the only thing I had to do when I got there was plug one thing in and make a phone call. They paid my mileage though so 👍