I was on a high school trip to Poland in the 90’s. It was an eight day trip through the country, including a couple of days of kayaking. Our school was definitely on a tight budget to make this trip work, so we spend our nights in a bunch of cheap hotels and camping grounds.
One luxury that we were always missing out on was decent toilet paper. The only toilet paper supplied was this single ply stuff with the same texture as sanding paper. So when we were out for an evening in Warsaw I visited a five star hotel to enjoy some quality bathroom time. This was several days in and I really wanted to enjoy using a toilet in a heated and clean environment. And it was so nice! No smells, no cold drafts and the toilet paper! So soft! I was in heaven :)
As luck would have it, the bathroom stall had a whole stack of these magically soft toilet rolls. On an impulse I stuffed all of them (around six if I remember correctly) under my coat and smuggled them out of the hotel. Back at the camp I shared them with the rest of my classmates, bringing back a little bit of luxury in our dreary little place. Never been that popular in my life :)
Rooster Teeth and Achievement Hunter - their fall from grace was slow at first. First yet another corporate sellout and Bernie leaving, then the employee scandals - especially Ryan. RvB outlived itself and it was their prime thing. RVBY went downhill after Monty died. The new talent wasn’t as entertaining as the old, and then the pandemic really kicked their ass.
Hate to say it, but Wintergatan and his Marblemachine X. In the earlier days his videos were an exciting mix of mad genius, cool music improv and crafting. Then he became obsessed with making the machine play tight, precise music to a level that is beyond what anybody in an audience would be able to hear, and it became obvious that the machine would never get finished because he was stuck in an improvement loop.
His goal wasn’t to create an art project though, but to create an actual instrument he can use. The artistry stuff and making it look cool was what made MMX a failure. I agree that the MMX videos were still fantastic content, but that thing was doomed.
Tightness: it’s a compound effect of every part, so afaik he’s just trying to make sure each part is as precise as possible, and selecting the most precise / consistent design out of the available choices.
Yup, one lf the most painful un subscribing I did. He forgot he was making an art instrument and got lost into engineering nonsense that he doesn’t even understand. Under every videos there are people screaming that he is making assumptions that won’t work in the real world and others that are just sad because the magic is gone.
Abandoning the MMX felt like being scammed by a shady Indigogo (can’t imagine how it felt for the patreons) after so much progress and many years of anticipation.
I still check his videos every few months and just randomly watch a few seconds of the videos, his new plans are ridiculous and uninspiring :/.
Yeah, pretty much this. Would have been best had he never bothered with 3d printed and manufactured parts as they allow a level of control (or illusion thereof) that would have never been possible with wood. Who cares if you’re losing a couple of marbles during a show (no pun intended), or if the snare drum isn’t tight to the thousandth of a second?
The MMX was doomed and not possible to save. It is exactly what it looks like: A cool looking contraption that can make some nice sounds using marbles, but it’s not an instrument you can use reliably in a band. You think it was hard for you to unsubscribe; how hard don’t you think it was for Martin to abandon the MMX? He wished it to succeed more than any of us, and probably abandoned it way too late because of it.
Cinema Sins. Used to be 5 minute videos pointing out continuity errors or over-use of something (Iron Man 2 Bird Bonus Round) but then bloated into 20 minutes of nit picky bull crap.
I can’t even follow the logic most of the time. It pre-assumes you’ve dug as deeply into the movie as they have and have already moved past surface level continuity errors. Also, it got cringey any time they’d remove points for “hot chick moment” or “liking this scene humanizes our channel”.
More like seatbelt is muscle memory they don’t actively think about. Nobody is mentioning closing the door or aligning their foot to the pedals either.
Since I haven’t seen him mentioned, Michael Stevens aka Vsauce, great Philosophy and science YouTuber.
Sadly only makes like 2 videos a year :/
But his older videos are all still very good watches, I love to rewatch them.
I recently discovered that he’s been consistently putting out YouTube shorts that actually maintainsl the same quality as his long form videos. Worth catching up on.
I think he’s been incredibly consistent with his videos and don’t find any of his ads offensive or annoying, even though I’ll never buy something. I guess I disagree that the quality has changed. I do feel I’ve seen most content already though and he’s not doing much to keep interest growing.
I don’t agree, his techniques and format are still good and though expensive, the covert instrument sets are some of the finest tools I have. If the guy wants to make a buck and offer a one stop shop for the hobby I don’t see the problem.
I guess my only complaint with LPL is seemingly running out of challenging locks, which is more a fault of manufacturers.
Apparently not just his tools, either. He’s got some partners too, and it started recommending me their videos too. Their stuff is more of the same, advertisements for their store.
Eh, I would have to disagree with this, I have been watching him for a while and as far as I can tell the quality is the same the only difference now days is that he mentions his tools in the videos while picking the locks, so the videos didn't even really get longer.
He’s very much not liked in the lock picking community.
Not only does he push his overpriced tools a lot, most of them are very much not needed. He also puts a lot of focus on specialized car lock picking tools which are expensive at, made for each brand basically, and in a very dubious grey area which is a big no no in that “sport”.
From a purist side there are also a lot of complaints.
Agreed. Before it would be “so I made this tool by filing down this other thing, you can probably make one yourself” to “I used this tool that you can get in my shop, and here’s how to pick it with a few standard tools as well…”
Man picks lock with skill and tools, not allowed to mention he also sells tools? Shit that would knock out so many YouTubers… LawrenceSystems, NetworkChuck, Level1Techs, pretty much anyone who does electronics or home automation…
This seems to be the prevalent trend with most channels that gain traction. They start focusing more on selling their plushies, clothing, tools, or other shitty branded merchandise, and less on the content that got them there.
Maybe it’s because original content creation is hard work. I get that. But holy shit, when they start hawking their stupid merch hard their credibility just goes down the toilet.
Feels like it’s mostly because there’s not much to talk about anyway, whatever needed to be said has already been said in one of his 1.5k video. I start follow his channel before he established his company, it’s mostly the same and it’s really just about how he defeat the lock. He sometimes still talk about unique lock he find interesting though.
Yeah, those unique locks are the highlights I remain subscribed for. He used to dismantle locks more often, but at this point it'd just be more of the same if he kept doing that.
Might be a good idea for him to change up his format a bit to make fewer videos but have them be more of a deep dive into whatever locks he's focusing on, maybe do more of the old "now let's see if we can open this with the leg of a Barbie™ doll and half of an M67 fragmentation grenade" stunt videos. I remember he used to get more experimental with his approaches when there was back-and-forth with Bosnian Bill.
I got into lockpicking and now I love Lock Noob. Covert Instruments aren’t that good either, I would go with Sparrows if I were to start, if anybody else is interested in getting into the hobby.
Someone who becomes good at something selling goods/services isn’t exactly what I would consider offensive. Consider the guy who did Mouse Trap Monday videos who is now selling his trap commercially: do you have any idea how long he spent testing and reviewing traps to reach a point where that was viable? I suspect he spent thousands of hours on this.
Level1Techs sell basically the only DisplayPort KVM worth a damn, that’s a pretty great offering to have. They don’t bring it up much but it’s there.
Elevated blood pressure is a common alcohol withdrawal symptom, but it looks like 9 days may be a long time for this symptom to last. As you’ve already seen from others, talking to a dr is probably a good idea at this point (if you have the means to do so).
The decision to let anyone in is typically a move a country makes because it’s going through population decline. Think Iceland, South Africa, Sicily, Pitcairn… the last of these would be the most rewarding.
Very seldomly does a good country just let anyone in, not just because it doesn’t want to be so generous but also because it doesn’t want to be exploited by people who realize that a good country is letting anyone pass.
My favorites (Space Time and Anton and Dr. Becky) were already highlighted so here are more.
I wish they would bring back SciShow Space, but the occasional space or physics content on regular SciShow is still good for a general audience.
Scott Manley got known for teaching folks to play Kerbal Space Program but he’s turned to great coverage of aerospace engineering and who is launching what major rocket missions this month.
Astrum is pleasant and relaxing with nice images.
Sabine Hossenfelder always has opinions on GR and QM that are somehow both spicy and super practical.
Fermilab has an official channel with good educational videos.
MinuteEarth / Minute Physics is great when you’re in a hurry.
Especially the early QM videos by Sabine Hossenfelder are great. Lately she’s just researching popular science news which may or may not be correct. But I like that she is at least stating her bias when she has one.
Yeah I don’t always watch her non-physics coverage since I tend to get that elsewhere. But she’s obviously well versed in reviewing the published literature and has a team of folks helping with that, which is more than can be said for many science journalists sadly. So even when I’m skeptical of her conclusions I’m at least confident she’s not just a talking head but actually checked the core papers on the topic.
FYI there’s SponsorBlock if you want to skip the NordVPN stuff. I don’t begrudge any channel for needing to make a buck though.
I use nextcloud news for rss feeds, and ground news for regular summaries and breaking news, as if I’m important enough to need to know everything right away.
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