#I'm just. losing my mind here. I was not expecting this amount of new info lmao

[diabeticgirl4]

I caved and checked out the group's character sheets for lvl3 (or lvl4 in chetney's case) bc they're already leveled up to 4 at this point therefore nothing on the lvl3 sheets should be ""spoilery""

But???? Chetney's apparently a blood hunter???? I could've sworn he was introduced as a rogue??? Hello????? Order of the lycan????? Werewolf????? I'm screaming?????

[vidreview]

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #3

[originally posted december 21st 2023]

here we are again! i've had most of this roundup queued for a while and just haven't had time to finish it, so the entries here aren't necessarily super recent. but they're still quite worth your time! so let's just jump right in.

"The Gaming Industry, Gambling, and Addiction" by GC Vasquez.

in the previous roundup i highlighted Jimmy McGee's series on the video game industry's ties to gambling. GC Vasquez has made what i think is an excellent spiritual companion to those videos, in that it approaches the same material from a decidedly personal place. the fact that the primary expected model for turning a consistent profit in the games industry (at least as far as companies like Unity are concerned, with the c-suite insisting that you'd be "fucking idiots" for doing anything else) involves pushing microtransaction gacha mechanics into every nook and cranny really cannot be criticized enough. but i think, even more pressingly, GC Vasquez points out that games have always included fictional gambling in the form of slot machines, poker tables, roulette wheels, etc, and that this demonstrably conditions kids to develop gambling addictions. on a lighter note, his video about why replay value in games doesn't matter as much as we think it does is one of those "finally someone put it into words" type essays.

"The Lost Majora's Mask Notebook | New Zelda Info" by The Hyrule Journals.

there are plenty of folks out there doing Zelda lore and history videos, but no one's got the stuff quite like The Hyrule Journals. Their documentary Line By Line, tracing the history of Majora's Mask's English translation by talking extensively to the guy who did the translation, is an excellent work of games journalism that revealed a lot of information previously unknown to me. The Lost Majora's Mask Notebook is a followup to that doc, sharing insights gained from the translator's own notebook kept during the translation process. it's cool! i would not call this A Great Video Essay necessarily but it's a good excuse to recommend an underrated channel.

"SEND IN THE CLOWN: a people's joker review" by let's talk about stuff.

oh this is a pretty cheeky inclusion, huh? one of my own videos? that's right, you got me: the whole VIDREV operation was just a shell game to goose my viewership numbers all along. the video is exactly what it says on the tin: a review of Vera Drew's incredible trans coming of age story / Batman parody film The People's Joker. i talk a fair amount in the back half about the novel ways this film got me questioning the cultural purpose of copyright and IP law, which is itself a strand of thought that began in my TUNIC review. if it seems like i'm always plugging my TUNIC review it's because i'm really proud of my TUNIC review and i would like for more people to watch it ("it" being my TUNIC review). anyway, The People's Joker is relevant now with the recent news that the film will be seeing wider distribution in the states come April 2024! so look forward to that, and to me undoubtedly plugging my People's Joker review yet again.

THE "DOESN'T NEED THE HELP" ZONE is kind of silly this time around since most of what i have to recommend is from channels that are doing relatively alright. my criteria for the distinction between does/doesn't need the help mostly comes down to vibes and subscriber count. if a channel has more than 100k subs, that to my mind means they don't need the help. this is not to insinuate that 100k+ creators are rich! youtube is a fickle mistress and everyone's revenue model looks different. i try to give precedence to folks below the 30k range, because that's where my channel's at and, coincidentally, where i tend to find the most interesting underrated creators. is it totally corrupt to put my own work in the implicitly-needs-the-help zone? call me out in the comments if you think this is a gross abuse of power.

"Playing Minecraft and Losing My Apartment" by Leadhead.

Leadhead has some great stuff, but this one hit me where it hurts. it's a video about escaping into the artificial goals of a video game at a time when personal disruption and chaos wrenches all sense of control over your own life away. i went through a pretty traumatic eviction myself back in 2021, and found myself totally incapable of making art about it. really nice to see someone else picking up that slack!

"Transition Regret & the Fascism of Endings" by Lily Alexandre.

another in a long line of bangers from Lily Alexandre, about how complicated it is to have mixed feelings on your own transition at a time when anyone expressing such emotions has their story weaponized against the rights of trans people everywhere. a lot of trans women in my life started HRT around 2017-18, and i've noticed a trend of folks in that cohort (myself included) trying to reclaim aspects of their masculinity from a safe distance by playing more with pronouns and presentation. i expect we'll be seeing a lot more videos about this in the years to come, and i can't wait! also: Lily Alexandre has some of the prettiest compositions in the whole video essay game. seriously, her color coordination and framing choices (and use of nonstandard aspect ratios!!!) are subtly artful in a way you really don't see very often on youtube.

"Should We Get Rid of Sex Scenes? (Part I)" by Broey Deschanel.

uh-oh, this one's a Nebula exclusive!!! i haven't really talked about Nebula on here yet, but suffice it to say it's an extremely important development in the business of online video. especially in this case, a video about sex scenes in Hollywood that quite literally could not exist on youtube under its current content guidelines! Broey Deschanel is a lot of fun to watch and makes some really great observations here. if you've got Nebula, it's well worth your time!

"Stop using Fandom" by mossbag.

if you have spent any amount of time in fandom (lowercase-f) spaces, you'll no doubt be well acquainted with how terrible Fandom (uppercase-f) is as a company and a product. this video digs deep into how scummy they are about filling wikis with intrusive ads, making alterations at the behest of private companies without consulting the people who manage said wikis, and their refusal to remove the wikis of any property whose community decides to migrate to another platform. one gripe i have with Fandom that didn't get mentioned is their outright ban on outbound links, which functionally murders any genuine archival usefulness a wiki might otherwise have. everything has to be in-fiction, which is just such a backwards and pointless way of doing things. they are systematically opposed to preserving community history and have no interest in fandom except as a money hungry middle-man between fans and IP owners. i highly recommend installing Indie Wiki Buddy on your browser so that you can avoid Fandom wikis like the plague they are.

"Journey to EPCOT Center: A Symphonic History" by Defunctland.

hey, did Kevin Perjurer just reinvent video essays? well… no, not really. but what he and his collaborators have accomplished here is a fascinating, impressive, and deeply odd intervention on the format which mixes archival footage, live recreations, and a "read along at home" written component to create an essay totally unlike anything i've seen before. honestly i really hope more essayists include supplemental written material in the future, especially with longer works where maybe not everything needs to be on screen! anyway, Journey to EPCOT is such a wild ambitious swing, and while i'm not totally convinced that it completely works i still have to applaud the audacity of the attempt. definitely requires a level of active participation that is well above average for youtube, not something you put on in the background if you actually want to learn anything from it, but definitely worth the effort.

"I kissed nuclear waste to prove a point" by Kyle Hill.

Kyle Hill is an educator on nuclear energy, and while i find a lot of his sillier videos a bit grating, i have nothing but praise for his work on historic nuclear disasters and the present day state of nuclear energy. it really can't be overstated how directly our general distrust of nuclear energy was kickstarted by fossil fuel companies, or how unambiguously illiterate the wider public is when it comes to the management of nuclear power plants and the disposal of nuclear waste. Kyle Hill here does a great job explaining just how unbelievably safe the whole operation is when it's well-funded and well-regulated, and stresses the inarguable fact that there's no source of green energy safer, more plentiful, or more efficient than nuclear. windmills and solar panels have their uses, but they will never be sufficient in reducing our reliance on fossil fuels if they're the only energy infrastructure we invest in at scale. and electric vehicles? oh man. the EV push as it stands is set up to be a grand historic embarrassment of catastrophic proportions. let's be good capitalists and set aside the rampant human rights violations and immense environmental impacts of rare-earth mining. the emissions from having to put down fresh asphalt more frequently due to the increased average weight of electric vehicles wearing roads down faster alone will outweigh virtually every gain from an electrified vehicle fleet, if electrifying the fleet is the only transportation infrastructure we invest in at scale.

there is simply no path forward to liberating the world from its reliance on fossil fuels that does not involve massive investment into building nuclear power plants and reducing our reliance on individual vehicles by exponentially expanding the reach of mass public transit. anything less than that is a laughable half measure whose most prominent boosters are, without a doubt, paid by fossil fuel companies to always be boosting. this is why i find Kyle Hill's work so impressive and refreshing. he talks quite a lot about nuclear disasters, but goes to great lengths to highlight that the fault lies in lack of funding, lax security protocols, and greedy parties preventing proper management, and that even with these horror stories at hand, fewer people have died from accidental nuclear exposure in history than get exposed to carcinogenic discharges from fossil fuel products every day and OOPS SORRY I'M SOAPBOXING it's a good video you should watch it

"What Happened To Spoof Movies?" by Eddache.

bit of a mood shift from that last entry, thank goodness. this here is an exceedingly thorough history of the spoof movie genre that does a great job explaining why some parodies work and others really, really do not. i had no idea how much of the recent history of spoof movies comes down to failson nepotism! a good chill video to watch if you want something relatively harmless to wile away an afternoon with.

and that's it. good luck in these final weeks of 2023, be sure to mask up, get vaxxed, and make sure your friends and family get PCR tests before any big gatherings, what with covid levels being as high as they were in 2020 in many places! i'm serious, deaths have been above 1000 a week since the end of August! so take care of yourselves out there

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ALSO: VIDREV's askbox is open! please feel free to forward any video essays that you think might be worth talking about (even if you're the one who made it!). this includes new stuff, old stuff, professional stuff, amateur stuff, anything that can be reasonably described as a video essay. no promises that i will cover anything that gets sent to me, but i will try to give everything an honest chance when i've got the time. if you have specific questions you'd like answered, please send those over to my main account as i don't intend to answer any questions here. okay, thanks!!

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