#might just stick to 3 art and continue pally from there

[aceofwonders]

formulating an insane triple multi-class rn

3 artificer (armorer)/3 paladin (glory)/3 fighter (battle master)

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Unsubscribe

Sometimes I struggle with unsubscribing from a channel on Youtube.

The faulty logic is something like this: I think their content is good, therefore I should be subscribed to it.

The reality is I should only subscribe to a channel if I think it’ll be useful to have their content appearing in my subscriptions feed. That is a VERY different thing.

Recently I’m going through and culling a lot of shows. Looking at a few, and the logic:

Sarah Z: I like Sarah as a person and as a content creator. I think her takes are accurate and her videos are well-researched, well-produced, and insightful. Unfortunately most of her stuff of late is about some form of fan drama. And while it’s cool to look at cultural impact of things, and I think she’s fairly respectful of these communities, it’s more just...I don’t need that drama in my life.

Mother’s Basement: This is one of the hardest to drop. These are beautifully edited and deeply knowledgeable videos about anime, which is of course one of my favorite topics. It’s just that 9 times out of 10 the videos are extraordinarily well-made shitposts, and he produces at a sufficient pace that another 10-minute funny shitpost every couple days will really start to add up to a lot of lost time.

If I weren’t culling entertainment shows because I want to stop treating Youtube as an entertainment site in general, I probably wouldn’t be getting rid of MB.

Noah Caldwell-Gervais: Slightly easier to drop but still kind of rough. Noah’s games journalism is top-tier and he writes about things he really cares about and has obviously thought through for a long time. What it comes down to is a (time : game dev insights) ratio. He’s got good insights, but his videos are upwards of 3 hours long and that’s just too big a commitment.

Penny Arcade TV: I put this on my subscriptions because I thought I was going to binge C Team and catch up to now and continue watching it live. That didn’t happen, C Team has now ended as a show, and also PATV has a bunch of other videos they put out that hold no interest for me and thus are just subscription-page clutter. Easy drop.

Patrick (H) Willems: They’re neat video essays about movies. If you want cool movie insights or care about weird stuff behind the scenes of films you might have seen? It’s pretty good. Right now that’s not what feeds me. (Also, a personal taste thing; I’m not a fan of sketches in the midst of film reviews, and that’s a stylistic thing he’s been leaning into more and more)

Lord Ravenscraft: Again, a review channel.

This is a general theme of this culling. I think part of the issue that led to this culling is just that I noticed that I spent more hours a week consuming thoughtful opinions about media than I did consuming media. And I feel like maybe experiencing more art for myself would be better for me than listening to experts tell me what to think of a thing I’ve never seen.

MFPallytime: This hurts not because the channel is good content - which it is - but because the dude is so cool. I like Walter aka Pally, and the parasocial feeling of Youtube makes it so this feels like if I were taking an acquaintance out of my friends list in FB. That weird sense of “Is he going to hate me now?” No, he won’t, he doesn’t know who I am. But it feels that way. It feels like cutting off a friend. But his channel is all him playing video games and - again with the “primary sources” thing, if I’ve got that kind of time I should either play video games or, if I don’t have energy for that, watch shows or read a book. Or take a nap, or a walk!

Markiplier: And another one.

Game Grumps: And another one.

For the sake of positivity, let me mention some of the things that I’m keeping and why!

WeskAlber: This is one of the best sets of guides to FFXIV that exists. As new patches come out that change how the numbers work he updates them. I play FFXIV. Also he doesn’t update super often, so he’s not clogging my feed.

Gaijin Hunter, SDShepard: Similarly, really useful guides if you play Monster Hunter games. I do. Gaijin Hunter has a few more opinion pieces that I don’t care about but they aren’t quite frequent enough to warrant unsubscribing.

Jess Jackdaw: Process porn of an excellent artist creating original works on the fly - “What if we crossed a silver dragon from D&D with the pokemon Absol?” or “What if we drew a displacer beast in the art style of Katamari Damacy?” Like, my complaint with a lot of the “watching someone playing a video game” stuff is that there’s some better way of injecting this media into my life. Not so, here. Jess’ channel is an absolutely original experience and leaves me feeling inspired for my own D&D games and my game development work.

Sharp Accent, Blackthornprod, Infallible Code, quill18creates, Coding with Unity, Jason Weimann: These are all purely for educational purposes, and by and large they’re pretty decent at it.

GMTK, Errant Signal, Extra Credits, Design Doc: These are a little more edutainment and theoretical, but I find enough insights into good game design (and they’re short enough relative to the number of insights gleaned) that they get to stick around. 

Matthew Colville, Dungeon Craft, Zee Bashew: Useful insights for anyone who wants to run a D&D game. Sometimes rules, sometimes variants, sometimes opinions on why a rule should be houseruled away. I don’t always agree but the talks do get me thinking and I think they help make me a better dungeon master. Also when Zee does sketch comedy in the middle of his education/opinion bits it’s an original animated short, so that always gets a pass.