Favorite YouTube Channels

I've mostly been doing my own thing and ignoring the Blaugust themes -- but this is the last day of Creator Appreciation Week™, so I'd like to share what I've been watching on the youtubes.

Makers

The sorts of channels I like are ones where people go in-depth on how and why they're doing something. There are a lot of makers on YouTube, but their videos are ~20 mintues and give an extremely surface-level look into what they're making. A twenty minute video on project that took a month can't capture enough to interest me¹.

Acorn to Arabella

I've been trying to finish Acorn to Arabella. The main playlist had ~340 videos, and I'm coming up on 300.

In 2016-ish, a guy named Steve decided to quit his job, cash in his retirement fund, and build a sailboat from scratch. To pay for that, he started a YouTube channel.

I just got to the video where the boat hits the water yesterday. There's still more finishing work to do, and some of the more recent videos indicate they have some problems to troubleshoot/solve. But it's been a fascinating series. I've never thought about how wooden boats go together, and oh boy, is it an ordeal.

The "from scratch" is part of the reason it takes so long too: most of the wood was from trees that Steve harvested on his family's homestead. The lumber had to be milled and dried before it could be used. A lot of the early videos focus on planning and preparing because they need to give the wood time.

There are so many different techniques, skillsets, and tools that go into it. Steve is a master carpenter and generally handy, but he's never sailed and had no practical shipwright experience. But so many different people appear out of the woodwork to help him: by the time of launch, his little YouTube channel has grown from him & his friend & his dog working on the boat to a Business Empire with several employees and a small army of volunteers for "unskilled" labour².

Stud Pack

InfinityB linked a video from a channel called Stud Pack when he was looking at toilets³. I thought it was an interesting video: an older fellow who was clearly some kind of general contractor was building a house with his kids. It was presented well, and the tankless toilet they had picked out was a pretty neat piece of kit.

So I did the normal thing and proceeded to watch all 320+ videos on their channel. The older fellow is Paul, and he was indeed a general contractor in California & New Orleans. At one point, his son Jordan realized he needed some help with his jobs, so he joined as an apprentice. But the catch was that Jordan wanted to film their work and start a YouTube channel.

It was a good call on his part. His dad needed some media training -- you can see in the earlier videos, he's pretty quiet and reserved -- but Paul has a ton of knowledge, experience, and tricks to share.

I'm not building a house or rennovating my bathroom or anything like that, but it's cool to see how houses get put together. They do some projects in extreme circumstances too: in a few videos, there's a house whose foundation has failed. The floor collapses. Just figuring out where to start is quite a puzzle.

The YouTube channel takes off at some point, enabling Jordan to buy a lot in Texas and build a house. That's been a long series, but you get to see every step of the process, starting from evaluating the dirt's suitability to build on. They're finishing up the garage, which they've used as a testbed for techniques, materials, and tools -- Paul has a lot of remodeling experience, but this is his first time building structures from the ground up.

This channel also taught me that general contractors have a conference called IBS. Which they all manage to say with a straight face, somehow.

Steward Hicks

Any time Stewart Hicks releases a video, I am there. He's an architect in Chicago, and he talks about architecture-y things. Not necessarily always in Chicago, but he's got a bias since he can film Chicago footage without needing to travel far.

"Archtecture-y" might make you think the channel is very similar to Practical Engineering -- but he's got a wider range than just concrete pours. Architecture is about designing a system -- a building -- which has to work with other systems in the city. So it's not just material selection and measurements, but aestetics, constraints, weather, how people on the street level engage with it, the logistics available...

Take a look at his video on 150 N. Riverside, a beautiful spot on the Chicago river that nobody had the skills to turn into a skyscraper because of how narrow it was. He takes a wholistic look at it.

And of course, he's covered the Chicago Rat Hole. Which has very little to do with skyscrapers, but was probably more important.

Gameing

I don't follow a lot of Gamer channels. Most of the Gamer content on YouTube is, uh, for a different demographic. Or it's all drama farming and doom-saying. But: I have three game & game-adjacent channels that I love.

Kruggsmash is the 10,000-ton unead gorilla of Dwarf Fortress. He picks a theme for a fortress, and then makes long video series documenting all the wild hijinks his dorfs get up to. The videos are very narrative, and he and Mrs. Kruggsmash illustrate all of the important characters and big moments.

There's not much focus on DF mechanics; he's using it as a tool to tell fun fantasy stories. And sometimes he'll squirrel off into adventure mode or Caves of Qud. It's a very pleasant channel.

Hoodie hair is a much smaller DF channel. Their videos are usually a single-episode adventure: she'll pick a terrible idea (like making a mead-focused fortress), make it the video's goal, and figure out how to do it. A lot of dorfs are harmed in the making of their videos.

Luetin09 gives hour-long deep-dive lectures on Warhammer 40k lore topics. The lore is my favorite part of 40k, and I've made reference to him on the blog before. I'll usually turn his latest video on when we're crushing zergs in WvW -- he puts tons of fan art in his videos, but it's really just a podcast putting on airs, so you don't need to watch.

Miscellaneous

Scott Manley makes videos about the latest in rocket launches and general space news. These are fun, because rockets are cool, but it's also a bit eye-opening when you realize how much stuff we're putting in space on a week-to-week basis. He's got a lot more launches to talk about than I expected.

George the Weather Dad is a tiny channel. I guess George retired from his job as a meterologist, got bored, and started doing his job again but as a hobbiest YouTuber. He posts the weather regularly, and he's midwestern, so he's focusing on the right areas for me.