Cracking the Cryptic is a channel about solving puzzles, by people who are really good at solving puzzles. My friend described watching Simon do a NYT crossword as a feeling like a dog listening to classical music. I thought that was extremely accurate. It was still engaging enough that I watched the whole video. But their sudoku is what I really wanna talk about. Their sudoku videos usually have a link in the description that will open the featured puzzle on their website in their sudoku web application. (It seems like their older videos don't have the link, and may have predated the current polished form of the software. But as far as I can tell, all of their recent videos do have links.) Their software is extremely nice. It lets you make a variety of notes, marking in possible numbers in the corners of squares or in the center but small. There's a button for color I haven't even tried using yet. I usually balk at even trying any puzzle that's not on paper, but I think I prefer this software to paper. You can try solving the puzzle on your own before you watch the video, follow along with the video, refer to the video if you get stuck, or watch the video and then see if you can solve the puzzle. Or you could just watch the videos. You can look at how they do notations, because there's specific methods. Some of them have names. I never knew. I successfully solved a NYT hard sudoku puzzle using techniques I learned from this channel and I'm very proud of myself. I'm still quite shaky on the advanced techniques people use for the harder puzzles because it just takes time for it to sink in enough that you recognize the patterns in the wild, but that's a definite start. I do often learn best when I can watch someone and hear what they have to say about their approach and thinking. This is the video for the puzzle I solved, and again the link to the puzzle itself is in the description:
I watched the mindfulness episode of Netflix’s “The Mind Explained” (a spinoff of their main Explained series with a more narrow focus) on the recommendation of a friend. It was only 20 minutes long so it’s not much of a time commitment. It actually left me wanting more. I’ve rarely seen mindfulness presented in a way that seemed remotely compelling to me, a person with clinical anxiety and focus issues. But especially clinical anxiety. One of the experts they interviewed was a Tibetan Buddhist who started meditating as a kid because of his panic attacks over disaster scenario thoughts. It was just nice to hear the approach of someone who knows what it’s like to try to be mindful when you have crippling anxiety. I also appreciated that the Netflix video did mention that medication is more effective for treating anxiety. And that they ventured that mindfulness meditation could be an option for people who would rather try something besides medication, which I completely agree with. It’s definitely not gonna be viable for everyone, and I die a little inside whenever someone who is not my psychiatrist suggests I should try meditation for my anxiety. Sure, I’ll just go do that, and maybe on the way home I can master the violin, and conversational Dutch depending on how the time goes. But more options is still more chances that some people will find what works best for them, or what works best for them for now. Though I’m firmly in the medication group, I was actually really interested in this presentation of mindfulness that didn’t sound like a trip directly to anxiety hell or unbearable boredom. I’ve always liked the idea of meditation but it never seemed very accessible to me. Now it sounded like I at least wanted to hear more. I tried searching youtube just for the heck of it and went, hey isn’t that the monk from the Netflix video? I do not know if “monk” is actually a correct thing to call him, but it was the same person, and “It turns out the Buddhist monk has a youtube channel!” is a sentence that is now bouncing around merrily in my head. Who would have thought I’d have a reason to ever say that? Not me apparently. I watched one of his meditation videos and enjoyed it very much. It turns out I can focus on my breath without getting hopelessly fixated on whether I’m breathing wrong if I know I’m allowed to acknowledge and experience fear of breathing wrong as part of the whole mindfulness process. That’s not exactly in the videos afaik, but I feel it’s not much of a leap when watching the work of a guy who talked about welcoming his panic and becoming good friends with it. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s youtube channel And a video about how practicing meditation doesn’t mean you have to sit there thinking about nothing, or even be calm, which is a huge relief because those are the worst parts imo. Well being calm is nice but trying to be calm is pretty terrible.
(just for clarification monk would be the appropriate word for him. if they've got shaved heads and are wearing robes that are orange/red/yellow and they're buddhist you can safely call them monks or nuns. though priest occasionally gets used too, especially in the case of japanese monastics who may wear black instead.)
(I did actually wonder if you might be the right person to ask. Somehow that didn’t translate into me actually, you know, asking. But I very much appreciate the information! I’m not likely to ever be Buddhist, but the very least I can do is be respectful if I’m seeking to maybe learn something from a Buddhist practice. Or just in general because that’s the decent thing to do. Thank you!)
For folks who like historical sewing or sewing in general, Bernadette Banner and Angela Clayton are my two current favorites. Just very sweet people who do amazing work. Angela does some step by step vids, but she seems to mostly do vlogs on what she's done over a month; and Bernadette does singular projects, a Lady Sherlock series that is finished, just a lot of very historical sewing, mostly Victorian era and before, while Angela's favorite era is the forties and fifties and she does many other eras as well. Bernadette is the type to try and make items from period-accurate, natural fabrics, and Angela is much more lax, but does enjoy using vintage lace and trimmings when she can. She also, on rare occasion, uses vintage furs when making a project with fur. It's meant to be less cruel then buying a 'new' fur, since the animal was originally killed to make an item for the first buyer..i guess. Fur is an interesting subject in costumery. Anyway, they are both very sweet people and it's nice to hang out with them for a while. Bernadette is a calmer presence, and Angela tends to work on like 5 projects at a time, is a bit younger, and is higher energy. Very workaholic, though she struggles with mental health and her followers keep commenting "She still got SO MUCH done, she's great, I can't believe she thinks she accomplished so little." Bonus, Bernadette has a guinea pig and he makes an appearance in most of her videos.
Cesario is a joy and a delight. Guinea pigs have never really been on my pet radar, but she’s obviously very fond of him. Watching Bernadette talk about or react to Cesario even in passing makes me feel like I completely understand the appeal of guinea pigs. It’s a very good feeling.
My sibling has recently discovered a channel called Primitive Life where some dude just goes out into the woods and builds stuff completely from "pull a rock out of the river and sharpen it and tie it to a stick and you have an axe" scratch and has been binging it for like the past week and I thought I'd share that fact.
This guy mostly does fantasy swords, but he also does fantasy castles. Here's his take on what a book-accurate version of Winterfell would look like:
Yeah, Shadiversity is pretty cool. Castles are honestly a pretty common subject, but he does a lot of cool stuff, like his fantasy rearmed and various fight scene analyses. Semi-relatedly, y'know what was hilarious? That one conservative pundit going on about how the Witcher was feminist cancer and women can never conceivably win swordfights, only for the entirety of HEMA youtube to go 'What the fuck are you smoking?'
I binged all this guy's content mostly because of the sentence, "You don't need to read a single line of dialogue from Redd White to know that you hate him."
Dan Floyd is fun. Have you seen his other channels? He was the guy originally behind the Extra Credits video-game development and analysis channel before he moved on, and he still does Let's Plays on PlayFrame, in which the first few episodes of any given Let's Play is usually him getting distracted by the animation and thus dying stupidly.
I've watched a decent bit of stuff from Extra Credits, but didn't make the connection that it was the same Dan.
Yeah, I first found him on Extra Credits and the pitch/speed difference in his voice was a bit of a shock when I found his Let's Plays.
I am perpetually grateful for and feel an immense fellow-feeling for this woman and her crusade against the soyummy/5minutecrafts/blossom/etc. content mill empire.
This is a really good video from Core-A Gaming analyzing fast and slow thinking in fighting games. In general Core-A has a lot of cool videos about fighting games. How they work, why they work, how we interact with them and why. Even if you're not a fighting game type it's a neat watch I feel like:
Here's a neat video breaking down how exactly the AI of the first FNAF game works. Each animatronic is gone into, the difficulty levels are explained, and things like how long blackouts and even Freddy's music box time are is explained.
