Hey, remember the sudoku guys? They've gone a bit viral recently. Among other things, James Charles recently tweeted that he had been so bored he was watching videos of a guy solving sudoku, seemingly implying that he had been watching their videos, so they made a video called, "If It's Good Enough for James Charles...!" Turns out it was indeed good enough for James Charles. The pinned comment at the top is his, talking about how much he enjoys their channel. I dunno why I find this so entertaining, but I really do.
The short story that invented the modern image of vampires is incredibly cheesy, so you can imagine how pleased I was to discover Maven of the Eventide reading the entire thing aloud while gently but mercilessly dunking on it. "Lord Byron would have described it."
One of my favorite genres of internet thing is "someone making a music video about their OCs set to Lemon Demon music". Especially when they're able to explain like, most or all of that OC's (back/)story through that music video alone. With that in mind, check this out: Youtube probably recommended it to me because of that Touch-Tone Telephone nightcore I consumed a while back, but also, the animation is really good...I love the facial expressions. And also, whoever the hell this is. Spoiler: an angelic presence
The marble racing folks @Saro posted a while back are doing a collaboration with the folks running Formula E, complete with series-approriate commentators and on-screen graphics. They've done two races, with the Seoul one airing yesterday. It's scratching my motorsport itch pretty nicely, ngl.
James Bruton makes robots. He's built a BB-8 replica, a Hulkbuster cosplay, and a number of walking bipedal robots. Here is the latest iteration in his quest to be a one-man, open-source Boston Dynamics.
While I don't expect it to make sense to those not into Warhammer 40K, this video short is FANWORK and the result largely of one person's work, from what I've heard. I've been rewatching this since it came out.
I haven’t hammered a single war but the editing is so effective. Just at the very beginning the confusion of the action cutting to black at exactly the right time. You didn’t process what you last saw while it was happening because there was too much going on, but it’s fresh in your memory during this uncomfortably long moment, and it was the only significant movement in the last clip, right out from dead center, so you were definitely looking at the right thing, and you sure are processing it now. The action moves from left to right across the screen, and occasionally it moves upwards though that’s used sparingly. There is significant pushback in the other direction (mostly right to left but occasionally downward). This holds true even when the camera is circling an object. They’re succeeding, the camera circles right. There’s not any confusion about whether things are progressing. This fan really seems like they know what they’re doing with cinematography.
I remember watching NileRed do interesting chemistry reactions a while back and here they are, making carbonated water out of diamonds:
(As an aside about how ridiculously racist Ancient Aliens is, can I add that one of my personal points of Extreme Hatred is how this sort of stuff likes to cast everything indigenous cultures did as though it all happened in the same vaguely hand-wavey prehistory to elide the fact that, for example, Tenochtitlan was probably founded in the 14th century. They were building floating farms in the lake while Europe was being mauled by the Black Death, not in Deepest Antiquity. Machu Picchu was built around the time Leonardo da Vinci died. The Easter Island moai were probably carved sometime between when Marco Polo was writing confused racist travelogues about the Silk Road and literally when the Spaniards stumbled onto Hispaniola. Cahokia got big around the same time William the Conqueror was building the Tower of London. Most of the Maya civilization was roughly contemporaneous with ancient Greece and Rome, and that temple to Kukulkan in Chichen Itza that everyone's seen pictures of is old, but it's probably a good 1500 years newer than the Parthenon. They deliberately obfuscate the time scales because if they actually side-by-side compared what different parts of the world were like at the same time, the racist hypocrisy would be starkly obvious.)
FABULOUS VIDEO. I’m a little sad that aliens hate white people, but you know what, not everything has to be about me. (This is not an important point or a complaint about the video, but it is a bit of a pet peeve. The blue light from your electronics is not giving you eye injuries. It may fuck with your circadian rhythm, and you may get eye strain from excessive screen time, but there is no evidence I know of that the blue light is actually hurting your eyes. The white backlight apparently throws off more blue light than the blue LEDs, which are a very specific wavelength and not capable of making ultraviolet at your face. The combined brightness of the blue LEDs and the white backlight at its maximum is nowhere near the brightness of being outside on a sunny day. Your electronics simply do not have the power to injure you with harmful blue light. If blue light filter glasses are more comfortable for you, then you should wear them by all means, but don’t let anyone who isn’t your actual eye doctor scare you into buying special glasses for fear that you’re putting your vision at risk. Relevant link.)
@LadyNighteyes thank you, I actually had no idea. I mean I knew a lot of cultures had Good Shit (and plumbing...) when Europeans were running around dying of plague and Being Terrible about chamberpots, but you had some great examples in there. Its easy for my brain to parcel off "never interacted with" with "America/etc was just in a different time stream somehow" and I Fucking Can't with racist asses acting like black people cant do a damn thing I wish we had more of the big old cities and shit from Africa around. I keep meaning to look up more about the continent in general (around with about 400 other topics) because I want to add different cultures to my stories without making them ethnically ambiguous, but I don't end up..doing any of that. Maybe I should use one of Stephanie Harlow's codes and get Magellan on my phone.
In the interests of full disclosure, I dug up the exact comparisons on Wikipedia because most year numbers don't stick in my head very well. :::PPP But yeah, Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire by several centuries.
I don't know terribly much about African history either, and it's something that'd be nice to know more about. That does, however, remind me of old timey archeologists and their desperate quest to find some way, any way at all, to justify claiming Great Zimbabwe was built by the Phoenicians. Also the mention of Marco Polo reminds me - there was a common belief among medieval scholars of the Gates of Alexander, built by Alexander the Great at the end of his conquests, that separated the barbarians of Gog and Magog from civilization. Marco Polo mentions it as a real thing rather offhandedly without it being entirely clear what's going on, but he was talking about the Great Wall of China, which, of course, was not built by Alexander, he just conflated the two. (Amusingly, though, the legend of the Gates of Alexander was probably not based on the Great Wall of China, and is generally stated to be somewhere around the Caspian sea, probably based on any one of numerous fortifications found in the area. The whole legend was first reported in the 1st century AD by Josephus/Yosef ben Matityahu and seems to arise from a... whole weird thing the Jews had with Alexander.)
So, a tool has been made that can solve the battleship minigame in WW in WR pace runs. This video explains how it was solved and how the tool works. It also explains why it is considered a legal thing to use in runs for this category (voted in by the community with a 2/3 majority):
This is one of Red Bard's best videos yet. It is a nice thorough deep dive into the My Immortal situation. She sticks to what we can confirm. Keeps the speculation to the minimum though she does include a section about why she believes it is a troll. It's got some shit in it that I myself did not know. Real good vid, highly recommended. I can recommend most of her deep dives into weird fandom history but like this one in particular is real good.
Didnt she do one about yaoi paddles, because that one was GREAT. everything you need to know about paddles. Straight up documentary. Bless her.
