yani00

[yani00]

For those not in the know, this is one of the Amanita mushrooms referred to as a Destroying Angel. Never, ever, ever, ever forage with an app. Especially for mushrooms.

[yani00]

"we need more complex female characters" yet you couldn't even handle her

[yani00]

why is this the hottest thing i've ever seen

[yani00]

art by @BottlngSunshine

[yani00]

It's like we all collectively forgot as a society that friendship and just connection in general takes effort. Even if you meet someone you immediately click with, it takes hanging out about 20 times (!) to become friends. And guess what, some of those 20 meetings might be awkward or unimpressive.

We all want to reap the benefits (having a friend circle, having a partner, getting married) without doing the work (going to events, interacting with people, learning to handle conflict maturely, dating). Myself included. If I could, I'd never leave the house or go on another mediocre date again... except, that's part of the process.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the cure to the loneliness epidemic is touching some grass and building tolerance for tedious in-person interactions.

[yani00]

Best of YouTube 2023

Yes, I did spend the first week and change of January on this. I wish I could have had it done for New Years, but too many people came out with incredible work in December, so waiting turned out for the best.

What these creators do are a huge influence on my life, I would honestly have difficulty doing what I do without them. That isn't to say that my favorites of the year are *only* on this image--It was almost impossible to narrow down my favorites. Many creators I wanted to include couldn't fit on a single page, and too many of them made more than one video I wished I could draw too!

But, to all of you, thank you for what you do. You're an inspiration.

For those who don't know, further is an explanation.

At the bottom center is an artistic masterpiece by Defunctland: Journey to EPCOT Center: A Symphonic History. Over the last several years, Defunctland has risen from delightfully-entertaining commentary on decommissioned theme park attractions to occasionally dropping stunning statements on the creation of art itself. "Journey to EPCOT Center: A Symphonic History" is worth treating like the cinematic experience it is. Any Disney, theme park, or independent film fan needs to pay attention to this one.

Bottom left is Caelan Conrad with their piece "Drop the T - The Deadly Consequences of Gay Respectability Politics." While I do think they've done more visually or artistically-daring pieces before, "Drop the T" is one of the most important videos released on YouTube in today's current climate of hate. We as queer folk (and our allies) need to understand how integral every identity of the queer experience has been since the start of the Civil Rights movement (and before!). While we are not identical, we are inseparable, and we deserve having our real history easily accessible.

TERFs and other conservative mouthpieces need not reply. Your opinions are trash. 😘

I cannot stop watching and rewatching @patricia-taxxon "On the Ethics of Boinking Animal People." It's not just a defense of furry fandom and its eccentricities, it's a thoughtful and passionate analysis of what the artform achieves that purely human representation can't. Patricia goes outside of her usual essay format to directly speak to the viewer about the elements that define furry media (the most succinct definition I've ever heard) and just how human loving animal cartoons really is.

As an artist who can draw furry characters, but never really got into erotic furry art, this video is a treasure. Why did I choose to have her drawn as a Ghibli character, hanging out with one of the tanukis from "Pom Poko?" Guess you'll have to watch, bruh.

Philosophy Tube continuously puts out videos that I would put on this list--I'm not even sure that "A Man Plagiarised my Work: Women, Money, and the Nation" is the best work she released in 2023. However, this video got many conversations going between myself and my partner, and the twist on the tail end of the video shocked us both to such a degree that I had no choice.

At the very tail end of the year, Big Joel released "Fear of Death." On his Little Joel channel, he described it as the singularly best video he's ever done, and I'm inclined to agree. However, for this illustration I ended up repeatedly going back to a mini-series he did earlier in the year "Three Stories at the End of the World." All three videos are deeply moving and haunting, and I was brought to tears by "We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot." While it may be relative common knowledge that the original Gojira (Godzilla) film was horror grappling with the devastation America's rush to atomic dominance inflicted on Japan, Big Joel still manages to bring new words to the discussion. Please watch all three of the videos, but if for some reason must have only one, let it be "We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot."

Y'all. Let me confess something. I hate football. I hate watching it, I associate seeing it from the stadiums with some of my worst childhood experiences, I despise collegiate and professional football as institutions that destroy bodies and offer up children at the feet of its alter as a pillar of American culture--

I. L o a t h e. Football.

But.

F.D. Signifier could get me to watch an entire hour-plus essay on why I should at least give a passing care. AND HE DID IT. I might think "F*ck the Police," the two-parter on Black conservatism, or his essay on Black men's connection to anime might be "better" videos, but this writer did the impossible and held my limited attention span towards football long enough to make a sincere case for NFL players--and reminds us that millionaires can *in fact* be workers. That alone is testament to his skill.

Sit down and watch "The REAL Reason NFL Running Backs Aren't Getting Paid." Any good anti-capitalist owes it to themselves.

CJ the X continuously puts out stunning, emotional videos, and can do it with the most seemingly-inconsequential starting points. A 30 second song? An incestuous commercial? Five minutes of Tangled? Sure, why not. Go destroy yourself emotionally by watching them. I'm serious. Do it.

Their video Stranger Things and the Meaning of Life manages to to remind us all why the way we react to media does, in fact, matter. Yes, even nostalgia-driven, mass-media schlock. Yes, how we interact with media matters, what it says about us matters, and we all deserve to seek out the whys.

Folding Ideas has spent the last few years articulating exactly why so much of our modern world feels broken, and because of that continuously lives rent-free in my brain. While the tricks that scam artists and grifters use to try to swindle us are never knew, the technology always changes the aesthetics of their performances. Portions of Folding Ideas' explanations might seem dry when going into detail of how stocks work in This is Financial Advice, but every bit of it is necessary to peel back the layers of techno-babble and jargon and make sense of the results of "Meme Stocks."

Jessie Gender puts out nothing but bangers, her absolute unit of a video about Star Wars might be my new favorite thing ever, but none of her work hit so profoundly in 2023 than the two-parter "The Myth of 'Male Socialization'" and "The Trauma of Masculinity." There's so much about modern life that isolates and traumatizes us, and so much of it is just shrugged off as "normal." We owe it to ourselves to see the world in more vivid a color palette than we're initially given.

Panels drawn after Kate Beaton and "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands."

"This is Not a Video Essay" is one of the most intense and beautiful pieces of art I've ever put into my eyeballs. Why do we create? What drives us to connect?

I don't even know what else to say about the Leftist Cook's work, it repeatedly transcends the medium and platform. Watch every single one of their videos, but especially this one.

The likelihood you are terminally online and yet haven't heard of Hbomberguy's yearly forrays into destroying the careers of awful people is pretty slim. Just because it has millions of views doesn't mean that Hbomberguy's "Plagiarism and You(Tube)" isn't worth the hype. Too long? Shut up, it has chapters and YouTube holds your place anyway. You think a deep dive into a handful of creators is only meaningless drama? Well, you're wrong, you wrong-opinion-haver. Plagiarism is a problem because of the actual harm it creates--the history it erases, the labor it devalues, the art it marginalizes--which you would know if you watched "Plagiarism and You(Tube)".

Watch. The damn. Video.

In fact, watch all of them!

Thanks for reading this if you did.

[yani00]

james somerton is clearly extremely fragile & worked to build reputation in a career where he could feel smart all the time, but suddenly became an internet wide laughingstock overnight. i don't know, it was gonna happen eventually, but i think the tears in his apology video are real.

[yani00]

piracy as a morally questionable thing is a very alien concept to me but so is piracy as a morally righteous thing like. Living in south america in a country with constant economic crisis has made me aware that there is fundamentally no moral in the act of downloading a videogame to your pc or a pdf of a book, because in here most things i actually pay for arent original either. Most books i have are copies or secondhand, so no matter if i pay for them or not the creators arent getting any money either way. I cant afford to go to the movies or actually buy videogames so for those things the question isnt if i pay for them or not, the question is if i get to interact with them at all. Its very weird seeing people talk about piracy as a thing that you choose to do or not and that choice having moral weight instead of just a fact of life that almost everyone has to do if they want to access information or entertainment

[yani00]

17 years ago today.. the biggest rockstar move in history.

The look of satisfaction says everything

[yani00]

a comic about printers

I remember seeing a post a couple months back of someone talking about printer troubles and companies making them bad deliberately, like pointlessly different screw sizes and a lying no-usb-compatibility sticker

If someone knows it please tell me, I'm pretty sure I remember it had good resources on a youtube channel that teaches you how to fix stuff!

[yani00]

if you have an android phone get newpipe

thank me later.

[yani00]

Nietzsche believed that you’ve gotta be able to think about suicide before you can move beyond wanting to kill yourself because only once you’ve accepted it as an option can you make the choice not to do it, and the alternative, to deny the urge and ignore it, would inevitably cause you to cave to the unaddressed desire you have for it.

And the dude was right. 

The rogue’s gallery of psych students and junior practitioners on this hellsite have hijacked my post about not being mean to yourself to explain to people how actually what I’m talking about is cognitive-behavioral therapy, and how it involves disciplining yourself to never talk negatively about yourself and how it’s important to check with a therapist that you’re doing it correctly, and like, this is why I don’t trust and can’t stand these people.

Being your own friend is a holistic process, there aren’t exercises you can do or therapy methods you can apply, which is why most people relapse almost immediately after stopping CBT or DBT, because they haven’t actually made any progress in how they look out for themselves, they were merely thrust into a disciplinary regimen where they are taught to engage in habits which their therapist then holds them accountable to, and so, without that therapist, they fall apart again.

Not being mean to yourself doesn’t mean censoring self-deprecating humor, it doesn’t mean snapping a rubber band on your wrist when you have a negative thought, it means taking time to sit down and think about yourself as if you were another person, to really take stock of who you are from as objective a perspective as you can muster, and if you really want to grow, realizing that this person you see can’t grow if the person closest to them, which is you, spends all their time berating them and making them feel like shit.

Being friends with yourself is not a series of therapeutic exercises, it’s challenging yourself to evaluate why you’re a dick to yourself in a way you aren’t to other people, or maybe you are a dick to other people, and maybe you want to be a dick to yourself, which is goofy as fuck, but if you’re still suffering, maybe ask yourself why the fuck you want to be such a dick, the answers may surprise you.

[yani00]

anyway all that to say that if you’re a dropout if you have shit grades if you go to an alt school and are looked down on for it if you’re in your 5th or 6th or whatever year of high school if you’re still getting your GED if you’re taking night classes if you missed out on “universal” high school experiences if you were abused by your peers (because make no mistake, that’s what bullying is) if you were expelled if you were truant every single year if you were homeschooled and got sick of the jokes if you never attended a full week if the whole world treats you like the scum of the earth all because of your high school experience or lackthereof you’re not alone. there’s so many of us that have been beaten down and broken by the school systems we’re subject to and the hostility they breed and the abusive environments they foster. some day we won’t have to be treated like objects of pity or contempt to be swept aside but until then we have each other

[yani00]

abandoned space elevator

[yani00]

Nintendo DSi

The Nintendo DSi is able to connect to an online store similar to the Wii Shop Channel,called the DSi Shop. Users will be able to download DSiWare games and applications to the internal memory or the SD card of the user’s DSi system. The DSi will be released in Japan on November 1

Long wait for Australia to get this product zZzZzZ

[yani00]

im manifesting team vampire frye so hard. you dont get it. shes the ideal vampire form.

[yani00]

"No one can love you until you love yourself" is like the worst possible way of articulating "if you don't respect and value yourself, it's very easy to become attracted to people who don't treat you right and then justify their mistreatment, so be careful."