Who's releasing comfy, casual, interesting, and/or educational, long-form video content regularly?
It's time to find new creators to follow—ideally folks who upload often enough that I probably won't forget they exist, and whose videos are long enough to enjoy.
A few of my top, still-active creators:
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Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
Casual, plant/fungal science
20–40+min/weekly -
RedLetterMedia
Comfy, film discussion, comedy
30–60+min/weekly-ish -
Some More News
Current Events, comedy
40–60+min/weekly -
Lawful Masses with Leonard French
Less casual, legal discussion
15–45+min/every few days
While their topics aren't related (and don't limit yourself to them), they all upload relatively long-form content on a pretty regular basis. They all fill a niche comfortably, and uniquely—with their own personality. There's usually something to learn, and something to chew on, and something to laugh at.
And they're not all so big that we've all heard of them before (except, perhaps RLM)
I'm not sure what you mean exactly by casual, but seeing as you mention Legal Eagle I can somewhat try to give you recommendations. For the description you're looking for:
Technology Connections
Niche: General technology. Often, older technology. Lots of series on a specific type of tech (see playlists).
This is a ridiculously good channel. The guy is funny and good spirited. He completely turned me on to how air conditioning works.
Example video: The Safety Can Opener (tildes thread)
Not Just Bikes
Niche: Bikes, but not just bikes. Public transportation, city planning, urban design, walkable spaces, etc. Talks a lot about infrastructure in the Netherlands. This is one of my absolute favourite channels and he introduces some other channels as well in his videos. I binged his entire upload history over a matter of days.
Note: His videos are categorized. Orange ones are his main ones, which you'll be most interested in. Green are shorts, red are channel meta, blue are just some bike rides, and black are special series.
Start with this shorter video
Medlife Crisis
Niche: Healthcare. Funny and relaxed cardiologist talking about various medical topics.
In general, I try to post all exceptional quality videos on Tildes, so feel free to take a look through what I've posted, you'll likely find some good stuff.
https://tildes.net/user/Adys/search?type=topic&q=videos
I'm gonna second Technology Connections. The videos are consistently good and almost always answer some kind of question that I didn't know that I had.
And I'm thirding. He deploys the wonder and fascination towards technology / engineering as Bill Hammack , albeit in a more casual and less professoral fashion.
@Deimos so i see that last link is actually not public. Is there a way to make it so? I take it this was done with intent, but I want people to be able to search my posts.
These might not be regular or frequent enough for your taste, but here are a few channels that might be interested in:
Atomic Frontier: Science communication. In the same vein as Tom Scott. Why Skyscrapers don't fall over
Adam Raguesa: Investigative food techniques and recipes (one of each per week). I can't vouch for the recipes, but I'm a fan of the stuff like his video about the effects of different ingredients in pizza dough
Defunctland: Theme park histories. Most are shorter than this, but this one was the best video he's ever produced: History of Fastpass
Mustard: Retrofuturism documentaries. Mostly aviation. The plane used to carry the Buran shuttle
Numberphile: Popular mathematics. Bertrand's Paradox
Summoning Salt: Speedrunning history documentaries. Super Mario Bros
Wendover Productions: Documentaries about modern life. The Failure of Drone Delivery
I really appreciate Adam Raguesa for how he brings a variety of history/sociology perspectives into videos that are ostensibly "cooking". I'm thinking particularly of his new kitchen video, which leads into the architectural and sociological impacts of living in a place where slavery or domestic servitude used to be common.
His channel was a relatively new find for me and I hadn't seen that video yet. Thanks for linking it. It's pretty interesting.
I'm going to completely neglect the diversity of my YouTube subscriptions and do a deep-ish dive into the game design corner that I frequent. That should set the niche relatively well, but I'll elaborate a bit on details:
The Architect of Games - tends to explore a relatively abstract game design concept in quite a bit of depth. Usually very interesting. I suspect this gets a lot less casual and more educational if you're interested in making games; if you're not, this is just about highlighting interesting games and understanding the medium.
Razbuten - Famous for "gaming for a non-gamer", but he's since moved towards content that I'd compare to AoG above. Quite similar, actually.
There's also Extra Credits - I seem to have fallen out of the habit of watching their game design videos; they feel uninspired to me these days. Sometimes they have great history pieces though. I particularly liked the collapse of the bronze age one.
There's also Indigo Gaming, who I'll mostly mention for his past videos about TES, Fallout and god games. Check out the most popular uploads.
Now for the nostalgia review section:
Raycevick tends to explore games X years after they released. Generally mainstream games, with a focus on racing and shooters. Sadly, not very active these days, but generally good quality.
Salt Factory's shtick is "Was X as good as I remember". Mostly RPGs. Relatively frequent uploads.
Mandalore Gaming covers weird games. There's the super weird like Myster of the Druids or Limbo of the Lost, but there's also stuff like Pathologic in there, which is a genuinely good, albeit inaccessible game. Then there's the classics mandalore covers, like the Stronghold, System Shock or Thief series.
Generally, I try to follow all of these, skipping the occasional video that covers a game or genre I'm not fond of. With all of them being somewhat slow to upload (think 1-2 months rather than weekly or whatever), that's generally quite doable. The ones of these that don't upload that frequently, I find their backlog quite impressive.
AoG and Razbuten are both fantastic. I appreciate AoG's willingness to deep-dive on something that's much more niche than some other channels (and also his running-gag about his inferiority complex with GMTK)
I'm slightly programmed to think anything longer than 10 minutes is "long-form," so feel comfortable recommending standupmaths, who has videos out roughly every 2 weeks, typically around the 10-20 minute mark. It's basically a popular mathematics channel by Matt Parker, and you don't have to have a Ph.D. in math to understand it, that's what he's there for.
There are two YouTube channels that I watch who both happen to be friends with eachother who both talk about games and media and art, all of them fairly interchangeably and fluidly. They are ThorHighHeels and hazel.
Neither of them are quite regular with their upload schedule, I think, but their content is the most comfy I could ever think of. They both talk in relaxed tones and they have this particular shared vernacular filled with art-related invented terms like “skung” and “sofistifuture”.
ThorHighHeels talks mostly about games and their aesthetics. He has a number of videos on the specific aesthetics that were being cultivated at Square around the start of the millennium which I found to be both nostalgic and illuminating. A lot of his videos focus on obscure games and their aesthetics and music. He is an artist and seeing his interesting designs for title cards is always worthwhile.
On the other hand, hazel is all about the art and she doesn’t care so much about what media it is from as to how it affects her. Her videos are also long and rambling in the best of ways. He last video was basically a super long compilation of her playing a big selection of “cozy RPGs”. It was surprisingly rewarding to watch through the whole thing.
Either of them speak with soft voices that clearly aren’t professionally coached, which makes their videos feel very relaxing and inviting. They also tend to talk about older media which has the effect of making their content seem nostalgic even if you don’t have any history with what they are talking about. And because they are talking about it with so much of their personal interpretation it will make the things you did experience in the past feel a bit more fresh and unique.
I've got to give a shout out to World War Two
I know, more WWII history, hasn't that been done to death? Well, yes. But This channel has an interesting feature: each week of videos (about three or four a week, at 15 to 20 minutes each) is a week of the war, examined. Special shout out to Indy Neidell... while the whole crew is great, Indy is fun. I love history but hate dry presentation, so most history YouTube leaves me flat. Indy is enough of a showman to make it interesting without sacrificing the education.
Since you explicitly requested casual, I'll plug Friday Night Tights. They rake whatever hot garbage is coming out of hollywood over the coals and praise anything that's worth watching. If you follow the many participants and guests in that show you'll find similar coverage of video games, comic books, and sports. They livestream every Friday evening for an audience of around 20k viewers for 4-6 hours. It's the sort of conversation that's common in the back rooms of comic shops or at the D&D table - nerdy, juvenile, and often hilarious.
Branch Education - Incredibly well-produced and well-animated videos on how things work, like JPEG compression, Bluetooth, speakers, mouse laser tracking, etc. I recently came across it. I initially thought it'd be some low-quality auto-gen, auto-narrated junk — but then I was blown away by the level of quality.
Nomad Architecture - A British architect travelled to remote places to video-document how different nomadic ethnic peoples build their shelters. The videos are minimalist with little music or talking. You feel like you've teleported somewhere else to silently watch these incredibly hardy individuals build or assemble ingenious structures.