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Which online content creators do you regularly follow?
Specifically, the kind of folks you like so much that whenever they release new content, you stop what you're doing and eagerly check out whatever it is they've put out.
This could be YouTube channels, podcasts, illustrators, webcomic artists, blogs, Twitter users, writers, you name it. (As long as they're not a nameless, faceless infinite feed!)
I know this is a pervasive term, at this point, so... this is nothing against you, @vivian, but... does anyone else find the term "content creator" kinda gross? It's so mechanical and commercial and lifeless and reductive, in my eyes.
Or, maybe... those that would label themselves "content creators" are those whose content I'd rather not ... "consume." Give me an artist, a writer, a director, a designer... a person just sharing their humanistic anything without pretense any day over some breathing machine made for algorithm manipulation in order to gain more views in order to gain more advertisement dollars in order to...create.
That said, here are a few of my favorite Content Creators®:
Tim Lerch, for his tender solo guitar playing.
Andy Galpin, for health and fitness related issues sans any BROscience.
Jacques Pépin, for... it's fuckin' Jacques Pépin! A damn legend!
Steve Hampton, for all your life-drawing needs.
The Doughboys Podcast, for laughs. They haven't failed to make me laugh, yet. Very therapeutic!
Citations Needed, for some in-your-face left-ism that is also grounded and self-aware.
Here are the things in my "priority" RSS feed category:
Of these, biggest shout-outs to Subnormality (so many words. so many GOOD words), Johnny Wander (I'm loving Barbarous, and I can't recommend Lucky Penny enough), MicTheSnare (who needs theneedledrop when you've got Mic), Cinefix (their movie lists are so enthusiastic and gushy and convincing that I can help but feel just as excited as they are), and Kicks Condor (they're doing such strange and curious things on the internet).
On YouTube: jan Misali (Conlang Critic), PBS Spacetime, 3Blue1Brown, CaptainDisillusion, Lindsay Ellis, Vihart, Northernlion (though he publishes every day)
There's a web serial, Worth The Candle, I'm always excited to see new chapters for.
He rarely posts, but I'm always hoping to see more from bluefluke's tumblr.
I check n-gate once every few weeks. It's commentary on the hacker news feed? So I think it counts.
I like the AI Weirdness blog. They do funny things with GPT-2 these days, like generating post-human flirting manuals.
The last one needs some explanation. On my book torrent site, there are freeleech tokens, which you spend one of to download a book without it affecting your upload ratio. For 10 tokens, you can add a book to the next site freeleech, which happens twice a month. So twice a month I go look at all the books that people thought are good enough to spend tokens recommending.
I love jan Misali, and I have only have a very mild interest in conlangs. I'm not sure what it is about his channel but it's very watchable/listenable.
n-gate is good indeed, I find it quite therapeutic to go there when HN really annoys me.
Trying to stick to more obscure ones, since my podcast feed, for example, is mostly the "usual" big hits, i.e The Daily, The Weeds, NPR shows, etc. and I don't think it's that valuable to tell people that I enjoy This American Life or something.
Youtube
The Modern Rogue - covers a wide range of topics, loosely themed overall as things a "modern rogue" (i.e a James Bond sort of figure) would do, but more or less an excuse to goof around. Often represented as a goofier and more adhoc version of Mythbusters, but they also cover topics like "how to appreciate whisky" or "what are the things to look for in cigars?". The crew and cast started as a National Geographic show so the production quality is excellent.
LegalEagle - The lawyer in this case has a genuinely excellent resume and is as charismatic as you'd expect a good trial lawyer to be.
Steve Wallis - Honestly, can't really explain why, but I love watching him camp in jank places.
Podcasts
ATP - out of all the relay.fm shows, this is my favorite. Mostly because of the mix of personalities. I'm not sure if I'd enjoy a show just with John, for instance, but watching him and Casey get into their "fights" is hilarious. If you don't like Apple products, wouldn't watch it though, although topics range from John's spaghetti recipe to Casey's use of emojis.
Just a friendly heads up, Accidental Tech Podcast isn't on the relay network :). But you're very right the hosts are (Casey is on Analogue and Marco is on Under the Radar).
And yeah, all three of them are such great friends and have a fantastic rapport with each other—including their arguments and disagreements on opinions. It's top of my podcast list in terms of priority if a new episode is out.
I'll throw my hat in for Upgrade with Jason Snell & Mike Hurley as being good for Apple news, as well as The Talk Show with John Gruber for wider coverage and opinion.
Huh, TIL. For some reason I always assumed it was on relay. I guess there's just a lot of cross pollination and they talk about relay a lot.
I am watching a lot of content from Jonathan Blow (game developer and designer) and Casey Muratori (game developer).
The first is streaming his work on a language compiler that he's creating and also on a Sokoban like game that he's developing with it. His stream.
The second has been streaming for a couple of years the work he's been doing on a game "from scratch". The twitch channel streams in the weekends, but more details can be found on the project's actual web page.
Here's what I check frequently - i.e. at least once a week. There's lots more stuff that I look at once every few months or so, which I have listed on various pages of my personal site.
Podcasts
I can also highly reccommed Behind the Bastards, but that is often too depressing to regularly check on.
Webcomics
Blogs
Youtubers
Hbomberguy, Folding Ideas/Dan Olson, Fredrik Knudsen
Some favourites of mine:
Gaming
Noah Caldwell-Gervais. I'm fairly confident Noah was frozen in time in the 60s and 10 years ago woke up from stasis and decided since he's stuck with all this new-fangled tech he mind as well be an independent games journalist who also does travel videos from his VW bus. He's an absolute treasure and a hidden gem on Youtube.
Football
Brett Kollmann breaks down NFL film for a deep dive on what's driving the current success and failures of teams and players in the NFL. Always learning something and always a great watch.
The QB School is interesting because it's a former journeyman NFL quarterback breaking down the play and performance of today's NFL quaterbacks. Obviously he has a ton of insight about the game and it's interesting to hear.
Sports
Saved the best one for last. If even a small part of you is a sports fan I think some of the best videos on the internet are made by a man named John Bois. His chart party series are strange, sometimes wacky looks at sports irregularities and points of fascination and well worth a watch.
The series started on his personal Jon Bois channel (and you need to watch the first episodes there) before he got picked up by SB Nation and the series continued there under the chart party moniker. The rest of the series can now be found in the Secret Base chart party playlist here.
Edit: One of my favourite Jon Bois videos on poker got DMCA'ed by Poker Central but can be watched here. If you like poker it's worth a watch.
On YouTube in no particular order:
Giant Bomb (Video game reviews/LP)
Northernlion (LP)
Ashens (Um? Weird food? Counterfeit consoles, shitty dollar store reviews?)
JANGBRICKS (Lego reviews)
GothamChess (Chess LP/instructor)
RebelTaxi (Animation reviews)
Star Wars Explained (Star Wars explained)
Obsidian Ant (Elite: Dangerous news)
Flailthroughs (Gundam Battle Operation 2 news/LP)
GameGrumps (LP)
PhlyDaily (Warthunder news/LP)
Forgotten Weapons (Firearms/history)
Technology Connection (Tech stuff)
Scott Manly (Space stuff)
LGR (Old PC tech)
I’m a nerd and I like nerd shit.
I've been reading Pale, a webserial by author Wildbow, who I've been following for probably 5 years now. He is seriously prolific, writing two lengthly chapters every week with almost no breaks for years now, and Pale is, in my opinion, his best work yet. It takes all of the strengths and lessons learned from his previous works and builds on them in a pretty impressive way. I would say it's be best bit of genre fiction I've read in a few years and I'm enjoying reading each chapter as it comes out and seeing the rampant speculation and memeing in the community.