started watching a random storytelling advice video titled How to Become a God with the expectation of getting mad that no one ever talks about homestuck, only for the creator to talk about homestuck for five whole minutes of this 17 minute video. what a nice surprise!
https://nebula.tv/videos/talefoundry-how-to-become-a-god
(sorry it's only on nebula atm)
a whole genre of video essay has emerged concurrent with the ttrpg boom just devoted to story analysis from a worldbuilding perspective-- magic systems, alt history, map-making, conlang, avoidable tropes, etc. i must admit that i don't find many of these channels particularly illuminating or useful? feels self-help adjacent at its worst when folks are selling how-to-write books and yet haven't published any fiction to speak of
THAT SAID tale foundry seems chill and respectably high-effort!
maybe one of these days i'll do a nebula-only vidrev roundup. it'd be three videos long and mostly involve me complaining about how nobody running independent streaming services seems even remotely interested in experimenting with new interface paradigms and as a result mostly encourage users to not use them
oh wait i bet nobody's innovating in streaming UI because so much streaming traffic comes from apps on TVs, consoles, and phones, instead of real computers with input mechanisms made for adults
there's also kind of an astonishing amount of anti-chinese propaganda on nebula and i don't really know what to do with that lmao
seriously though wtf? there's one channel called polymatter that's like "a bunch of different topics and also china," then they have a dedicated series called polymatter-- China Actually that's a featured original promoted in the site banner??? i haven't watched any of these vids so idk maybe i'm wrong but in the trailer the host claims to be trying to talk about china "without hyperbole" and i'm sorry but your thumbnails and banner ads are exclusively hyperbole
one problem i have with nebula is that there's seemingly no specific ideological or political criteria for what gets hosted there besides "is successful enough on youtube to drive traffic and/or has enough problems with youtube censorship to make exclusives and/or someone at nebula likes them."
i don't care about the morality of that so much as how it results in a kind of boring platform where you can pretty much only discover what's already popular elsewhere
@sarahzedig TBH I currently think of Nebula as a great way for creators I already like to make stuff they otherwise couldn't. I don't really use it as a primary viewing platform.
@sarahzedig Hm.. thats not. great. The titles and thumbnails are definitely framed in the same kind of clickbait you would push on youtube to get the max amount of attention by getting people upset. I would figure that wouldn't be necessary on a platform like Nebula.
@sarahzedig So I bit the bullet and watched the "China's Fundamental Economic Problem" polymatter video on youtube to see if it gets weird with it.
And... kinda? It mainly doesn't say... anything. Like it really just says that China relied on building infrastructure to keep its economy strong and it's running out of room, and that's spread out into 14 minutes. What mainly stood out to me is that he doesn't talk about the effect of this on the average chinese citizen
@sarahzedig No mention about how they feel about this economic change, no talking about if people are having trouble finding places to live or food to eat. he doesn't even reference any media, journalism, or statement from anyone in china. At all. It's this very outsider look at a situation and it drips with a vibe of "oh you silly kids, look at what you did! Guess you didn't know any better."
@sarahzedig Also its fucking boring. Monotone voice saying next to nothing for 14 minutes. Worst version of a video essay.
@thewispsoftime yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
bonus gripe: nebula doesn't let you change search parameters for some reason. i searched "china" in that first screenshot above and there's no option to view results chronologically. so that's cool