chat

I pretend that Chef John is my dad sometimes and now can you too.

Other cooking channels I recommend include Ziang's Food Workshop, School Of Wok, Joshua Weissman and YSAC. How To Cook That with Anne Riordan has lots of fun debunking videos as well.

For video-essays I like Big Joel and Lindsay Ellis. Also ContraPoints but the content is pretty slow and steady.

For gaming I like RagnarRox, Razbuten and Kilian.

Reactistan posts endearing Tribal People React content and Accented Media summarizes cool Chinese movies that I would never hear anything about otherwise.

Also this is not a new complaint but the YouTube algorithm is so shit, it shows me the same few things every time I log in and hasn't shown me anything from the channels linked above in literal years. It has been an up hill battle to enjoy YouTube since at least 2013.

HI THIS IS CHEF JOHN FROM FOOD WISHES DOT COM

my mind took this a little too literal and went with the 18th century cooking guys at Townsends. still a good channel though

I'm a huge fan of Drawfee when I want something light-hearted and incredibly wholesome. It's a bunch of art / graphics folks who just get together and do weird drawing prompt games. It's fun, funny, creative and their whole vibe is just lovely the way they talk each other up.

this old house releases full episodes every week (on their own site, not youtube).
stud pack - they're building a house right now.
kirsten dirksen - she tours cool houses.
dr geoff lindsey - cool stuff about english phonology.
casual navigation - ship stuff explained.
simon roper - interesting stuff about mainly old english.
k klein - also about linguistics, p good.
nick zentner - US west coast geology, mainly washington state geology. has a huge backlog. some of his stuff is on the washington state university youtube channel, most on his own channel.
historia civilis - mainly roman history, with low budget pixel graphics that can be hilarious sometimes.

Ross Scott at Accursed Farms. His Game Dungeon series where he just talks about an old obscure as hell game and whatever other related thoughts meander in is great.

If you enjoy the vibes of Baumgartner Restoration, there's a big backlog there. It's art restoration, so you kind of have to turn off the "fine art is money laundering for the ultra wealthy" part of your brain to enjoy it, but if you can do that, it's quite soothing.

Frostprime is a high-energy streamer with sometimes problematic chat/jokes who posts daily YouTube videos, often of Slay the Spire. I go through cycles where I find him incredibly funny for a few weeks and then can't stand him anymore.

There's a whole series of Elden Ring Bingo matches where speed runners race to complete various tasks in Elden Ring. It's pretty fun if you're into it, probably dreadfully boring if not.

Clips of British panel shows can be good. I've been watching Taskmaster recently, which actually has full episodes on YouTube, very nice. Would I Lie to You clips are also pretty top notch. I think there are some full episodes too, but I haven't really looked.

I'll second Colin Furze, he's great. A sort of similar vibe (not really) is I Did a Thing. He often makes things, hardly ever wears shoes, and puts way too much effort (just the right amount) into his throwaway bits. He's also an actual leftist and half of Boy Boy, although his leftism rarely comes up on the I Did a Thing channel. My one issue with him is that I'm vegan and some of his videos are incredibly not vegan friendly. Lotta gross stuff with dead animal bits, so if that's an issue for you, be wary.

Oh, also, Viva La Dirt League is pretty great and also has a huge backlog. You'll almost certainly enjoy at least one of their long-running series. I particularly like Souls Logic and wish there were more of it.