Share and explain your YouTube Subs

In My Humble Opinion
1

I like discovering new video content - my particular favourite topics are: Woodworking, metalworking, traditional crafts, foraging, nature, quirky musical and animated content, plus tech stuff and nerdy-content vlogs

I’m sure this has been done before, but I thought it might be good to have a thread with one-paragraph reviews of your favourite YouTube channels - something like this:

I subscribe to:
Aquachigger - he explores rivers for ‘treasure’, which can be lost GoPros, or American Civil War cannonballs.
It’s good because: it’s interesting, and well-presented in a friendly and engaging manner

ArtMöbius - A Cool Spanish-language channel, not huge, but it’s good because it has some great origami-style crafting, done with recycled aluminium drink cans

AvE - Proper manly metal engineering, teradowns of expensive kit, presented in a hard-talking, yet easygoing way.

Bad Lip Reading - comedy voiceovers of famous people (news and movies) saying what it looks like they were saying, not what they actually said.

BigCliveDotCom - A Soft-speaking Scots electrical technician tears down and explains (mostly cheap) electroncis stuff

Bill Wurtz - Clearly a talented musician, singer and videographer, makes very short, surreal videos that are hard to explain (like ‘shaving my piano’)

Carl Jacobson - high quality traditional woodturning

Cody’sLab - Amateur science including refining metals, plant culture experimentation, mining and cool things with stuff you thought was deadly poisonous.

ColinFurze - Mad-as-a-brush British engineer making cool, insanely-dangerous stuff out of metal

ElectroBOOM - electricity and electronics explained by a crazy Iranian masochist

Grant Thompson - The King of Random - Howtos, lifehacks, cool projects

GreatScott! - Old school electronics projects that actually work

JoergSprave - AKA The Slingshot Channel - Jolly German guy makes terrifying weapons

Matthias Wandel - the internet authority on making wooden geared mechanisms - very talented, yet grounded woodworker - currently making his own bandsaw from scratch.

Nerdist - ‘Because Science’ explanatory vlogs, movie news and reviews all with a sci fi slant.

Peter Brown - cool projects in wood and resin

Rextorn Metalwork - Beautiful traditional metalcrafting in videos that are superbly artful

Smooth McGroove - Skilful one-man a capella renditions of video game music.

TAOFLEDERMAUS - Cool experiments with guns - shooting slugs made of all sorts of stuff.

Techmoan - Slightly grumpy reviews of new action and dash cameras, as well as vintage audio kit.

The CGBros - Collected short animations of generally very high quality.

The Slow Mo Guys - Slow motion reveals of everyday and not-so-everyday events. Cool to watch.

TheBackyardScientist - dangerous experiments, amateur style.

Trollskyy- Makes beautiful handmade knives out of old tools, car springs, etc.

Veritasium - Lucid and accessible explanations of interesting science topics

Vsauce(also Vsauce2and VSauce3) - high quality discussion of science, philosophy, maths, sociology and other complex topics

Wintergatan- Swedish Folktronica music - using some instruments that were purpose built by the band, and also non-instruments such as typewriters etc.
yeti dynamics - animations showing what it would look like on Earth if various things other than the moon were in orbit.

I hope that this thread will also be good for us to recommend specific channels to each other, based on what sorts of things we clearly like, but haven’t listed.

2

Looking through my subscriber inbox, I really seem to like AMV creators and let’s players. But that is boring for others, so here is some variety that we all might enjoy together.

The New Screen Savers - Remember that early 2000‘s show on TechTV/G4, The Screen Savers? Well, it has been revived, since last year, into a weekly format on YouTube, with the original hosts. They help callers with their computer problems, discuss tech news/issues, do interviews, and generally keep the laypeople informed, while also having deeper discussions that the real nerds and professionals can appreciate.

The Great War - ‘The Great War’ shows you the history of the First World War in the four years from 1914 to 1918, exactly 100 years ago. Our host Indy takes you back week by week and shows you what was going on in the past. Learn more about the Allies and the Central Powers, emperors, Winston Churchill, Wilhelm II, soldiers, battles and of the life aside the battlefield.” quoted from their own About-Description tab

Gregory Horror Show - luckily the channel name matches the series’ name Just an interesting Japanese series animated in a 3d Minecraft-like style. It is about the afterlife, and how our regrets, delusions, and unwillingness to take responsibility for our own life/actions makes us lose our way and prefer the ever-worsening conditions of our own mental prisons to reality. If you can stand Let’s Plays, I do suggest watching Cloud8745‘s play through of the Playstation adaptation of the series, as that is what got me into the series.

Classic Show - YouTube likes to take down stuff like this, so do not expect this channel/link to work if you are viewing this thread a year later. Anyway, I appreciate and sub to channels like this, that do content aggregation for Batsu games (punishment games) done by the Japanese group Downtown. Searching for Gaki no Tsukai also works. This group of 5 comedians spend 24 hrs in a themed place (like working as teachers or being detectives) with the rule being -if you laugh you get punished. The result is 3hrs of them getting put into hilarious situations, and them getting spanked, or kicked in the butt by a kickboxer when they can’t suppress their own laughter. I also wish that they did more Absolutely Tasty series, where they try to cook/eat good food with weird ingredients.

HomeStarRunnerDotCom - Funny flash animations about a guy in a luchador mask and boxing gloves on his hands answering people’s email questions. Does seasonal bonus animations new update for this Halloween

Wizard People, Dear Reader - this is a full playlist of Brad Neely’s hilarious reading of the first Harry Potter book set to the visuals of the first movie. Just give it a chance, please. It… its like an MST3K riff track on the book.

3

I think I have one, because I keep getting email notifications of one. Is that what a “YouTube Sub” is? It’s full length Ethiopian movie releases. There are hundreds of Ethiopian fulll length films on youtube, and I’ve watched a few, and somehow must have clicked the Sub button. A few are actually very, very good movies, but most bring to mind a Mexican version of a Bollywood picture without the music/dancing. There’s one I saw on a bus in Ethiopia, and want to watch again at home, but I can’t find out the name of the picture.

4

Just one.

Clickspring - A guy documenting building a clock from flat brass plate and rod stock in his machine shop.

5

Okay. Apart from some personal ones, and a few I follow but don’t subscribe to because of too much chaff, in alphabetical order:

CaptDeadmeat - A friend of mine who plays video games and puts them online. It’s surprisingly entertaining to watch other people who are good (or not) play games.

Cosplay Chris - An Australian cosplayer who is really good at sprucing up cheap toys and making them look more impressively expensive works of art.

EVNautilus - A scientific exploration of the ocean floor. Some amazing lucky discoveries of weird undersea creatures as they cruise around atolls and coral reefs.

Felicia Day - Queen of the nerds. I also follow her Twitch channel.

fullychargedshow - A UK pro-EV channel, hosted by comedy actor Robert Llewellyn from Red Dwarf and Scrapheap Challenge.

Grace Helbig - A “YouTuber” who has great comic sensibilities and regularly makes me laugh.

homestarrunnerdotcom - Now that Flash is arguably dead, they put all their clips (rare events these days) on YouTube.

James Bruton - XRobots. James makes costumes and robots using 3D printing and Arduinos.

Keshen8 - A Lego animator of great skill. I think he’s Australian.

Kevin Smith - As much as he can be an annoying blowhard, and I don’t like his movies, his YouTube channel is fun to watch. Marc Bernardin helps make it better.

Mr Ben Brown - A videographer who vlogs most days, often with a quadcopter drone, I discovered him via the Chris Hadfield Arctic trip from a few months ago. A talented and upbeat guy, he lives a life I wish I could’ve had.

MyHarto - Hannah Hart is one of the aforementioned Grace Helbig’s friends, is equally as funny, and does My Drunk Kitchen, which is apparently coming to TV soon.

OfficialNerdCubed - Another video game vlogger. There are many to choose from, but I can only handle a couple. Dan is one of the better, more widely known ones. He got married yesterday.

QITV - QI’s channel, where they put clips from both QI and No Such Thing As The News.

The Muppets - Needs no explanation.

thebrainscoop - Just started following Emily Graslie. She’s a zoology nerd who works at The Field Museum in Chicago

Tom Scott - You might recognise him, he does a lot of interesting videos about interesting things around the world that get spread around a lot. Also a few comedic things in accompaniment. He went on the aforementioned Arctic trip too.

Vaginal Fantasy - Felicia Day hosts a book club, with Bonnie Burton, Kiala Kazebee, and Veronica Belmont. Not only do they talk about romantic fantasy novels, but they’re vry funny and also nice to look at.

vlogbrothers - Also a recent addition, but I’ve seen their videos around a lot before now. Two brothers, John and Hank Green, make videos each week discussing interesting and personal things, sometimes with great insight, and usually objectively. They’re almost like the American versions of Tom Scott, I guess.

6

Very nice - I subscribed.

7

If you have a google account, you can sign into YouTube (as opposed to just going there to watch stuff) - one of the features of a signed-in account is that you can ‘subscribe’ to various YouTube channels and this makes it easy to keep up with new content on those channels as soon as it appears.

The YouTube site will tend to make recommendations to the signed-in user about stuff they might like to look at, and subscribe to, but often this only allows you to travel the beaten track - to discover other channels that are like the ones you already like, or are liked by people who liked the same stuff as you already like - both of which are useful, but won’t often challenge you to try something different- that’s one of my goals in starting this thread.