How to follow up shooting your cameraman with a crossbow
Last week on YouTube: Medieval safety lessons learned. Four-byte burger reconstructed. 2000s visions reappraised.
What is this thing?
Every day on YouTube, thousands of channels play new and baffling video games. These are some of them.
Honkai: Star Rail (April 2023) is a new turn-based RPG from the developers of the massive hit Genshin Impact. Like that game, it’s free-to-play, but will make a fortune by tempting players to pay real money for a chance to obtain better characters through a gacha system. The drop chances are the same as Genshin, with a 0.6% chance to get a five-star character on any pull of the slot machine. Best of luck to all the regulars at the anime girl casino.
Deceive Inc. (March 2023) is a new deduction/extraction shooter that combines ideas from the journo-revered SpyParty, Prop Hunt, and nearly every game under the sun. In it, four teams of players disguise themselves as NPCs or props and compete to achieve their objective and/or kill each other. Party channels seem to like it, but some deduction-game fans don’t love having shootouts with FPS guys.
Amanda the Adventurer (April 2023) is a kids-horror game that mixes VHS nostalgia, 90s CGI, and a lot of cartoon saucer-eyes straight from the Putt-Putt era. This previously made the rounds with a “pilot episode” in the DreadXP Found Footage Jam. It’s wild that Amanda has tens of millions of YouTube views, 97% positive Steam reviews, etc., but the game and its entire genre of micro-horror titles are largely ignored by any games press outside of YouTube.
David Szymanski’s Iron Lung (March 2022), a submarine horror game, is one of the few true micro-horror classics. Horror icon/children’s entertainer Markiplier just announced that he’s turning it into a movie. If Markiplier stars in a feature film after years of working as a horror host and occasionally posing nude, his transformation into Elvira will be complete.
Shooting your cameraman with a crossbow is a tough act to follow
You might have seen headlines like “BLOKE DRUNKENLY SHOT BY CROSSBOW IN TWITCH STREAM RECEIVES BEER INSTEAD OF FIRST AID” (The Daily Star) last weekend. If you track down the dim video, you’ll see almost exactly what you imagined: the streamers wanted to test whether a crossbow could shoot through a door, the cameraman got on the other side of the door, the crossbow passed the test, and Twitch chatters spent the next 10 minutes repeating “hospital” and “fuck you guys are dumb.”
To anyone who misses the halcyon days of Jackass and just-guys-being-blokes television, this moronic event was a breath of fresh air. But it’s merely a breath of normal air for fans of the streamers, OfficialDuckStudios, who do a lot of things like this. They quickly returned to the content grind in a video uploaded Tuesday:
After supreme reactor Cr1TiKaL imagined a follow-up MrBeast video called “How Many Doors Does It Take To Stop A Crossbow From Killing My Friend,” ODS manifested it. The resulting video resembles many they’ve made before: a bad idea, a trip to Home Depot, some destructive testing, and a huge mess for someone to clean up.
The 1.1M-sub channel’s videos date back to 2014 and include hits like “I encased my hands in concrete,” “can I beat Halo before the concrete hardens around me?”, “I deep fried a loaded gun,” and “the biggest blunt ever made!” Did I mention these guys are from America? A lot of their videos parody clickbait trends that have come and gone over the last six years, and they share a lo-fi “bros in a house trying dumb stuff” vibe that seems like a relic of an earlier YT era amid today’s landscape of big-budget MrBeasting. They also have a bunch of old deleted videos where they say slurs and shit.
It’s not my corner of YouTube, but they clearly have a bunch of fans who’ve been along for the ride for years.
Surely it was one of those once-young fans who felt obligated to donate $5 to send the message “Attention idiots: go to hospital. Internal bleeding possible” while watching them pour hydrogen peroxide on a crossbow wound.
The interesting part of this story is not that the Twitch “community” was “outraged” (hard to find anyone who seems offended or even surprised) or that ODS was banned from the platform (Twitch haphazardly bans and unbans streamers every day). It’s not even the helpful bit of Father’s Wisdom about interior doors being hollow. It’s that the ODS crew went immediately to work capitalizing on their Livestream Fail, and in YouTube logic it was totally correct to do so. On other social platforms, users often spend time placating all the people who are mad at them or pretending to be. On YT it makes sense just to reformat the controversy into the shape of your usual content.
YouTubers can always post through it
Elsewhere on the platform this week, the gun-tuber Oxide posted a video of himself firing depleted uranium rounds into body armor at close range. The notable thing here is that Oxide was connected to the big Discord intel leak story, but only briefly alludes to it at the end of this video.
Prior to the leaks, Oxide apparently banned Jack Teixeira from his Discord just for being annoying. Then all the banned users gathered on their own tiny server to spam memes at each other (this is also how 4chan started) and Teixeira started sharing secrets there.
I actually would have liked to hear Oxide’s side of the story, because forums history is funny. (See: the WaPo article quoting Oxide saying he banned these guys for being losers vs. the other WaPo article where they interview one of Teixeira’s deeply pathetic cronies, who says they left because the server was “too crowded.”) But on YouTube creators don’t have to talk about this stuff unless they want to. Most of the audience doesn’t care what’s going on behind the scenes. Many arrive at the video solely because a robot told them to watch it or because their TV’s YouTube app was on autoplay.
Anyway, the top comments here are a wall of praise and understandable concern about breathing uranium particles – you have to scroll really far (past a reference to Cruelty Squad) to find any chatter about “current events.”
Two incredibly specific video game essays
This week saw two fresh uploads from certified Good YouTube channels that only post once in a blue moon.
This one, from cool design guy Stuart Brown, is the latest entry in a long-running series about Amiga stuff. He has many other tasteful and witty videos about video game weapons and history.
My other favorite video this week was a 50-minute grab bag from the hyper-online Dark Souls minutiae channel Limit Breakers:
Ahoy is highbrow enough to recommend to anyone. Limit Breakers isn’t; its weird use of text-to-speech, elaborate setups for bad jokes, and often fruitless mechanical investigations are an acquired taste. (“But did you know…that this…does nothing?”) Part of the appeal of this type of thing is always a shared amazement that an audience for it even exists and that you’re part of it.
Frutiger Aero bubbles up again
People have been writing explainers about the surge of nostalgia for Frutiger Aero – the splashy water-with-lime mid-2000s tech aesthetic – since late 2022. It looks like search interest peaked in December thanks to Tiktoks like these and is now climbing again.
I’ve noticed a lot of channels mention the trend in passing and refer their audience to overviews like The 2000s Vision of the Future - Frutiger Aero Explained. It seems likely that some larger Tiktok-sensitive creators will pick up on the interest and create flashier explainers, or explore old media that has the look.
But it’s challenging to find things in this style that aren’t menus, ads, or wallpapers. Frutiger Aero isn’t nearly as well-represented in existing media as cottagecore or dark academia, which repackage widespread fantasy clichés as a vibe. I can’t think of much — maybe Microsoft’s N.U.D.E.@?
Thumbnail Corner
These thumbnails were posted two weeks apart by competing Minecraft channels Aphmau and Cash.
Loose videos
I mentioned Unrecord discourse last week, but even better UE5 demonstrations came out afterward – one artist used scanned assets to slap together a similarly real-looking environment in a single day
The modder/animator Neeher creates neat in-game presentations for their Fallout 4 projects (h/t PC Gamer)
The Ecco OST holds up
Thanks for reading
That’s it for this week. o7 to all veterans of forum wars.