YouTube: The Definitive Review

Streaming from my eyes.

I don’t watch TV these days. I don’t even watch streaming services that much. Instead, I watch a lot of YouTube. This is mostly because it has incredible content for your personal niche interests, if you’re lucky enough to find it. I’ve said before that YouTube is one of the eight wonders of the Internet¹, being such a preposterous idea that if you were to tell someone from 1993, at the very dawn of public adoption of the Web, that a vast, ever increasing archive of video on every conceivable subject would be available for free, they’d struggle to even understand the concept, let alone grasp what YouTube actually is in practice. YouTube’s vastness and wild, compromised democracy means that it mirrors the world. For every wonderful hyper-niche expertise video, there are a hundred horrorshows, but we mustn't let the 90% of crud outshine the 10% of wonders. Because the wonders are fucking magnificent. In a spectacularly lazy turn, I shall now summarise my bestest YouTubes as if this is a vintage Buzzfeed listicle.

1: Really Old Computer Tech People

Curious Marc and Usagi Electric recently did a joint video where Dave from Usagi visited Marc to see about fixing an obscure floppy drive for Dave’s even more obscure Centurion minicomputer, a wonderfully styled 16-bit beast from 1980. Dave has been restoring the Centurion for years, and the sheer doggedness of his pursuit is genuinely inspiring. After a hundred seemingly impassable obstacles, Dave now has a fully functioning Centurion up and running, and the journey is wonderful. What is he doing next? Well, he has a PDP to mess around with but he’s paying a lot more attention to a Bendix G-15 he’s been given. Never heard of it? What kind of geek are you if you don’t know it’s a valve-based computer from 1956? It doesn’t even have RAM. It’s got a magnetised rotating drum instead. Yep, one revolution of the drum is one cycle of memory, and the computer gets all its timings off the drum too. Nuts. It’s absolutely fascinating, truly primordial stuff. Dave keeps his videos quite short and despite the heavy, heavy technical slant, his explanations are really very good. A real insight into the bare metal nuts-and-bolts of computing. Oh and Curious Marc? Oh, he just restores Apollo guidance computers and things like that. Colleague of Ken Shirrif. You know - the reverse-engineering genius who restored a Zerox Alto.

2: Really Good Diagnose-and-Repair 8-Bit heads

This is a category with a lot of creators, but only two really stand out to me. One is Noel, the Spanish Amstrad enthusiast and the other is Adrian Black, who owns a digital basement. Noel is a more sporadic poster, but his content is generally fabulous. I got into him after seeing a video on faked vintage chips from China. There’s a fucking wild C64 repair he does where the character ROM is a bit flakey and by pressing on the chip, Noel makes insane shapes of alpha-numeric noise appear on the C64’s display. The pressure makes the ROM substitute the blank spaces that make up an empty BASIC screen with random character noise. It’s like a Demoscene effect, but feeling clashingly wrong and weird. You’d expect a dodgy chip, particularly a ROM,  to crash the machine or output nothing, so this completely unique effect carries a more haunting sense that perhaps TRON was a documentary. Needless to say, the implications of this collision of analog reality distorting the digital is utterly captivating to me, and perhaps my loyalty to Noel springs from that supernatural oddity. For even better hardcore content, Adrian Black is like a founding archetype for really good retro repair videos. He as solid as a fucking rock, posts like clockwork and has resurrected so many Commodore 64s that he deserves a sainthood. Adrian’s spectrum of topics is fabulous; one week may be 60 mins tracing faults on some 80s 8-Bit, the next a deep dive into CRTs, then another 60 mins on unlabelled early-90s PC cards. Ended up with a bonkers expensive, hyper-niche graphics card the other week. Adrian barely mentions soldering despite being the US’s peak consumer of chip sockets, but does go wonderfully deep on oscilloscope usage. He also explained how to use a logic probe, which is kinda amazing. Has a magic CRT rejuvenation box, from 1969 with dials and chunky switches and shit, which sometimes actually works. Adrian must be protected at all costs.

3: No British Retro YouTubers?

Now, as an aside, the more knowledgeable of you may notice a lack of British repair/restorers in my faves and that’s generally because they’re just a little bit too boring to really keep my interest. They also have an obsession with ‘retrobriting²’ everything. I’d add Jan Beta for a Germanic flavour of Commodore-centric repairs, but the bigger names from the British scene don’t really qualify for me. Some are OK, offering up occasional fix-up videos that catch my eye, but there’s a homogeneity problem and a dumbing-down fixation with the UK scene that leaves me feeling more alienated than engaged. I did, however, revel with quite some delight in the controversies that have been rocking the UK community on a seemingly annual basis. There was the hilarity of the Lady Decade/Top Hat Gaming copyright scandal³ which via controversial agent provocateur par excellence George ‘Funky Spectrum’ Cropper⁴, managed to snowball into a saga that embroiled many of the most visible UK youtubers. The melodrama was exquisite. Secret Discords were exposed, collusion, misdirected sympathy, in-groups and out-groups, all deliciously exposed through a series of extreme and incredibly profane rants on George’s now-lost YouTube channel. Just supreme drama on a par with the trashiest Reality TV. It proved, more depressingly, that there’s a tendency towards mediocrity in the UK community, and moreover exposed a kind of willful enjoyment of the average and unexceptional. The UK tastemakers have a kind of blind acceptance of anything retro, which leads to garish fanzines with sub-forumite writing, spectacularly ugly console mods⁵, every fucker with more than 50 subs publishing their definitive guide to gaming hardware via Amazon print on demand, claiming in their tiresome Twitter bios that they ‘wrote the book m8’. So glad some of the worst offenders went off on ludicrously poor Kickstarter projects because they ran out of things to make videos about. Especially after releasing YouTube monologues about how bad YouTube is for making money, as if they’re entitled to a salary or something, when all they’ve actually done is make sub-par copies of utterly predictable history videos that at least five other people have done in far more interesting ways.

4: No Game Critics?

No, because they bang on for too long about boring shit. But then, I loved HBomberGuy’s video about the Roblox sound effect and Super Bunny Hop does some great stuff. And I kind of love that I follow them in the twilight of their creative arcs, where they’re already burned themselves out on the content march. Really, I dip in and out depending on algorithmic tides and never really settle on critics in any permanent sense. NoClip? Fine, I guess. Too celebratory perhaps. A bit too smarmy, too smug?I mean, anyone who puts up Geoff Keighley as a vital commentator on videogame culture has to be an asshole. I will swerve at this point to mention Kim Justice, who has made a fucking great series of docs on the UK ‘software house’ era. She covers all the greats, collating a surprisingly large amount of knowledge and oral history into reasonably entertaining videos. Sadly, her arc here is pretty much complete, but the set of docs are almost invaluable. Kim now wobbles between retrogaming livestreams, random game lists and Puroresu documentaries and you know what? That’s 100% fine with me.

5: Conference Presentations, Motherfucker

My more obsessive YouTube behaviours revolve around trawling. I’ll put “BBC”, a year, and set the video length to over 20 minutes and see what nostalgia triggers I can find. I’ll go tunnelling through someone’s archive of Techno or Drum and Bass vinyl for hours, or simply keep working through Terminal Passage’s huge playlist of Jazz Fusion⁶. But my more relevant trawls involve two main conferences and their decades of talks. First off is Defcon. Retrogaming stuff slips through occasionally, but then there’s the fascinating insights of people like Deviant Ollam, who did a full hour on elevator hacking that will blow your mind. Defcon was also home to a few Jason Scott talks, including his amazing one about ego wars within software piracy. And, of course, nearly every Jason Scott talk is worth watching, as is his utterly fantastic BBS documentary series and Get Lamp, his doc on text adventures. In a more European sensibility is the Chaos Computer Club, which has played home to some barnstorming talks on cracking console security. Everything from original XBox via X360, Wii, PS3 and onwards has a CCC talk, not to mention Michael Steil’s series of fabulous lectures on the Commodore 64 hardware, the 6502, Nintendo Gameboy and the Apollo Guidance Computer. Other contributors have added Atari 2600/VCS, Acorn Archimedes and Commodore Amiga overviews, but they don’t really match Michael’s. Special mention must go to newcomer (to me) Vintage Computing Federation and its various regional offshoots, forming a really nice backbone for the US vintage computing community. The VCF conferences throw up some amazing talks, including one about the machine used to do the vector graphics for the Death Star plans and Rebel briefing in Star Wars, in amongst all sorts of deliciously niche, hyper detailed retrocomputing waffle. I mean, never mind the quality - feel the fucking width.

I could write so much more about how I abuse YouTube. I use 4k Video Downloader a fair bit to get, ahem, local backups of content I want to keep, and yet I don’t pay for that but I am more than happy to pay for YouTube Premium. The rest of my family gets the use of my Prime, Netflix, Disney+ and so on. I don’t really care. I mean, I do have a Mubi sub, but that’s because I’m mildly obsessed with John Cassavetes. Oh and Britbox because of vintage Dr Who and Blake’s 7, but that’s almost religious practice for me. However if I suffer any kind of catastrophic financial collapse, it’s YouTube Premium that’ll be the last to go  I swear to god that watching Voultar solder is one of very few things that keeps me sane.

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1. Bitorrent, encrypted IM, Steam, Soulseek (STILL WORKING WTF), Archive.org, Wikipedia, YouTube, AI porn generators.

2. I fucking despise this term. It's bleaching. With hydrogen peroxide. That's all it is. And it's part of this insane urge to 'restore' to the appearance of being new. This is fundamentally dishonest; a machine's colour is an artefact of its age, of its life. To erase the patina, no matter how distasteful you may find the hue, is erasure of the machine's identity. There is a similar issue with vintage cars. Conserve or replace? Generally, conserve wins out, for original bits and original patinas are impossible to recover. I recall one particular YouTuber who started out a nice, geeky repair hack who abandoned virtually all repairing to showcase his hot wife and engage in brutally over-egged retro-themed 'comedy' content. I knew things had gone wrong when they replaced a missing cosmetic piece on a mysteriously donated SX-64 with some 3D-printed monstrosity, resplendent in its slightly wrong colour and painfully visible filament texture. It looked fucking shit, but because it made the machine look vaguely complete, it was somehow a triumph. I find the whole thing morally reprehensible for reasons I'm not simply not prepared to discuss as I have a simply wonderful proof but this margin is too small to contain it.

3. In short, Lady Decade used a copyrighted image in a video and when usage compensation was sought (for £500), she published a monologue video begging for cash donations to help. This exposed the channel to deeper scrutiny, revealing that every episode was ghostwritten and the content carousel revolved around acquiring rare games and hardware as investments leveraged against the revenue a video on them would bring in. Raw commercialism instead of actual interest in the subject. It recalls the mad days when anonymous beat-diggers would find un-sampled breakbeats and sell them to HipHop producers for thousands of dollars, because those producers would make instrumentals that could be sold to artists for more than the cost of the vinyl. $1k records turned into $10k beats. 22 years ago, Frank Tope remarked in the Ch4 series of music tech shorts The Shape Of Things That Hum (also on YouTube) that we were entering an age of chasing cutting edge nostalgia. And how right he was!

4. George is definitely 'a character' and rants onward at his own site. I can't work out if he's chaotic good or chaotic evil, but I can tell you that his review of Afterburner Climax is one of the most astonishing pieces of videogame criticism I have ever seen.

5. A transparent Dreamcast case with 100 multicolour LEDs inside it is not a ‘glow up’, you fucking tasteless ghouls, it’s a fucking crime and the perpetrators need to be locked up. What the fuck is wrong with you? Fucking hell. TRANSPARENT?! FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

6. You cannot truly understand and appreciate the original Outrun soundtrack unless you understand the first Casiopea album.