Ow

Mar. 9th, 2023 09:44 am
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Yeah I’m still sensitive to weather changes: woke up at 2:30 AM, unable to sleep until I gave up and took melatonin at 3:30. Emailed [personal profile] myrialux to say not to wake me up until 10AM, but at 8:30 a text from a friend woke me up and I had one hell of a headache. So I got up anyway to take Excedrin. And looked at the weather to find thunderstorms are predicted today, which seems to correlate quite well with sleep troubles and bad headaches upon waking.

Anyway! So this post isn’t entirely me complaining, here’s a couple of YouTube channels I have been loving recently.

Beryl Shereshewsky
https://youtube.com/@BerylShereshewsky

Trying foods from around the world. Her usual video format is themed (breakfasts, comfort food, cheese, deep frying, etc.): she shows 4-6 video clips sent by viewers describing a dish that fits the theme and what it means to them and their culture. Beryl then makes the recipe and tries it on camera, giving her reactions. She is utterly delightful, in part because she likes just about EVERYTHING. And even in the rare event she doesn’t like something she finds something good to say about it. She occasionally does videos of recipes involving foods she doesn’t like to see if she can find a preparation that she likes—bitter melon was the one I watched recently. Recommend when you need to see people around the world excited to share their cultures with others. Warning: you will get hungry.

Let’s Game It Out
https://youtube.com/@LetsGameItOut

A channel wherein a guy named Josh takes on simulator games and plays them in ways that were not intended by the developers. He finds ways to break them, ways to exploit them, ways to crash the game. His favorite thing is to ask “Is there a limit?” and then see: can you build a tornado of conveyor belts, can you hire one million workers, can you spawn an endless amount of boxes? He has endless patience in doing this, too. I’m not getting across how funny he is, but frequently [personal profile] myrialux and I end up gasping for breath because we’ve been laughing so hard. I’d suggest searching his channel for his SimAirport video and the earliest video on his Hydroneer playlist and watching those. If you like them, don’t worry: there’s an almost inexhaustible supply of other videos.

Watching

Feb. 24th, 2021 10:16 am
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What I'm watching a lot of right now is the backlog of YouTube videos from this guy who followed his dream and started a poultry farm in Vermont (along with his wife, who chooses not to be a focus of the videos). It's charming to watch them because he has such enthusiasm and love for his work and the animals. It's sort of competence porn because while he's still learning, he usually goes about it in the most sensible way possible. Starting the farm was also done sensibly--they saved up and bought it outright instead of taking loans, and they both have full-time jobs and aren't relying on the farm for their living.

Anyway, that's just the intro and why I'm watching it right now (and why YouTube is constantly suggesting I watch farm and homestead-related videos and no! I will not get sucked into all of FarmTube!). Today's post also has a bit to do with web accessibility.

I often watch TV, movies and videos with captions turned on, partly because I listened to enough loud music in my youth that my hearing is not as good as it was--not degraded enough to be considered impaired, just enough that I have difficulty making out speech if there's a lot of ambient noise, either music or other noises in the video, or noises in the house. (Zoom meetings can be fun because of this, since everyone's mic is set differently, people keep moving away from the mic, causing me to turn the volume up, then suddenly make loud noises that cause me to jump.)

The other reason I use captions is that I've become fascinated by them since having to make the website at work accessible, since captions are a big part of that and I coach coworkers through how best to create and use captions.

I've found that YouTube's auto-captioning is actually really good, at least for English. I don't know any other language well enough to say if it's good for them. It gets about 90-95% of the words correct, and even when it screws up, there's enough correct that the messed-up ones are guessable from the context.

What does this have to do with watching Gold Shaw Farm's YouTube channel? Well, he doesn't put captions up himself so YouTube's auto-captions accompany his videos. He also raises ducks and geese (and some chickens because he's ironically allergic to duck eggs). Ducks and geese are noisy creatures. Noisy enough that YouTube's auto-caption bot occasionally picks them up and assumes they're human-produced noises and part of the soundtrack.

Occasionally as he's talking, the ducks and geese will be making a racket behind him, and YouTube helpfully captions them. So you'll see inappropriate [applause], [laughter] and one I saw for the first time today, [music] captions pop up in the videos.

That was a lot of typing to explain one amusing thing, but it makes me laugh every time.
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This is about 3/4 of my Youtube playlist, ones that I thought [personal profile] yhlee might not hate, coming out of a conversation elsewhere.

How do I handle having such a giant playlist? I don't actually watch every video they post. :) Also, I put stuff on it and take stuff off it with some regularity.

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...I am currently being charmed by the Geography Now YouTube channel. It's a guy and some of his friends who are making short videos introducing and explaining a little bit about every country in the world...in alphabetical order.

Also, Nefer has yet another UTI and spent Monday at the vet getting diagnosed and dosed with meds. She came home apparently smelling of the vet, and Sora took great exception to this state of affairs. They were both up on my desk, Sora sniffed her, and then hissed at her FOUR TIMES before I separated them. And then I caught him later sniffing her and hissing again. Luckily, she was doped up on pain meds and quite amiable about every little thing that happened to her so we didn't have a huge catfight on our hands.

She seems to be feeling better right now, so we think the antibiotics she got shot up with are working. The cultures haven't come back yet, so we may end up having to go pick up a new prescription for her if it comes back that her infection is resistant.

I have no idea which cat is the more expensive one right now. They're involved in a neck-and-neck race here. XD (we looked up pet insurance a few years back, noted what it would cover, noted that our cats were getting things not covered, and just started putting money aside every month for pet care. It has served us in good stead.)
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I've uploaded two videos in the past couple of days:

Our morning routine, which is Nefer demanding I turn the shower on for her. She's quieter than usual in the video--normally she yells until I accede to her demands.

This next one is a video we pulled off the PS4 of Toby playing Fallout 4. If you didn't read my previous post (with the crappy video), he accidentally got into the biggest fight he'd ever been in in FO4, because it turns out that when you lay waste to the Institute, the game doesn't want you to leave and spawns dozens and dozens of synth troopers to fight you. Toby defeated them all armed only with a knife. (And a set of power armor. And some maxed-out Stealth and Blitz stats.) The PS4's framerate went to hell through trying to render all those troopers.

Highlights: The video starts midway through the first wave. Then skip to 4:32 for the beginning of the second wave. Then skip to 10 seconds before the end for the punchline of trying to close the elevator door on a giant pile of bodies.

Synth Trooper Scrum

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