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Ah, the holidays. A time for joy, merriment, and vegging out. Maybe you use the time to marathon Christmas movies. Maybe you use the time to catch up on the best media of the year that you missed. Or maybe you share a YouTube obsession with your friends and loved ones.
This year, Polygon is marking the last week of December with YuleTide YouTube, celebrating some of our favorite creators, series, and videos on YouTube with all of you. There will be music. There will be games. There will be controversies. There will be granular examinations of niche topics. Maybe you’ll even learn something along the way!
So sit back, relax, and enjoy our curated journey through the archives of YouTube as we share our various obsessions with you. And have a very, very happy holiday season, from all of us at Polygon.
Image: Monterey Bay Aquarium
There are many museums, zoos, botanic gardens, and other institutions that are good at translating their educational and preservational assets to social media. And then there’s the Monterey Bay Aquarium and its oceanic lo-fi livestreams.
Monterey Bay is an internationally respected aquarium that real nerdy-ass fuckin’ nerds will know as the shot-on-location stand-in for the Maritime Cetacean Institute as featured in Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales. But tucked away in California’s central coast, a drive of two hours or more from the closest big city, San Francisco, it’s on the museum’s staff to make their institution accessible to the wide world that might never visit.
YouTube channel Odd Tinkering doesn’t hold many surprises — other than the disbelief at how good the consoles, controllers, and keyboards they restore look when the work is done. What starts as a broken, dirty Game Boy Color in this video becomes a crisp, clean handheld fit to be a 1998 Christmas present.
The creator, seemingly based in Finland, keeps their name off their channel — but that doesn’t mean they’re totally mysterious to fans. Subscribers often send in their water-damaged, Cheeto-finger-stained, cracked gaming devices to be repaired, and the process is satisfying and nostalgic. (That makes this channel a great stoned watch, by the way.) It seems like the person restoring the items is a true gamer, too — some of the projects are deep cuts, like the Pokémon Mini.
Kiun B’s YouTube videos are mini documentaries about her life and the lives of the 800 people who live in her hometown of Yakutia, Siberia, aka the coldest town on Earth. The creator, who narrates the videos, says she and her community are native to the region. The enchanting mini docs showcase their customs, culture, and day-to-day life — which looks quite different when it’s 95 degrees Fahrenheit below zero outside.
This installment follows a family through their day, including waking up before the sun to feed the furnace fire and melt ice for drinking water. They don layers and layers of insulated clothing just to walk short distances outside — or long distances, in the case of the schoolkids who bundle up each day to commute to class. The stories are humbling, especially as you sit in your cozy home and watch the Yakutians do such hard, backbreaking work just to keep their homes running through the winter. (Don’t worry, it gets warm in the summer — and there’s a video about that, too!)
Image: Mike and Matt Chapman
The death of Adobe Flash on Dec. 31, 2020, may have marked the end of a great era of internet creativity — but one of its most significant triumphs is still around. In an archival feat for the ages, HomestarRunner.com still lives on YouTube.
In an age before algorithms or social media, Mike and Matt Chapman went viral the old-fashioned way — uploading good stuff at a reliable pace that was so quotable it rewired the brains of an entire generation. All of Homestar Runner’s bits, japes, and inside jokes were heavily regurgitative of 1990s media — cartoons, video games, action movies — but while the flagship “series” of the website was the Strong Bad Emails, I have a dark horse contender for the best of HomestarRunner.com.
I think we can all agree that Jon Bois and the team over on our sister site Secret Base do incredible work. Their documentaries are deeply researched, visually unique, and incredibly human, telling stories about sports but also the history of slipping on banana peels and that time some very dumb people got into an argument about how many days are in a week. Which brings me to Kevan MacKay, aka BobbyBroccoli. His YouTube channel definitely riffs on the same 3D docu-space animation style: He even made a tutorial for how to animate like Jon! But I must be very clear: BobbyBroccoli is no knockoff.
Instead of data-driven documentaries on the television series 24 or SCORIGAMI!, BobbyBroccoli’s bread and butter is scientific controversies. However, this isn’t a look at the “controversy” surrounding, say, vaccines or climate change, but rather, the scandals that revealed legitimate scientific fraud. These include the Korean human cloning scandal, the cold fusion fraud, and the fake discovery of new periodic elements.
Do you know how knives are made? Do you know how knives are made of milk?
Unless you’ve seen this video — or any others on YouTube channel kiwami japan — you don’t. The channel is dedicated to the art of knifemaking, but most of the videos are detailed step-by-steps of the creator’s successful attempts to craft real, usable knives out of materials like UV resin, tofu, bismuth, and yes, milk.
Holidays come with a lot of family talk. Whether you have taken the requisite planes, trains, and automobiles to be with your loved ones or you are celebrating at a distance, there is often a parade of family updates — the well-wish calls that inevitably (and gratifyingly!) turn to the reports and the check-ins. Some of us come from divorced families and are well versed in the art of such phone calls, so please, take some wisdom from me here.
First, I advise having a few on-hand anecdotes or topics. You’ll have to be in the flow of the conversation, but the yawning open-endedness of even a simple “So what’s been going on with you?” can quickly swamp even a seasoned converser if you’re not ready.
I would hazard a guess that every anime popular in the 2010s has an AMV (anime music video) set to Thirty Seconds to Mars’ “This Is War.” It was the song for fan-edited music videos, and I will never be able to hear it without thinking of how I would edit it to whatever piece of media I’m currently obsessing over. (Right now, it’s the newest Dragon Age game. I can picture it, the second verse’s “the Liar” lyric superimposed on Solas…)
From the moment the song came out in 2009, it was posited to be a hit in fandom culture. It actually debuted with the soundtrack of Dragon Age: Origins, a fact that I, a passionate Dragon Age fan, did not even realize until I started writing this piece—
We all have videos that we keep saved as an emergency escape hatch for dark times. You know what I’m talking about — the videos that never fail to make us laugh, no matter what. My absolute favorite of these is “Heavy Rain - Covered Market [Super Klutz Edition],” a classic from a channel called NahmanJayden in which a player intentionally fails every single button prompt while playing through a chase scene in Heavy Rain.
This video is hilarious even if you know absolutely nothing about the game Heavy Rain, but I would argue it’s significantly funnier if you do know anything about Heavy Rain, so allow me to explain. (Or you can just watch the video if you don’t want to deal with me laboriously explaining the joke. That’s also fine.)
Image: Triple J
Life is stressful. Sometimes it’s difficult to unwind. For me, a surefire method to improve my mood when I’m feeling down has been watching Australian radio station Triple J’s Like A Version series, which includes a regular segment where established and up-and-coming artists alike cover classic or new hits.
Sometimes the covers are close to the original; sometimes they’re completely different. Most of the time, they bring me a direct dose of joy, either introducing me to new artists and songs or recontextualizing my appreciation for older hits – whether I liked the original versions when I first heard them or not.
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