Some recent good YouTubes

These days I spend most of my time on YouTube keeping up on a ton of sports like the Vuelta a Espana bike race, Women's Pro Baseball League, the World Softball Championships, and the FIFA U20 women's soccer matches.

Every couple of months I tend to post a handful of interesting stuff I saw in the weird corners of YouTube, so here are my picks for the most interesting things I watched over the past few months.

I saw this on Mastodon, where someone called it "Solarpunk" and I loved it. A small Arizona neighborhood was tired of what little rain they got running off into sewers so they went rogue and cut curbs to capture that water and transform a neighborhood into a greener space.

There are so many places to eat in Portland that even after living in the area for over 20 years, I've barely scratched the surface of what's available. Every so often, I watch videos where people review nearby food carts and in the past, going to the same places they loved has turned out well. This video is from a guy who is visiting from LA and it gave me lots of places to check out in the future.

Southern California has been hit with massive hurricane tides over the last few weeks and I'd seen news clips of it, but watching actual surfers just point their camera at spot in Laguna Beach really captures how powerful and destructive huge surf can be.

This cooking video about three decent looking sheet pan recipes has an introduction that literally taught me things I never knew about how ovens actually work. It's basic stuff, but I never knew any of it in over 50 years on earth using ovens.

This channel is run by an engineer who goes off-roading and I love the Mythbusters-esque way he goes deep into the science of things. In this case, he looks at the aerodynamics of putting stuff on your truck and the MPG hit you might see but it includes both computer modeling and real-world data with his own results.

I had no idea 1970's van culture was still alive and well but skim around in this video and get amazed like I was that people still drive untouched 70s custom vans, but also, people are out there making new ones today.

This is a popular channel from a guy that plunges into old photographs and does some expert-level geoguessing, and this is one of his best. It's incredible how much information he can glean from a single old photo. I love how good he is at digging into seemingly minor details, and how adept he is at researching history on the fly, live and all captured on camera.

For bike nerds, there's a new tire in town that was all the talk of the recent MADE show. I pre-ordered a set and can't wait to give them a try.

I am a sucker for the "I did this cool creative project for free for a random person" genre of videos and there are tons of folks doing this, but I really love this artist's work on her murals. Her video of painting her dad's semi truck was also pretty great.

Over the Hill looks like a game made for just me. It's a bunch of casual exploring in off-road vehicles and you can play it with friends in real-time like Big Walk? I can't wait for this to hit the PS5 so I can play it.

Another highly anticipated game: Nintendo returns to something as good as Wii Sports was almost 20 years ago. I can't wait to bowl and play tennis again by waving things around in the air.

Mulaney at the Emmys last night was a real barn burner. I hope he gets an awards show hosting gig someday, but I don't know if any network would really let him be free enough for his full DGAF approach to jokes.

This is an old video from a furniture maker I love watching on YouTube these days. I made this media console myself a few weeks ago and really loved how it turned out. It's simple and takes just 2-3 sheets of half-inch plywood and just a day or two to cut and glue it all together.

A final moment of zen: I had no idea a person could spend a day surrounded by Golden Retrievers but this looks fun if I'm ever in New Hampshire and have a $100 burning a hole in my pocket.