videos of things getting made
for three years or so i've been running a fortnightly murder-mystery watch party on discord, and part of the programming for that is generally little bits of "here's a random thing that you weren't expecting." short experimental films, an occasional music video, an episode of something we've never watched before, that kind of thing. it's an implicit threat of "i think i know what is going to be shown tonight, but..."
i'm always simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by youtube because it is both the full, beautiful chaos of humanity and art and there are many precious gems, but also: good lord, what the fuck is going on here?
i was a little short on surprises tonight and i went to the mines to dig up something to scrape off of google's server's with yt-dlp. also. actually, fuck what i came here to write about, let's talk about:
be brave and use the command line
even a little bit
(you are strong and i believe in you)
if you're not someone who has used a command line interface, or (very reasonably!) finds them intimidating, i think yt-dlp is a great single thing to learn to use on the command line. there are things that wrap yt-dlp in a graphical interface, i've mentioned before that i use IINA often for little one-off videos and stuff. but the command line interface both isn't that bad, and has huge return on investment if you're willing to get familiar with it.
there's a monumental difference between "i don't use the command line at all / have never used the command line" and "i use it a little bit". doing the thing once and even just being a little familiar with it i think goes a long way when you might need to use it for something else down the road. and i think it solves a huge need: youtube is pretty cool sometimes but also fucking sucks so, so bad to be on.
(i've been thinking about this a lot lately, since my japanese teacher who is an older lady that is "bad with technology" often shows youtube videos in class and we have to suffer the ads.)
so, first you find stuff you want to have as videos. this is left as an exercise for the reader. i have an unlisted playlist on youtube that i save everything i want to download to that to make things easier to download in batches. (this also means i can just run the same command i ran previously. you just press up on the keyboard and hit enter again. easy! you could even automate this to just pull stuff from that playlist once a day.)
here's a single video you could try out using yt-dlp with:
https://youtu.be/1KpquqnqRoo
$ yt-dlp https://youtu.be/1KpquqnqRoo
$ yt-dlp 1KpquqnqRoo
note that you can just give yt-dlp that last chunk of the web address that i've highlighted, without the stuff after the question mark you usually get. (that's a tracker)
here's a playlist of Important Videos you could try it on:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYw-090EcEJAbLLfaBWq7LCk18MkPmG-U
$ yt-dlp --download-archive archive.txt PLYw-090EcEJAbLLfaBWq7LCk18MkPmG-U
it's got a lot of videos, though, so if we run into a rate limit and need to wait a while before continuing to download, we'll want to keep track of what has already successfully downloaded with the download archive option, which will save everything that has successfully gone through to archive.txt. (by the way, yt-dlp works on all kinds of stuff, not just youtube. instagram, tiktok, vimeo, twitch, twitter, soundcloud.
where was i
oh yeah, stuff on youtube.
while digging around i came across this channel, which i have only watched a few videos of, but appears to be entirely zero-narration craft and industrial processes. incredible. and there appear to be a staggering number of them. some of the more recent videos have narration in the subtitles.
here's a few:
https://youtu.be/a2Lum1X1Nmw
$ yt-dlp a2Lum1X1Nmw
https://youtu.be/uYDvPT1LvcU
$ yt-dlp uYDvPT1LvcU
https://youtu.be/O9E77WZGCpQ
$ yt-dlp O9E77WZGCpQ
If you were so inclined, you could in theory download the entire channel's videos with:
$ yt-dlp --download-archive archive.txt https://www.youtube.com/@processx/videos
...but that's like over 500 videos. who would do that?
of course,
it goes without saying that the background radiation of my fascination with these is that fundamentally i want to see humans making stuff because i am mad about genAI. this all started because i was trying to remember the tag you see on independent anime on youtube1 but instead just searched "作る" ("make") and wound up in a pleasant rabbithole.
in conclusion, here's another video that came across my feed that is also zero-narration process, of an old lady making kusamochi with a surprising number of well-behaved cats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjEMfqgrdHY
$ yt-dlp MjEMfqgrdHY
a while ago i bought a book and a bag of red beans with the intention of taking up making wagashi, but i failed to account for the fact that i want to make mochi for real and not from powder. the mochi-pounding machine she has is maybe the coolest thing on the planet.