Red Letter Media. Obviously I found them through their Star Wars prequel joke reviews, but they’ve just turned out to be a really solid and enjoyable semi-comedic film review channel. You get a sense of their particular interests and biases, some they share, some they don’t and that helps understand their perspective on films they review so you have an idea of if you’d like them. Plus their other series like Re;View and Best of the Worst show me discussions on movies I probably wouldn’t have ever watched otherwise.

I also just love how low-key they are as far as the YT influencer BS that’s become the norm on the platform. No sponsorships. They never ask you to “Like and subscribe and leave a comment and hit that bell!”. They have a Patreon but they don’t even advertise it in their videos, let alone dedicate a portion of the video to a stream of internet names that donated. The thumbnails and titles aren’t really clickbait. Their video descriptions are actually descriptions of the video instead of a bunch of links to their socials and sponsors. They don’t act overly hype or angry or anything. They just act like what they are: Shlubs. They occasionally get B-list celebrities as guests and rather than plaster their name and whatever projects they’re working on all over the fucking video for clickbait, they just don’t even really acknowledge they’re celebrities. They’re just some dudes who happened to stop by to hang out and be on the shows. With most of them you wouldn’t even know they were celebrities if you didn’t already know them. I had to look up a few of them, which is hard when they don’t even use their full names.

I watch pretty much all of their Half in the Bag and Re;View shows and the occasional miscellaneous video they make. I don’t watch Best of the Worst that often, but I have enjoyed it when I have watched it.

I feel like we might as well just go back to symbol languages. What’s the point of an alphabet if the letters don’t actually convey consistent pronunciation? It’s just more confusing because the letters imply rules which don’t hold.