Before I crash, I'd just like to take a moment and offer a handful of YouTube channels, some of which I've watched for a long time and others I've just stumbled over in the last little while, which may go some way toward making things better.

Battleship New Jersey Museum and Memorial
Just like it says on the tin: the former USS New Jersey (BB-62), now preserved (like all the Iowa-class battleships) as a museum. NJ's is not your average museum YouTube channel. Curator Ryan Szimanski and his media team put out a video at 7 PM Eastern time every weekday about something in, on, around, or to do with the ship's history and/or present state. You never know what it's going to be. It might be the keys that controlled the nuclear weapons the Navy can still not confirm nor deny the ship carried in the 1980s. It might be a cool wrench Ryan found while poking around one of the ship's dozens of DAMCON lockers. Ryan seems like he'd be a fun guy to hang around with.

The Tank Museum
Another not-your-average-museum-channel. The Tank Museum in Bovington, England has the world's largest collection of armored vehicles, and they like to talk about them. They like to do that quite a lot. Most of the figures who made this channel one of the lifelines of the pandemic have sadly moved on, but there's still a lot of fun stuff coming out of Bovington, and of course the archive of all their older content is still there.

The Royal Armouries Museum
One last museum channel. Many of you probably already know this as the home of Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms and Artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in the UK, Which Houses a Collection of Thousands of Iconic Weapons From Throughout History, and indeed his "What Is This Weapon?" series is a mainstay of the channel--but they also have other people working there, and other areas of specialization, which also get their own interesting and well-produced videos on occasion.

Midlife Stockman
Speaking of fighting back with support and kindness: Sean Stockman lives somewhere in greater Detroit, and his hobby is driving around with a trailer full of lawn care equipment and tidying up overgrown properties he spots along the way. Abandoned houses (and there are a lot of those in metro Detroit these days), vacant lots, the yards of folks who can't keep up with it for various reasons, whatever. If it's covered in vines, choked in weeds, and just generally making the rest of the neighborhood look bad, he'll clean it up. He doesn't just mow the grass, either. Trash that needs picking up, hedges that need trimming, if it's yard-related he'll get to it. The man is a fanatical edger. (Not in that way.) And he does it all for free.

He's also relentlessly cheerful and non-judgmental about whatever's going down, and very good at de-escalating situations when people get in his face about... cutting grass for free?? (This happens with a slightly weird frequency.) He clearly regards what he's doing as a capital-M Mission in the Christian sense, but, at least on camera, he's unusually non-overbearing about it. He's too busy getting stuff done.

Rudan Brothers
The three Rudan brothers, Miloš and his twin younger brothers Stefan and Momĉilo, are immigrants from Serbia who have a roofing business in greater Toronto. A few times a month, they do basically the same thing as Stockman, except instead of looking for yards that need work, they look for houses with roofs that are in bad shape. When they find one, they offer to replace the gutters, no charge. If the homeowners take them up on it, they do the gutter work as promised, but at the end, when they've shown the homeowners their new gutters, they offer to put a new steel roof on the house. For free. With a lifetime warranty.

As you might expect, a lot of people the Rudans encounter are very suspicious, both of the initial offer and the follow-up. The homeowners almost always assume it's some kind of scam at first. Some homeowners even run them off with threats of violence and/or the police. Even after the gutters are done, some are skeptical about the roof offer. The fun thing about this is that the brothers are so likeable, and so obviously good at their job, that the ones who give them a chance usually end up bringing them food and having patio parties with them by the second day of the job.

I dunno, I never thought I would be interested in videos about lawn care or roofing, but there's something strangely engaging about both of these channels. Part of it is that the segments where they're actually working are oddly meditative, but in both cases, their interactions with the people they're helping, and other people in the neighborhoods, are what really makes their channels what they are. It's a sad statement about today's world that so many people are suspicious of, or even actively hostile to, both Stockman and the Rudan brothers, but at the same time, the fact that they're out there pushing back against that tide is really something.

(Also, the Rudans have a pal called Sonny who sometimes comes and pitches in with their bigger products, which is especially touching when it comes out that Sonny's Croatian. Serbs and Croats... not generally the best of buds, after all.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.