I know bizarrebub, I have to agree with the recommendation, though some of the clips (especially when they involve little kids) can be real stinkers. Will check out chilling scares! Thanks!

Let me lead with this: I’m taking recommendations for spooky channels.

Okay, first of all, how the fuck has nobody mentioned Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t? [https://youtube.com/@crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt](Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t)

You get to hear the angriest man alive nerd out about plants.

Someone else mentioned Tasting History with Max Miller and I must second that recommendation, it’s a really good channel if you appreciate Cooking, History, and especially both.

For spooky stuff, I recommend Midnight Broadcast. They basically take 4chan/reddit creepypasta threads, clean it up a bit for the YouTube algo, feed it to an AI reader, and publish them as 20-30 minute videos. There’s also a now dead channel called “Chass” that did the same thing, mixed in a bit of its own lore, and also did a couple of specials like the Epic of MonkeyHumper (11/10 story, possibly the best creepypasta ever published, cannot recommend enough). Though, Chass kept a bit more of the raw 4chan elements than MB does, so be ye warned.

Overanalyzing Avatar does that good 20-min long videos where he just really goes maximum nerd on Avatar The Last Airbender and Korra. It’s passionate, funny, and interesting, and if you even kind of like the cartoons, I highly recommend giving him a try.

I’ll add some more if I think of them

“God damnit don’t take your mask off while the proles are watching us, you’re going to ruin the surprise!” - French Lizard Person

I’m legitimately struggling to answer this right now. I have little pride for nations in general, and none whatever for ours at the moment. I have plenty of pride for individuals and groups that are trying to do the right thing, but there’s nothing unique to America in that regard.

Well, it depends on how you define the USA. You mean the Republic of the United States of America? Yeah, no, that’s dead. It is currently dead. It died when the SCOTUS made the president functionally beyond criminal prosecution, and everyone has just kind of been playing weekend at Bernie’s since then (though the Trump administration is dropping the pretense pretty quickly). Don’t get me wrong, it’s been dying for a long time, but that was the exact moment it was declared dead. No matter what happens, the republic as we knew it is dead and is not coming back. Nobody believes in the constitution anymore; among our leadership there are only either those who are in a hurry to destroy it, or those who are unwilling to defend it. I think a lot of the American populace haven’t sincerely believed in the constitution as an effective charter for governance for a while, too. Imo, we’re less than a year from the legislature being dissolved in some fashion of another, unless they just hang on like some ceremonial vestigial organ.

What we get to decide now is what comes next. That’s what nobody’s sure about. Are we going to have a middle-east style theocratic government? Italian fascism? Maybe the military defends the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic and we re-form the republic? German fascism? Neofeudalism? Peaceful balkanization? Hot balkanization? COULD IT BE?! BY GOD, it’s the ghost of Lenin with a steel chair! Or maybe we’ll get something entirely new? It’s frankly impossible to guess while we’re living in it. I think cold balkanization is both the most likely and most optimistic scenario. IN THE MEANWHILE, yeah, you’re still going to see all the window trimmings of the USA; the maps will still say USA, we’ll at least nominally still have the things that make America America (like the constitution still sitting in its fancy protective case, as though the GOP didn’t just wipe Trump’s ass with it), it’ll all look weirdly normal while they make the republic’s corpse do a funny little jig.

Yeah, I found Microsoft family to be a pretty half-assed experience. The thing that seems to work best is the screen time management. I had planned to try and set up YouTube access via allow listing channels in a home Linux server, but it turns out that YouTube doesn’t identify their videos by channel in the URL and I’d have to allowlist every single video for a given channel.