It took a while, but I finally made it through all two and a half hours of the latest Folding Ideas video, all about the cult-like madness of the memestocks world:
Like his epic Line Goes Up and The Future Is A Dead Mall Dan Olson eviscerates hype-based tech and finance scams with deadpan but blistering erudition, diving deep into technology, economics, policy, and whole lot of terrible Reddit posts so we don't have to.
The video may be long, but it's broken into chapters, so you can take it a section at a time over a week or so. It's well worth your time. At least in Nova Scotia it's looking like a damp dark weekend, so this might be a good thing to do while you're stuck indoors.
If this is too much for you, or if you need something different afterwards as a refresher, another much shorter kind of supreme nerdy indulgence is vintage costumer Bernadette Banner, redoing cheesy romance novel covers with more authentic clothing styles appropriate to their actual historical eras:
Bernadette is highly amphibious: she's an American living in London, with a reverse mid-Atlantic accent, and she also lives partly in 2023 and partly around 1900. If you liked this, don't miss her attempt to make a Victorian "saucy ankle pics" OnlyFans account. The part where she uses a camera drone to get a high-angle shot of her entirely clothed ankles feels far too much like something from the Neo-Victorians of Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age."
There's a lot of talk about the decline of network TV, and even streaming. Part of the reason for me is that none of these channels would ever create something as quirkily niche as these videos. On the other side, social media channels like TikTok or Instagram Stories are too focused on short takes to support these kinds of longer form productions.