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The Combo Video

I have a tendency to become deeply enamored with things. I fall in love with and get wrapped up in things that to many people wouldn't have much meaning. The star of these little interests has been, for many years, fighting games. The core of bettering yourself inherent in these games has enchanted me years at this point. Of course, I am far from the only person who has a similar love for fighting games and I want to talk about a particularly beautiful expression of that love. The combo video. To put it simply, a combo video is a montage of the fucked-up things you do can do to an opponent in these games. A way to paint your skill onto the canvas of digital video and share it with the world. But over time this changed. People began to tell stories in this format. In an odd way, the videos themselves started to reflect the creators inside and outside. Nowadays, a combo video can be a lot of things. A stylish breakdown of your prowess at a children's party game, the first example...

The Best Documentaries of Our Day Are Being Made on YouTube

  Thumbnail by Defunctland Recently in a session of my film class, my professor said something along the lines of "a great documentary makes you interested in something you wouldn't care about anyway,". This was in reference to the film Snowy , a 2020 documentary film about a family's pet turtle. Her point reminded me of a very specific type of documentary. The YouTube video essay. For those unfamiliar, a video essay is an artform that has largely been created and innovated on the video sharing platform, YouTube. Films in this genre often center around one specific topic and delve into said topic with a depth that I really haven't seen anywhere else. They are almost all indie films, made by either singular artists or small teams. These people tend to write, edit, and direct the entirety of these pieces all on their own. And they are fascinating. I have watched a two hour long documentary on the origin of a sound effect from Roblox and I was intensely interested th...