Five Cool Videos You Should Check Out (12/13/22 Edition)

Including my review of 'Avatar: The Way of Water'.

Let’s try something new this week: Here are five YouTube videos I’ve watched (or made) recently that I found interesting, enlightening, and/or entertaining. Note: I’m putting my own video review of Avatar: The Way of Water into the mix because if I put it separately, it would imply that I didn’t think it was good? But I guess now it seems a bit self-aggrandizing. Ah well!

1. My (non-spoiler) video review of Avatar: The Way of Water+

I reviewed Avatar: The Way of Water! Sadly I think I’m going to have the minority opinion on this one but I have to stand in my own truth against the sequel of the highest grossing film of all time. All that said: still a worthwhile theatrical experience, as one would expect.

2. Adele surprises Adele impersonators

I need to thank Spencer Althouse for turning me on to this 6-year old video: Adele once surprised a bunch of her impersonators at a live “audition.” This video actually made me tear up: The moment when the impersonators realize what’s going on is so magical. You get to watch them make a whole emotional journey in the span of a couple of minutes.

3. Mark Rober’s Egg Drop from Space

Mark Rober has been going massively viral for years with his intricate exploding packages for porch thieves, but I appreciated his latest effort to drop an egg from space and have it survive. What’s great about this video is it shows you how crushing it is when a plan for a project goes into the toilet and you have to regroup and find the motivation to keep going.

4. The Verge journeys into the Metaverse

Meta has spent over $36 billion on the Metaverse so far. This video does great job of illuminating what that money has bought so far. Spoiler: It’s not good. If journalists that study technology for a living can barely make heads or tails of Horizon Worlds (Meta’s flagship app for VR), I don’t have much hope for the rest of us.

5. A Timeline of Elon’s Twitter Mistakes

This video by Thought Slime does an excellent job of summarizing all the wild stuff that’s happened at Twitter this year, along with a great moral to the story. Definitely a must watch for those who aren’t following the saga closely and what to get brought up to speed.

BONUS VIDEO: Elon Musk gets viciously booed at a Dave Chapelle show

Inadvertently humiliating Elon Musk is the funniest thing Dave Chapelle has done in 3+ years.

That’s it for now. If you have a chance, hit me up in the comments (or reply to this email!) and let me know if you’d appreciate rundowns like this in the future.

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Stuff I’ve Made

• For Decoding TV, Roxana Hadadi and I recapped the season finale of The White Lotus. It was an eventful episode of both the show and the podcast! Listen/subscribe here.