Tapa Update #9 - They're among us ...

Here's something that's been bothering me for years. There's this problem on Youtube where high-output, low-substance channels are drowning out the ones that are actually ... well, good.

Behind the Scenes
Bad edutainment

Despite a seemingly endless variety of edutainment channels available on Youtube, there are not all that many good edutainment channels on Youtube. I say that as someone, who loves the genre and desperately wants more of it. Only, for me at least, it needs to meet a certain standard. And most of the time it really isn't.

What am I talking about? There are lots and lots of explainer channels offering multiple videos a week that are 30 minutes or longer delving into all kinds of topics, most commonly history. On the surface, they seem legit. The thumbnails and titles look professional, even the graphics and audio make a solid impression most of the time. The thing that's lacking is any sense of original writing or narrative skill. These videos are fine to leave on in the background. As long as you don't actually pay close attention to the information and how they are getting it across, they're totally passable. Problem is: There's little to learn or understand there. They are just amalgamations of surface-level info copied together from Wikipedia or other websites. Info that is just aimlessly dumped on you without any thought given to structure or what might actually be important to include. You wanna learn about the Punic Wars? Well, here's ALL THE INFORMATION ABOUT THE PUNIC WARS! That's neither very helpful for learning stuff, nor all that entertaining. It's like these flat, going-nowhere television documentaries, only made for Youtube. And yet, people might leave these videos on in the background for hours on end and labor under the delusion they're actually learning something from them. Even worse, these channels, due to the sheer mass of material they can output, are flooding Youtube with this stuff, leaving very little for those actually trying, not to make as much content as possible, but to make videos that are actually great. I so wish there were more good edutainment channels, but with that much low-effort white noise flying around, most money and attentnion is sapped away from such high-quality channels, making it hard for anything new to grow.

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Qomments and Cuestions
"I like how this guy speaks with a very soft accent so that he sounds almost like a first-language English speaker, but also regularly skips words like "is" or conjunctions like "on," or delivers sentences with an unusual word order in a way much more characteristic of second-language English speech. (...)  I find it jarring but endearing lol"

Yeah, so ... thanks, I guess? I put a lot of work into stuff like sentence structure, so it's cool someone noticed. Sometimes, a sentence needs to go on and on to deliver some specific information in a solid piece. That can be a bit of a drag, since those long-running sentences seem to kind of suck the life force from you while you're reading. But what if there's no shorter way to say it? Well, there always is. If need be, I cut every single thing out of that sentence that can be cut without making the sentence unintelligible. That makes the text appear a lot snappier, shortens the time I need to deliver the information, and usually, the result's even quite enjoyable and unique. Now, while I know that that way of expression can take some getting used to, we actually do stuff like this all the time in everyday speech. Not every sentence needs finshing. Not every point needs to be hammered home with a long, precise, wordy sentence. If getting the point across is what it's all about, it's sometimes best to do that as quickly as possible, without wasting your time.

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Interesting Stuff
The Newest Flag Bible

If you're at all into vexillology - and, I really don't hate my chances in assuming that you are - you might've found that there's very little well-researched stuff out there. So, let me give you a hand. The best point to start is Alfred Znamierowski's "The World Encyclopedia of Flags". It has pretty much everything the typical enthusiast wants to know about flags in it. The information in it isn't perfect - there are some blunders here or there - but it's pretty much the most solid, general piece of writing about flags there is; at least at this scope. Now, this isn't the newest book - first edition's from 1999, with newer editions available at least up to 2020 - but it's the newest flag bible, covering the whole field of vexillology. A must-have, pretty much.

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And don't forget: Seriously, don't forget. Thanks.

Have a good one!
Tapa