The “Living Big in a Tiny House” drinking game

I watch a lot of Living Big in a Tiny House, and I have very mixed feelings about it. But there’s definitely a bunch of trends I’ve noticed with it (and also with other tiny house channels on YouTube).

  • “We aren’t actually living in it yet”
  • “My things were controlling me”
  • Moved in just one month ago, “loving it forever”
  • “We just got married”
  • Outdoor bathroom
  • “We found a great parking space”
  • “Our family had this land available”
  • “It’s a lot bigger than you’d think!”
  • Slide-out bed
  • Closet bed (especially for children)
  • Ultra-dense bunking for their five children
  • Kids saying: “We used to have our own separate rooms but now we get to play together a lot more”
  • Have to completely reconfigure your room every time you want to do something different
  • No kitchen space
  • “My smoke detector keeps going off” (or, alternately, no smoke detectors at all)
  • Super narrow, steep, tall stairs
  • Lack of accessibility in general
  • “It’s a bit tricky to do [thing that will become harder as they get older] but it’s not a problem”
  • “I don’t even miss having stuff”
  • Composting toilet (or no toilet)
  • Instruction sign on the wall for visitors to use the toilet
  • “Do you like this [composting/incinerating] toilet?” Heavy sigh followed by, “Yeah it’s pretty great once you get used to it”
  • “You totally get used to the smell”
  • Have to climb a ladder to get into bed
  • Changing bed sheets is also… interesting
  • “Close yourself off, retreat from the world”
  • Owner makes their living as an influencer
  • Owner got the inspiration from whatever YouTuber is interviewing them
  • Owner intends to start their own tiny house channel for an income source
  • “Everything I could possibly need I have right here”
  • Added storage by putting things on some sort of complicated hoisting system that totally would never fail
  • Owner lifestyle that’s one step removed from tradwifery
  • Peak Instagram decor (fake ivy vines everywhere, “Live Laugh Love”-type signs, no actual artwork anywhere)
  • General Wiccan vibes
  • Weird religious overtones to the story (got inspiration from God, prayed for a spouse, “all my prayers were answered”)
  • And of course the kids are homeschooled
  • Spare chairs as wall decor
  • Random appropriation of native culture
  • “I don’t need a TV with this amazing view!”
  • Is this actually being filmed in an Ikea model home showroom?
  • “This is really private” (usually in respect to the, again, outdoor bathroom)
  • Super water- and energy-efficient tiny house next to a gigantic swimming pool
  • Tiny house in the back yard of a gigantic house that the owners actually live in
  • Tiny house situated on a 5-acre lot otherwise used only for a fucking lawn
  • “I’m saving [tiny amount of money] on rent!”
  • Ignoring long-term maintenance costs especially for off-grid systems (batteries, septic, etc.)

Please stop using open captions

There is a really pervasive trend in video these days where people will use (usually auto-generated) open captions (sometimes called “burned captions” or “hard subs”), where the text for the narration or the like is baked into the image of the video. This is sometimes accompanied by some attention-grabbing effects, like making the currently-spoken word jump up in size, often with a very goofy animation.

Please stop doing this.

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YouTube ContentID is still broken and dumb

I’m still trying to figure out the best way to get my music copyrights properly enforced on YouTube.

The problem is that I’ve released pretty much all of my music under CC by-nc-sa, which means that people are free to use it as long as they credit me, use it noncommercially, and also put their content under the CC by-nc-sa license.

However! People never fucking do. It’ll never be credited, is often used in a literal fucking advertisement (EDIT: I got the advertisement taken down without challenge, but it was just someone using my song “Come Out” to advertise disposable placemats for some reason), and is also absolutely never put under the same license.

So, you’d think this would be a perfect use case for YouTube’s copyright enforcement tools, right?

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The Mr. Barry Lewis Drinking Game

One of my favorite YouTube cooking shows is the eponymous one run by Barry Lewis, formerly known as “My Virgin Kitchen.” Given how long it’s been running and how many videos Barry has made over the years, there are certainly some standards that happen.

So, in the great tradition of Internets past, here’s a good old-fashioned drinking game. Actual amounts to be determined at the discretion of the viewer.

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