Episode: 4545
Title: YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #12
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4545/hpr4545.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:40 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4545, for 2026-01-02
Today's show is entitled, "YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #12"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:16:28
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Part twelve of my list of subscribed channels"
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had
free slots that were not filled. This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute
shows in order to survive. Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello, this is Ahooga for Hacker Public Radio. Welcome in you to another exciting episode.
And this is coming to you from the Reserve Q. So you know what that means? We're not getting
enough shows submitted. Hacker Public Radio is a community project that relies on members
of the community to record and submit shows. If that doesn't happen at some point, we
shut the whole thing down. I don't want that to happen. I'm assuming if you're subscribed,
you don't want that to happen either. So record a show and submit it. It's really
not that hard. So with the public service announcement out of the way, I'm going to
continue with my discussion of YouTube channels that I subscribe to. And I'm going to start
this one with Rick Steve's travel. Now Rick Steve is a travel writer. Also has a company
that leads tours primarily Europe. In fact, the company is called Rick Steve's Europe.
So these are a series of videos. They're long. So typically an hour and a half to two hours
at a time. So some of them might be check favorites beyond Prague, Normandy and D. D. B.
Which is Toledo in Spain. Ethical traveling in a warming world, Norway in a nutshell, you
know, all of these are over an hour. Now they come out once a week. I will sometimes skip
one. If I don't have the time, he's also got the Rick Steve's Europe channel by itself. And this
is the primarily the short form, relatively short. So a lot of these are like 25 minutes. And I
think what they are is rebroadcasts of the television show. In the United States, he's got a
program that heirs on the public broadcast system, PBS, called Rick Steve's Europe. So this is,
I think mostly just rebroadcasting those programs. There's a lot of them by now. He's been doing this
for years. The next channel I'm going to mention is Ringo Star. Yes, the ex beetle. So this is
partly news. If he has a new release, he may release a music video to go with the new song.
Typically, though, it's mostly just short stuff. And maybe four or five minutes max.
So then there's Robert Reich. Robert Reich was the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration
and this is another one of my news and politics things. He's a observer of what's going on in
comments on political developments in the United States. Now, these can vary between short and long.
So he did one like the ten biggest myths about our economy that was close to a half hour,
that he did one, why the super rich are killing social security. And that was like four minutes long.
So a little variety there. On the next one is called Rob words. Rob is the name of the host.
And he's a word geek. What that means is that he is taking a look at some of the interesting
things about language. These are typically in the 20 minute or so range, 17 to 23 kind of thing.
So one of them was the worst English phrase book ever written. That was interesting.
Did Shakespeare invent as many words as people claim? Untranslatable French words.
Words, the Vikings left behind. Old Norse words that are still in English.
Did one on the alphabet, the origin of all of these letters? And so on.
Okay, next channel is Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That's the official channel.
So usually it's going to be stuff about the induction ceremonies and who's getting inducted each year.
So it's kind of a news channel as much as anything.
Then there's Rowan J. Coleman. And he does what he calls in-depth retrospective reviews on science fiction
and superheroes and stuff like that. So he's talking about visuals stuff. TV movies, things like that.
Review and analysis. So might be Star Trek, Babylon 5, Robo Cop, Red Warp, and so on.
Then there's Royal Caribbean blog and Royal Caribbean is a cruise line. So this is about cruising.
These are, again, you know, probably about 10 minutes long. It comes out about once a week.
Things not to do on a cruise. The five big changes coming to Royal Caribbean in 2025.
How much do I tip everyone on a cruise? I'm not sure if this is actually an official one or
there's just some guy decided to do it because it reads like it's just some guy deciding to do it.
On the other hand, I've got to assume he's got some kind of relationship with Royal Caribbean
cruise line that enables him to do it, otherwise he'd probably get a cease and desist.
But there you have it. Then the Sabaton history. Sabaton is a Swedish heavy metal band and a lot of
their songs, possibly all of them. I'm not an expert. I have to do with war and related topics.
So the Sabaton history channel is hosted by Indy NIDAL. Now Indy NIDAL was the host of the World War
one series that we talked about when we were looking at real-time history. He's one of the people
that split off and is now hosting videos on time ghost, which we will get to because I'm going
through this thing alphabetical order. So he's the host of the Sabaton history channel and
so it will usually be a discussion of something in history and then there's a Sabaton song.
It's about that and then he'll talk to one of the members of the group and say, okay, when you wrote
this song, what were you trying to do, what were you thinking about? Then there's the next channel
be Sassy Gamer Lady and this is another one of those Gamer channels. Now she does a number of things
but occasionally Civ will be a part of that and so it's mostly the Civ that I'm interested in.
Then science news channel. Science news is a publication that for a long time has been coming,
it's been published in the United States for decades. I think it traces itself back to the
beginning of the 20th century. They had been publishing by weekly and I think in just now with
2025, they may have just switched to monthly because I just got a very different looking publication
that says it's the January issue. So if the publication is all about what's in the news and science,
very good stuff. The videos are really short. So when I say short, I mean typically less than a minute,
occasionally just over that but like see a vampire bat working out on a treadmill.
An animation one, how Pluto met its largest moon Karen.
Watch an Ethiopian wolf slurp nectar from a flower. Here's what work is praying on a whale shark looks
like. So and all of these are like you know 30 seconds long kind of thing. So just a short little thing.
Then there's science at NASA, another one of the NASA ones and this is from the Science Mission
Directorate. So it's talk about the science work that NASA is doing and that could be
experiments conducted in space or it could have to do with developing new scientific instruments
or what have you. Something going on on a space station could come on this channel but it's
basically science oriented. And there's a channel that I could probably drop at this point because
I don't think the the host is doing anything any more because he switched to a different name
channel. This channel is called scienceium an element of knowledge and the Derek the host
now has a channel called veritasium and seems to be doing everything over there. But there were some
a few good videos there. Then there's the Sci-Fi channel. Sci-Fi is short for science Friday and in the
United States that is a radio program that is on national public radio or American public radio.
I'm not sure either. I'm not never entirely sure what the difference is but it's a public radio
program. It's also a podcast and it's a YouTube channel and what they do on the YouTube channel is
usually somewhat shorter form. So you know we could be talking about anything from a couple of
minutes to seven or eight minutes occasionally something longer. They have a Sci-Fi book club and
that can engender longer videos because I have a group of people talking about a particular book
so that can go on longer. But most of these tend to be anywhere from a few minutes up to like 15 minutes.
And then there is Sci-Show. Sci-Show is another complexly
product and it's just a YouTube channel devoted to science. So these are the same people behind crash
course. They're the people that got involved with PBS digital and this is their specifically science
related channel and then they split out a couple after that. So there's also Sci-Show Psych
which is all about psychology. I haven't seen anything lately from them so I'm not sure if
they're still doing it or if it's on hiatus and then there's Sci-Show Space which is specifically
about space and that does seem to still produce a few things. So like they did one a few months back
about black holes and then there is security now. This is the twit network. This is the one with Steve
Gibson and I sort of just check in. Those are so long. The average video there seems to be at least
two hours long and I don't often have that much time but the nice thing is in the show notes they
list all of the topics. So what I tend to do is I scan that first and say okay is there anything
here I really want to know about. And you know frequently it is the case that I look at and say
nothing that's going to compel me to dig into a two hour long program. So I think that's enough
for this. This is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio signing off and it's always encouraging you
to support free software. Bye bye.
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