Hot take: 2020 has been a dreadful year, and will get worse before it gets better

It seems like a long, long time ago that I wrote my last "hot take" post for this blog.

OK, in fairness, it has been a while - my last post on this blog was back in May, and it's now November. That's six whole months, time in which I've spent all my time at home (yes, I'm lucky enough to be able to work from home), streaming video non-stop to such an extent that I'm now paying extra for my ISP's "unlimited bandwidth" option, because I was routinely going over my 1 TB data cap.

What I haven't been doing though, for the most part, is watching shows or movies. I've been watching the COVID-19 response, of course, as we all have, along with the slow descent of our neighbours to the south into outright, fascist dictatorship. We've got another long week coming up, too, as we wait to find out whether or not the American electorate still cares enough about democracy to vote for change (although the fact that several different states had already surpassed their total 2016 vote counts even before early voting had finished is easing my mind somewhat).

And, yes, I've been gaming, but it mostly hasn't been new games; it's mostly been Hearthstone, whose Battegrounds game mode has replaced Microsoft Solitaire as my most-played game. I'm still playing Path of Exile, too, but since I switched from Windows 7 to Pop!_OS, PoE just doesn't run nearly as well -- lots of performance and stability issues, including frequently crashing not only itself but Steam, that just make it difficult to develop any kind of flow.

So, what have I been watching? YouTube, for the most part.

• Journey to the Microcosmos has been a balm for my soul for the last few months. Imagine a David Attenborough-style nature documentary, but about the same microorganisms you can find in pond water nearly anywhere, and presented in bite-sided chunks, and you'll be close. Narrated by a super-chill Hank Green, which was itself a surprise because super-chill is not a vibe I'd ever have associated with Hank Green before seeing this channel.
• For a similarly chill vibe in cooking show form, check out the Babish Culinary Universe (formerly Binging With Babish), whose baritone-voiced host, Andrew Rea, is just soothing to listen to, even if you don't care about cooking shows.
• Still not soothed? Try the Fall of Civilizations channel, a surprisingly soothing source of documentaries about ancient civilizations which we mostly know from their crumbling ruins. Paul Cooper's narration manages to turn tales of war, corruption, disaster, and genocide into a very relaxing listen... or watch, if you check out their later "TV" posts, which lay the soundtracks of earlier episodes over beautiful footage of the crumbling ruins in question.
• Accented Cinema is a recent discovery, a channel all about the films of China, South Korea, and Japan, as seen from the point of view of someone who grew up in the region, and speaks English as his third language. It's both charming and eye-opening, and gave me an entirely different perspective on some films whose place in popular culture is much more complicated than I'd previously realizes (let's just say that Chinese people had a much different view of Disney's recent Mulan than Westerners did).
• Looking for more deep-voiced, soothing takes on some of the most fraught issues of today? Try T1J, whose terrific pseudo-explainers of the roots of police racism in the U.S., the myth of cancel culture, the disappointment of performative wokeness, or the time SNL absolutely nailed racial commentary.
• Still need more chill? Try the gameplay videos of Octavian Morosan, a.k.a. Kripparrian, whose super-chill approach to video game content is almost the exact opposite of the jump-scare, screeching antics of a Jacksepticeye or Markiplier (Kripp makes a lot of Hearthstone: Battlegrounds content, though, which may have you wanting to play the game afterwards, but no worries: Hearthstone is free to play).

That's just a sampling, mind you: I'm currently subscribed to over six dozen YouTube channels, and that's after I ruthlessly culled the subscription herd last week.

 

Oh, sure, there have been a few shows that I've spent time with. The Umbrella Academy's second season is all right; and the second season of Doom Patrol was, if anything, even weirder than the first. Lovecraft Country looks promising, although I'm not sure how much more content about America's history of racist brutality I can actually take; the first two episodes of Raised By Wolves were interesting, although I have serious doubts about how well-thought-through the world-building of that show actually is. 

 

So far, though, nothing has been as compulsively watchable as Westworld, or Altered Carbon, or The Mandalorian. Is it just that I don't have the energy for that kind of time commitment lately, or are the current crop of streaming show darlings just not that good? I find it difficult to say, but I bounced right off The Boys, for example, in spite of strong critical and viewer review scores. Maybe it's me.

So, what's coming, that I'm excited for, now that Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed again, and bumped Path of Exile's next batch of league content in the process? The answer is simple: hardware.

After years spent in the PC hardware wilderness, AMD has roared back to life in the last few years, and have finally cemented their utter dominance over rival Intel in the CPU space with their upcoming Zen 3 generation of Ryzen processors.

 

And, since CPU is only one of two critical components of a gaming PC, AMD went on to drop the mic on GPU rival NVidia with their RX 6000 series of graphics cards.

 

And that, folks it how you do it. 

 

Just like that, I'm suddenly saving my pennies with an eye to building a new gaming PC this coming spring. I can't remember the last time I was excited about PC hardware, but I am now, thanks to this knock-out one-two punch from AMD.

Which brings me to the other category of YouTube content I've been watching compulsively: TechTubers!

• Linus Tech Tips
• Marques Brownlee
• Moore's Law Is Dead
• Dave Lee/Dave2D
  
• Gamers Nexus
• JayzTwoCents
• Bitwit
• Paul's Hardware
• Optimum Tech 
• Hardware Canucks 

All good stuff, if you're into gaming hardware, including the next generation of gaming consoles. Because it's not only PC gamers who are getting new toys to lust after this XMas.

For the record, Santa, I'd like a Ryzen 9 5900X and a Radeon RX 6900 XT for XMas this year... although I wouldn't say no to a Ryzen 3 5600X with an RX 6800, either. Just saying.

And, finally, there have been books. Nothing is as comforting to me as curling up in a warm bed on a cool day, and spending all of that day reading a well-loved, or brand-new, book, and I've found a lot of comfort in this warm, literary cocoon. I re-read all ten books of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen (now available in a digital omnibus edition, which is a terrifying thought), with excellent new novels by Hank Green and Lindsay Ellis (A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor and Axiom's End, respectively) sprinkled throughout, for variety.

So, there you have it: my multi-media diet for the last six months, by which I've remained relatively sane through our era of COVID-19 madness. Hopefully, you can find some of these tips helpful; I know that they've helped me.