.. this blogger gave to thee...
... ten chaotic beings...
... nine tufted treats...
... eight potential palettes...
... seven custom Cons...
... six fancy dresses...
... five gold things!..
... four FX plushies...
... three midnight magnets...
... two tricks and treats...
....a tale of lovely lore.For Day 10 I'm going to show you some weird, wonderful and chaotic beings that have somehow entered my life over the past couple of years and who I find thoroughly fun and entertaining. No promises that it'll be most highbrow humour, but it's all in good fun and they made me laugh when I needed it.
Celina Myers "Celina SpookyBoo
Sleepwalking, dad jokes, makeup and the paranormal, Celina Myer, a.k.a. Celina SpookyBoo is a TikToker who I found when she put an awesome yellow streak in her hair, fuelling my ongoing desire to bleach and colour my hair while also being clueless as to what to do:
@celinaspookyboo #greenscreen fancy @hannah.joy #BeautyLoverReveal ♬ original sound - Celinaspookyboo
I was so enamoured of both Celina's hair and silly personality that I showed the video to my little sister, who coincidentally had, without me remembering, shown me one of Celina's other videos, of her antics while sleepwalking.
A chronic sleepwalker, Celina's antics went viral when she posted the clips from the cameras that she and her husband, Adam, installed around their home to document her night time antics. Whether it's chugging chocolate milk (when lactose intolerant), flipping the bird people who aren't there, feeding her lawn soda or wrestling an octopus, here's just something about her toddler like running, borderline demonic giggling and propensity for being a tad spicy, while her husband (who stays up to keep watch over her on nights she's more likely to sleep walk) corpses with quiet laughter.
The reason I loved watching Celina's videos, sleepwalking or otherwise, is that there's nothing malicious about them, she's just funny and sweet and puts up these videos as much for her own amusement as her viewers.
Link || Celina Myers "CelinaSpookyBoo" || Website || Instagram || Twitter || TikTok || Facebook || YouTube || Snapchat || Podcast
Link || This Woman is Going Viral on TikTok [...] by Megan Falk via Shape
Katie Budenberg "make_love_not_diets"
This beautiful, funny, chaotic, awesomely weird and outspoken person is Katie Budenberg from make_love_not_diets, who is an Instagram creator who speaks out on the danger of diet culture and promotes body positivity, acceptance and self-love, and it does it with honesty and a huge dose of humour.
Katie was another person my little sister introduced me too, and whether she's dancing around in her underwear showing people that it's okay to have lumps, bump and jiggly bits on your body, the idiocy and hypocrisy of women having to shave legs and armpits or the bizarre fact that clothing and underwear companies don't seem to think women have public mounds or vulvas...
... the content is poignant without being preachy or aggressive.
At the end of December 2021 Katie also started a petition on Change asking for Instagram to allow users to filter out weight loss ads from their feed, as they just add to the idea that you should feel bad about your body and try to persuade you to spend money to help you reach the "ideal" image. This option would go alongside other potentially triggering topics such as alcohol, parenting, pets, social issues, elections and politics, and give the users a safer, more inclusive site to use without triggering them if they have a history of disordered eating or body image issues.
This was particularly important around the turn of the year as advertising switched from telling us to indulge and do what we want to telling us that we must diet, exercise and stop being over-indulgent for fear of not being bikini ready. She asked for 10,000 signatures, she currently has 35,000 and her petition has become one of the top signed on Change.org.
As someone who has no body positivity, and I haven't since puberty hit (before even) and I got hips, tits and hair in places as girls we were told we shouldn't but all do. That feeling's never gone fully gone away, and being able to turn off content that is both psychologically upsetting as potentially dangerous is something I fully support. I signed straight away.
Katie's content is about body positivity, acceptance and encouragement while pulling faces, showing off hairy legs, jiggling her tummy, mostly in her underwear, and more importantly making people laugh and feel that not only are those things acceptable, they're completely normal and can be beautiful.
You and I are completely normal and fuck anyone who tells you otherwise.
Link || Anti-diet Activits Fight For A Weight Inclusive Society by Ellie Ng via Kingston Courier
Bailey Sarian "Murder, Mystery & Makeup Mondays!"
Bailey Sarian was a name that, as someone who watches a lot of makeup and beauty content on YouTube, kept being more and more frequently mentioned by other creators. Everyone was obsessed with her and her series Murder, Mystery & Makeup Mondays, where every Monday she would do her makeup while talking about the true crime stories that were "heavy on her noggin".
Before I watched Bailey, I wouldn't have considered myself as someone who enjoyed watching true crime content. There would be the odd documentary that I'd get sucked into, or the occasional foray into Wikipedia when something would pop up in the media or a show I was watching, but generally, I didn't seek it out. But out of curiosity I started to watch some of Bailey's videos to try and understand why everyone had gone so nutty over her. The answer was, even with the macabre content, Bailey is sweet, funny, silly and also really talented at makeup, creating looks that are really bold, bright and grungy and I really like, and I weirdly enjoyed listening to her talk about the subject matter, without feeling like it was being done in an unsavoury, glamorised way.
"Get better idols!" (Bailey Sarian)
In June of 2021, Bailey also started a podcast called Dark History, and instead of exclusively talking about true crime, she began talking about historical events such as the dancing plague, Thomas Edison and Stonewall...
It's not everyone's cup of tea, if you'd asked me a year and a half ago I'd have said I wasn't interested in someone talking about true crime, but the fact that she was doing her makeup, and the way some of my favourite beautubers talked about her, gave me a reason to investigate. The content is interesting, the makeup is on point, but I really watch it for Bailey's personality.
And the theme song. The silliness of the theme song kills me every time.
Link || Bailey Sarian || Website || Instagram || Twitter || TikTok || Facebook || Pinterest || YouTube || Spotify
Link || Murder, Mystery & Makeup || YouTube Playlist || Audioboom || Spotify || Apple Podcasts || Amazon Music || Deezer
Link || Dark History with Bailey Sarian || YouTube Playlist || Audioboom || Spotify || Apple Podcasts || Amazon Music || Deezer || Google
Joshua Weissman
Last year, or the year before, I wrote about Bon Appetite (BA) Test Kitchen and how it was one of the things online that brought me a little bit of joy. That watching Gourmet Makes, among its other shows, was a little bit of lightness and rest bite for me. Well... I think I may be an omen, because after saying that they were very rightly cancelled for not paying their few POC employees properly, being a racist and toxic environment to work in and this lead to most of their most popular chefs quitting in protest.
In fact for a few years now I've worried that I'm a bit of an jinx because after suggesting that Jenna Marbles was worth watching, she self cancelled herself for her old content and has yet to return to social media, and Heather Moorhouse, a beautuber I absolutely adored, decided she wasn't enjoying being a content creator any more and that she was going to find something else that made her happier. I hope she has, though greatly miss her joyful content.
All I'm really saying is, if you're on this list and you get cancelled in 2022, I'm sorry...
... now the reason I bring that up is that after BA was cancelled, the foodie creator that very quickly took their place in my viewing habits was Joshua Weissman, who I'd initially encountered when searching for how to make a sourdough starter a couple of years before people were searching for it mid pandemic.
Josh is a trained chef, whose food looks ludicrously good, but he's also a completely and utterly ridiculous human being.
One of my favourite series he creates on his channel is But Better, where he recreates fast food favourites from scratch, the goal being to not only recreate it, but make it significantly better. The reason I gravitated towards Josh is because of content such as this, it has the same energy that I enjoyed from BA. Josh is also ridiculous, singing randomly, calling himself papa, pushing his cookbook as often as possible in as weird a manner as he can, he's scathing and pointed when reviewing food that we all eat, but know is not the best, and he's passionate about good ingredients... to the point where you'd need to earn a small fortune to create some of recipes.
I watch him because I know I'm going to be entertained and probably come away hungry.
He's also responsible for this nonsense that I've now entered into every time I make pizza dough...
Weird? Pointless? Yes, but also silly, a little creative and I'm probably not going to stop for a little while. (Yes I'll also probably take photos of all of them.),
If you enjoyed BA's content or creators like The Babish Culinary Universe (previously Binging with Babish) and SortedFood, you'll most likely enjoy Josh as like them, he's the right mixture of idiocy and actual usefulness.
Link || SortedFood || Website || Club || Instagram || Twitter || TikTok || Facebook || Pinterest || YouTube
Novympia
(L to R: Nova & Olympia Åvalanche)
Novympia comprises of two UK based drag queens Nova and Olympia Åvalanche, a real-life couple who I have been subscribed to for a long time and have a huge soft spot for. But, over the past couple of years they have been more regularly uploading parody videos of their favourite (or most ridiculous) fellow YouTubers, including Safiya Nygaard, Baumgartner Restorations, Claire Saffitz, Ask a Mortician, Jenna Marbles and Nigella Lawson...
All done in gest and more often than not with a great deal of love for their parody subjects, these are really entertaining and stupid and scarily accurate. Most of the "victims" even respond positively to the videos and being flattered and entertained by seeing their ticks and vocal fry mocked.
These videos, with Olympia front and centre, I love because there's something about seeing her dressed as one of my online favourites, such as Bailey Sarian and Rachel Maksy, which I get great joy from. Having one of your favourites proclaiming their love for another of your favourites is strangely conspiratorial, like you're part of a secret club that can agree on all the silly things you like about that person and see where mockery is actually deep seated appreciation.
I suppose it's because you're in on the inside joke. And who doesn't enjoy that.
There's plenty of other content with Olympia and Nova, including makeup tutorials, the tasting foreign snacks, gaming, music, skits and mostly the pair teasing and bickering with each other while using obscure TV, film, music and YouTube references as part of their vocabulary. Inside jokes are abound in their content, to a distracting level at times, but I have a real soft spot for them, and particularly for the parodies.
Link || Novympia || Website || Facebook || Twitch || YouTube || Soundcloud || Patreon || Merch || Spotify || Bandcamp || Apple Music || Deezer
Dave Made A Maze (2017)
Over lockdown it's probably guaranteed you watched more TV, more films and generally streamed more and more, and that led watching some weird and wonderful things.
Early in the morning on the run up to Christmas I saw listed on Amazon Prime a film called Dave Made a Maze (2017) which as the slightly odd trailer auto-played, I was kind of transfixed:
... it was so weird and intriguing in fact that I instantly watched it.
The film is based around Dave (Nick Thune), who is currently without a job and with his girlfriend Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) away for the weekend, decides to start building a maze from the inside out, until the Tardis like cardboard box that sits in the middle of his living room has become so big he get trapped. Annie calls one of their friends, who in turn calls more of their friends, including a filmmaker and film crew, and they decided enter the maze on a quest to rescue Dave. Understandably, hijinks and adventures ensue.
It was weird and fascinating and I'm still not entirely sure what was going on, but I haven't stopped thinking about it, and a huge part of that is because the set was made of recycled cardboard. With a tiny budget film maker Bill Watterson and the set designers created an entire world out of carboard and because the studio was only able to house two rooms at a time, as one scene was shot, the next set was being built for next part of the film to be filmed. The lifespan of each room, some which were filled detail and curious elements that the set designers were making up as they went along, was only about four hours!
"He [Steven Sears who wrote the screenplay] really dug that concept of being
in your own room but somehow being lost at the same time. Thirdly, it was
fueled by the frustrations that so many of us face when it comes to trying to be
creative and not starve in the process. It gets more and more challenging to
remain playfully inventive as the struggles of adulthood take hold. The more
the script developed, the more the story became a metaphor for the creative
life itself." (Bill Watterson, Horror Channel Interview)
The more I think about this film, the more I love its weirdness and the metaphor of being lost, both in life and creatively, alongside how much craftmanship went into creating all of these sets out of cardboard on zero budget, meaning it really had to be a passion project.
If you see it online, please watch it for the weirdness.
Link || Dave Made A Maze (2017) || IMDb || Wikipedia || Rotten Tomatoes || Twitter || Instagram || Amazon
Link || Interview with Bill Watterson [...] by James Whittington via Horror Channel
Link || Dave Made A Maze Aims To Pull People Into A Crazy Cool Papercraft Adventure by Evan Narcisse via Gizmodo
Link || Thinking Outside the Box: An Interview with Bill Watterson [...] by Paul Risker via PopMatters
Link || DICFF 2020 | Interview With Bill Watterson [...]by Stephen Porzio via HeadStuff
Watcher "Puppet History"
What seems like a very long time ago I enjoyed BuzzFeed, then it got pretty low brow and my desire to read or watch any of their content waned. I did however keep up with a few of the content creators who I had found entertaining, mostly this was just Safiya Nygaard and The Try Guys, but eventually I found Watcher which featured the weird creative talent of Ryan Bergara, Shane Madej and Steven Lim, and this was because I discovered Puppet History.
Hosted by The Professor, a jelly bean producing puppet (voiced & puppeteered by Shane), this history based quiz show brings to light some of the weirdest and horrid events in history in a light hearted and entertaining way, which as with many additions to this list, I find endearingly odd.
Puppet History seems like a lot of silliness, and I won't deny that it is, but it's actually pretty informative, I mean, did you know that there was a great molasses flood in Boston in 1919 or that there was a dancing plague in France in 1518?
Coincidentally I also started watching a lot of BuzzFeed Unsolved (Supernatural and True Crime), which featured Ryan and Shane until Season 7, which concluded in November 2021. I'm pretty much blaming Bailey Sarian for my increasing interest in this kind of content, but when it comes to Unsolved I was mostly there for Shane's nonchalant, non-believer attitude to ghost hunting and Ryan's borderline hysterics at every strange noise that he hears while the pair are on an investigation. Ryan being a strong believer in the paranormal.
In 2022 they're reviving the premise on the Watcher platform as Ghost Files, which will hopefully allow them to continue the supernatural content they and their audience love, without the BuzzFeed overlords being involved. Personally I'm looking forward to this because of the duo's interactions, and hopefully this year there will be some more Puppet History. Though they did leave us on a rather massive cliff hangers.
Link || The Professor || Twitter
Link || BuzzFeed Unsolved || YouTube
Lego Masters Australia
At home, as kids, one of our favourite things to do was get the Lego box out. We'd spend hours building houses and towns and random stuff, and then watch as my little sister - mostly when she was a toddler - would smash her way through our creations like some sort of toddler Godzilla, earning the moniker of Lego Bomb.
There's still a big box of Lego in my parents loft and if I'm honest I would quite happily bring it down and spend too much time building again... though probably after a very deep clean.
I don't think I'll ever not want to play with Lego and so when I saw a couple of years ago that there was going to be a TV show based on my childhood toy, I thought it was going to be great, and then to be honest, I was disappointed. I didn't really enjoy the American or British versions, they were (silly to say) too competitive, too slick and lacking in humour, particularly in their choices of presenters, so I stopped watching very quickly.
That is until Channel 4 repeated one of the international versions towards the end of the year, namely the Australian incarnation, which came on after something else I was watching, and instantly I loved it!
The Aussie version of the show became a firm favourite last year and a large part of that was Hamish Blake, the host is funny and silly and just seems to love Lego and the insane things that people can create from it. That high energy, upbeat personality instantly changed the mood of the show. It's not taken as seriously and it's just a room full of people who love Lego and want to have fun, the competition and potential prize just seems to be a bonus. As is getting to see the creations that took them hours to complete destroyed by shaking, drops, bats and explosions.
The Lego Bomb strikes again!
Audrey Hopkins "Auditydraws"
From the first scream, I was a fan. Audrey Hopkins a.k.a. Auditydraws, is an artist and illustrator whose TikTok videos of her drawing made me laugh instantly because of her high energy natural and inability to not break down in wheezing laughter as she draws random mashups of characters, gender bending Disney villains, the embodiment of certain names or the Covid-19 vaccines, or redrawing things her husband Rich - who isn't an artist - has drawn to get her out of creative blocks.
@auditydraws I can’t believe this worked 🤣 #art #fyp #foryou #comedy ♬ original sound - Audrey
@auditydraws My new favorite princess!! 🤩❤️ #art #foryou #comedy #foryoupage ♬ original sound - Audrey
@auditydraws Today Karen becomes a pro wrestler!! 🤣 #foryou #fyp #comedy #art ♬ original sound - Audrey
@auditydraws This might be my new favorite way to make characters 😂 whose is better? @richarddoesnotdraw #art #fyp #comedy ♬ original sound - Audrey
It was her boisterous personality that I was so drawn to over the past year, she was funny and silly and while she's loud (maybe turn your volume down a little), it's this over exuberance that makes her so fun to watch. That aside, I really like Audrey's drawings, she has a very distinct style which translates throughout her illustrations, even when she's mimicking other artists styles. I'd say her style was Disneyesque (god that's a weird word to see written down!) but in a more expressive way.
Throughout her videos Audrey uses the WannaDraw Idea Generator, a free app that she and Rich created to help artist like herself generate fun ideas to draw when you're stuck or just wanting to flex your drawing muscles. The generator currently has over 100,000 different possibilities, combining characters giving a character a particular activities they're doing, it's a really fun way to expand your ideas (I literally just downloaded it).
Whether you want to watch/follow Audrey on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube, she posts most of her content to all three platforms, and since they're short form videos it's really easy to binge her content the way I did. She's very fun to watch.
Link || Audrey Hopkins "auditydraws" || Website || Instagram || Twitter || TikTok - Auditydraws || TikTok - Richarddoesnotdraw || Shop || Twitch || Discord || YouTube
Ryan Dykta with Casper, Daisy, Bernie & Crumpet "Teamcasp47"
Last but not least is Ryan Dykta and his dogs Casper, Daisy, Bernie and Crumpet, who go under the name Teamcasp47 and simply said, he does what we all do and gives voices to his pets and conversations between them all, whicht he then puts on TikTok.
@casp47 Poor Simon #casp47 ♬ original sound - Ryan Dykta
I found Casp based on this video and instantly sent it to my sisters and mum to make them laugh because this is exactly what we do when we're at home, have conversations with our cat as our cat. We've done this with all our pets over the years with varying levels of sass, but it's not something I think any of us are in control of, we just do it without realising... even Charlie questions our sanity because of it.
@casp47 What was that daisy?? #pets #casp47 #fish #dogsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Ryan Dykta
@casp47 So crumpet is getting older….surely his voice is gonna break?? 😝 #casp4 ♬ original sound - Ryan Dykta
@casp47 I do miss Simon….#casp47 #dogsofttiktok #fyp ♬ original sound - Ryan Dykta
This is just sweet and ridiculous content and we've even inadvertently integrated "tufty whomp", "discipline" and you "killed my unicorn" into our pop culture lexicon, that as a family we've been filling with random reference that no one else will necessarily understand, including these.
Sweet, silly and familiar, having content like Casp turning up in my feed made me smile. What more can you ask for?
Link || The 'Talking Dog' Who Became a TikTok Star [...] by Andrew Stuart via Wales Online
The thing about all these people, animals, films and shows is that they were satisfyingly sweet and distracting. Some of them were borderline educational, others creative and all of them were stupid, silly and weird and those my friend, are my favourite kind of people.
Hopefully something on this post will make you laugh, even just a little bit. That's my only goal on posting it.
Happy New Month! Part eleven before March I swear...
Listening: Pressure - Jessica Darrow (Encanto)
