Things I Watch When I’m Sad
Life is full of ups and downs, and when you’re on a down, you need something to bring you up. For me, that often involves watching videos on Youtube and other video services. Here are the sort of things I watch when I’m feeling sad. I’ve mentioned most of this stuff before, but I feel like these things are worth repeating, because the world these days is so depressing.
Dog grooming videos
I don’t know why I watch pet grooming videos in particular, but they almost always have happy endings. Even videos with massively matted dogs end up with a happy ending and a dog that’s happy to finally be able to breathe again. My favourite grooming series currently is The Girl With the Dogs, a channel with a very nice lady with a very clean but small grooming facility. However, I prefer her longer videos. It’s more satisfying to me to see a longer groom, and it keeps the sadness at bay for longer.
Some videos though are just stupidly long for no reason. One video in particular was about a dog with a massive tumour. The video could have been over with in 20 minutes but they somehow managed to stretch it out to 2 hours. The tumour was removed at the 45 minute mark and I gave up after that. Just stick to nice and short grooming videos.
Lots of QI
QI is a great show. It’s both funny and informative, and it distracts me quite nicely. I’m a fan of both Stephen Fry and Sandi Toksvig as presenters, and frankly I’ll watch pretty much any episode. However I do prefer watching newer episodes mostly because they’re recorded at higher quality. It’s an old show, they’re currently working on Series U, so of course the quality will change over the years. Sure, the facts aren’t always accurate (and can sometimes be overly nit-picky) but the laughs along the way are worth it.
QI has started uploading episodes to Youtube, so you don’t need to go to weird obscure channels that do weird things to the videos themselves to hide from copyright. That being said, there’s basically no trace of Series T, the latest series on Youtube, which I find really weird. You’ll need to use BBC iPlayer for that.
Some loud music
Sometimes I’m more angry than sad, but don’t really have a way to get rid of that anger. So instead of watching normal videos, I watch some music videos. Normally, I hate what Youtube decides to auto-play (that’s a whole article on its own) but with music, I find it to be a little better. But the key here isn’t just to watch the videos, but to sing along as well. The singing makes things better. Disturbed is always a good choice, as is a bit of Muse. But I do keep on coming back to certain songs, like We All Life Together. It elevates the mood in a way that just watching a video can’t always achieve.
That being said, Gangnam Style keeps on being recommended to me. It’s a good song and worthy of its success, but jeez Youtube needs to calm down and start recommending other songs.
Taskmaster
As far as I’m concerned, Taskmaster is a classic. It’s hilarious, it’s stupid and it features a bunch of crazy comedians with all types of senses of humour. Not every series is the same though. Series 14 for example, all the contestants were pretty talented, even the crazier comedians. However, Series 10 is a little less… consistent, with pretty much everyone being shit and one of the contestants being kinda not very enjoyable (which made the final episode where she lost a lot more satisfying). What’s a shame is that the older series have less episodes, which meant less time for the contestants to shine. It’s all enjoyable though and, more importantly, it’s all there. Every single Taskmaster episode is available to watch on their channel.
This one particular video
A Jolly Wangcore’s videos have always been funny, even back when he was called A Jolly Wanker, was completely silent and only ever used captions. Turns out, he’s actually quite an attractive guy. Either way, his Half Life Google Translate Edition is probably one of his best videos, simply because he’s laughing at it so much. The changes themselves are also funny, and the team behind it did a pretty damn good job, but it’s so refreshing hearing someone so full of joy, that it cheers me up too. I find myself watching this video a lot lately.
Anyway, those are just a few of the things I watch. Joy is hard to come by these days, so get it when and where you can.