January 28: Humans are meat (beautiful) / Humans are meat (grotesque)

Here it is, the last entry in The Crossover Appeal's 2025 recap. I'm ashamed to say I watched barely any movies from last year, nor any TV really unless you count football and GBBO, so to wrap things up you're getting my favorite YouTube videos of the year. Turns out that, at least in my case, when you spend the first half of the year in a single room keeping a tiny infant alive, YouTube kind of takes over.

I've always said that the essay is my favorite literary form. So it stands to reason, I suppose that YouTube, the current runaway leader in platforms that deliver essays to your living room, has become the media place I spend the most time. Don't get me wrong, YouTube is a swamp of drivel and dreck, but it's also alive with some of my generation's best small non-fiction filmmakers and commentators, showcasing what can be done with minimal equipment and maximum creative freedom.

2025 was also the year I gave YouTube my first real try as a video creator myself. I put out four videos across the year, including one that, despite its amateurish flaws, I'm about as proud of as anything I've made since I left graduate school. Hopefully you'll see more from me and my channel soon because I found the whole process of video creation to be incredibly rewarding. Something about knitting all the pieces of a video together makes me feel like I'm caught up in the flow of some broader sense-making apparatus, a feeling that, frankly, I'd like to chase more of right now.

And maybe that's the magic of YouTube in general for me. Watching these videos that have been produced by people who've poured themselves into the thing then shared it directly with the world, you get the feeling that despite all the noise and damage the Internet has brought us, there actually is a big community of creative and thoughtful people out there putting in the work to make good things. And at the end of the day, that's what this newsletter has always been about. Find good things and share them because people deserve them.

So, without further ado, here are four of my absolute favorite videos from 2025.

"Horizon: Forbidden West -- Anatomy of a Crowd Pleaser" by Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Horizon: Forbidden West is on my Mount Rushmore of open world games. It has close to everything I want from a big, prestige action game. A compelling protagonist with a genuine sense of agency and interest in her world. An unusual and difficult-to-master combat system. A breathtaking and expensive-looking playground to run around and do shit in. Some fantastic character writing and mocap acting among the NPCs (looking at you, Noshir Dalal). In my view it even wears its imperfections well. The arch sci-fi plotting fully achieves camp thanks in no small part to Carrie Ann Moss's committed line readings, and the intimidating, almost exhausting size of the map is softened by the care and beauty of the environments. It's all just a hell of a production.

Which is why it's always baffled me how much Forbidden West escapes meaningful critical attention. It has its champions, of course, but it sometimes feels like video games' version of the James Cameron's Avatar series - technically impressive but culturally unimportant popcorn.

Cue Noah Caldwell-Gervais' video essay on Forbidden West, one of several lengthy video essays that Caldwell-Gervais released toward the middle of last year. Like most of his work, "Anatomy of a Crowd Pleaser" isn't exactly concise, but what it lacks in brevity it makes up for in attentiveness, the one thing that I've always felt was missing in Forbidden West's coverage. It's a wandering, meandering kind of criticism that promiscuously hops from film crit to games crit to pop culture references to deep dive analyses, all in the service of noticing, in detail, the texture of Guerilla Games' opus. It's critical and laudatory in equal measure, always pressing deeper to understand how the experience actually works in a way that I found incredibly rewarding to watch. I can't overstate how hard it is to sustain this level of careful attention on a game that stretches for hundreds of miles and dozens of hours - it makes this video feel a little miraculous.

"I Tried 30 Viral Health Trends for 30 Days to See What's Worth It" by Speeed

2020 was, for me, a precambrian explosion of new enthusiasms, and Youtube was the primary site of those million little detonations. I've always been a hobby guy, but now I was a manic little Vitruvian dude, collecting interests like a Hoover-branded teenager. Rising to the top of those interests was car stuff. I've always liked cars in one shape or another. I like racing games, I had a ton of Hot Wheels when I was a kid, that kind of thing, but now I was watching 2 hour videos about LS swaps in Miatas.

If that last sentence made sense to you, you probably already know about Donut, one of Youtube's largest car content channels that, a couple years ago, lost some of its top talent to a scattering of independent new ventures. James Pumphrey is one of the dudes who left to do his own thing. If I were to pitch James as a type of guy to you, I'd say he's like if Brennan Lee Mulligan was kind of a bro. And I'd say you should check out his Youtube channel, because what he's doing there at Speeed is pretty special. He's putting together a men's lifestyle magazine in Youtube channel form, but the catch is, it doesn't suck. In fact, it's pretty great.

This video in particular captures what makes not only the channel, but James himself, so good. He takes a concept that you've seen or heard a million times and uses it as a jumping off point to be vulnerable about his own health, examine the powerful rhetoric of the wellness industry, and ultimately offer a genuinely affecting call to better health for guys like him - which is to say guys like me.

I'm not getting any younger. This is the very last year I could feasibly tell someone "I'm in my mid-thirties." My cholesterol is high. My dad had a quintuple bypass in his early fifties. Watching James put in the work, even though a lot of it was bunk, was honestly inspiring, especially because I know he's had plenty of his own health issues to navigate. When, in the video's conclusion, James discusses how health has been reconfigured by our hyperreal Internet reality into a question of optimization, he brings the scope back to the importance of trying rather than perfecting. "I'm not saying don't try. We should try. The whole point of this channel is to encourage people to try."

That's got to be my absolute favorite sentiment in the world at the moment.

"Are Minimal Phones a Scam" by Becca Farsace

Becca Farsace is my favorite tech Youtuber anywhere at the moment. Formerly of The Verge, Becca went independent a little while back with the tagline "I take tech outside," a north star for her channel that has proven eminently compelling. She's not here to gin up excitement for the new, the shiny, and the expensive - she's here to talk about how we actually use technology on a day to day basis. To ask questions about whether or not the tech is working for us or if it's actually making it harder to live the lives we want to live. As a bonus, Farsace is also just a lovely presence on camera, like a neighbor you're always happy to talk to in the driveway as you're heading your separate ways.

I could have chosen any number of videos to represent my affection for Farsace's content in 2025, but I chose this one because I think it highlights her knack for canny tech crit the best. It's about a fascinating recent development in the tech space, the emergence of the minimalist phone, and in this video Farsace digs into the questions that such a trend suggests about the ways our relationship to tech might need to change while maintaining a healthy skepticism about tech's capacity to facilitate such a transformation. And she does this all in the format of a comparative product review, a format we're all so used to that you might not even notice the quality social commentary she's offering between the product descriptions and personal anecdotes. It's a great little bit of tech criticism that is just a taste of the high quality bar Farsace is setting out there in the Techtube space.

"Humans Are Bags of Meat (in Games)" by Jacob Geller

I always have time for a new Jacob Geller essay. Like he has for most of his career, Geller put out quite a few fantastic videos in 2025 (not to mention a real actual book through Lost in Cult, everybody's favorite arthouse games press), but this relatively minor little essay captured my attention the most. It does what all of my favorite essays do: start off with a fun bit of minor trivia, expand that trivia into an agreeable set of observations about the broader space it comes from, and then see how those observations play out across an eclectic group of texts - in this case,the video games Doom, Prototype, Humanity, and Slitterhead. It's a clever, compelling video about the ways games represent, value, and de-value bodies and whether or not the way video game bodies regularly explode into giblets can tell us something about how we experience our own, fleshier selves.

I'll admit, this one is about as narrowcasted to me as a video can get. My specific field as an academic was representation and embodiment in video games. I thought and wrote all the time about what bodies in games are doing, how they relate to our own bodies, and how we should understand the actions and interactions of game bodies in a way that sets them apart from film bodies, book bodies, and TV bodies. For me, the question of bodies in games has always been a question of meaning and the production of it in play. So many of our most closely-held ethics are grounded in the idea that our bodies cannot be metaphorized away. Our flesh and blood are the final truth of our lives, a fundamental backstop that we can't symbolize our way out of. And yet, in games, that's all bodies are - a synecdochal extension of our real-world body's activity. It's the foundational weirdness of play and, to me, why games are so important to understand.

Geller's essay slots right in the middle of all that weird mess. In its closing moments, Geller's video offers an aesthetic framework for understanding the politics of bodies in games - "Humans are meat (grotesque) and humans are meat (beautiful)". And while, of course this binary split simplifies the whole thing quite a bit, it nevertheless is a productive jumping off point for wrestling with the limits and affordances of what it means to represent a person in a game. Because whereas in our case, at least we are thinking and feeling bags of meat, the ones onscreen are not. They are in fact machines, not meat. All that video games can do is aestheticize that meat in one direction or another. Well, that and ask you, the sentient meat holding the controller, to play.

That's it, that's the recap. And the relaunch, I suppose. Next week The Crossover Appeal will be shifting into what will hopefully be closer to its regular rhythm for the rest of the year. Keep your eye on the inbox for more. Thanks, as always for being here.

Jordan Cassidy