Dropout TV
Jan. 17th, 2023 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrI recently subscribed to College Humour's streaming website, Dropout TV, and have been enjoying it enough to keep subscribed for something like two months over the 3 day free trial period so far.
It's about $9AU/$6US a month for access to a large backlog of generally humourous shows. The two I have been watching the most are the nerdy game show Um Actually, and the scifi roleplaying show Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey, both of which I've really enjoyed, but there's also a bunch of other silly game shows, comedy skits, and roleplaying.
The College Humour Youtube channel has a bunch of trailers, which imo generally aren't very good, and little clips of funny moments, which are what actually got me to try out the free trial. There's also full episodes and in some cases entire runs of a few shows. Dropout.tv has pretty good closed captions, from a brief check the Youtube ones aren't as consistent. It looks like you can subscribe on youtube instead and see all current subscriber-only releases but I'm not sure it has the full backlog.
The cast are fairly diverse, with a moderate number of POC and queer people, and the humour is generally good natured and coming from a progressive place. They also have cameos by minor nerd celebrities like Matt Mercer, Sungwon Cho etc. The site is owned and run by members of the cast, so while it's entirely plausible that there's some sort of inequality behind the scenes, it is nice knowing my money is actually supporting the creators and not mostly being swallowed up by some evil megacorp.
If you do sign up for the free trial note that it defaults to signing you up for a year instead of month by month. The video streaming functionality on Dropout.tv is pretty bare bones, you can add shows and videos to your favourites but it doesn't have any way I can see of keeping your place within the season or any individual video. Since Dimension 20 videos are often over an hour long I literally write down where I'm up to if I want to pause and close the browser. Skipping forward to where I was up to works fine, at least.
So! The specific shows I have watched, with some illustrative free youtube videos.
Um Actually: Nerdy contestants compete to see who has the most in-depth knowledge of the obscure details of nerd-loved canons like Star Wars, D&D, Wrestling etc. The only prize is the satisfaction of being right, and wins via technical pedantry are encouraged. Everyone is very good natured and funny, and on board with the show being both a celebration and gentle critique of the nerdy desire to butt in and correct people about the details of your favourite canon. This is especially fun to watch with Cam, since then we have someone to be impressed when we notice a super obscure detail before the contestants.
Game Changer: a humourous game show where the specific rules change every episode. Some of this was very funny but some of the challenges contestants had to do got a bit mean/unpleasant. They didn't seem to mind too much but I don't enjoy that sort of thing.
Make Some Noise: A subset of Game Changer episodes, and then a spin-off, where comedian contestants have to improvise a sound based based on a description, which can be anything from squelchy noises for "Slime ASMR" to an in-character monologue for "An Ad for the new McDonalds Burger: The MacBeth". What I've seen of this is pretty great but it can get repetitive so I only watch it occasionally.
Dimension 20: "actual-play", where a group of roleplayers and a game-master create original stories through table-top roleplaying. There's a wide variety of these, which afaict are all stand-alone stories, though some have multiple seasons. The main game-master is Brennan Lee Mulligan, who I had previously noticed as the funniest one in various College Humour skits I'd seen linked on tumblr. And he's really good at it! Funny, clever, great at creating vivid characters and stories and the kind of quick-thinking, generous improviser who works with everyone else to help create a collaborative story instead of rail-roading his own ideas. His demeanor can be a little too over the top for my tastes sometimes, especially when I'm pretty sure he's faking the "OMG the bad guys somehow ALL missed, what a LUCKY SURPRISE!!!". The rest of the cast varies but includes the non-binary Ally Beardsley who plays a mix of genders of characters.
Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey: Scifi about a spaceship of rag-tag misfits getting into scrapes as they try to survive in a chaotic galaxy full of unpredictable danger, evil corporations, and secrets. Like Firefly with aliens, robots and diversity. Delightful mix of silliness and sincerity, with social commentary and parody mixed with genuinely good scifi, and lots of incidental queerness, including multiple non-binary characters. Based on a comic, Starstruck, I've never heard of, written by Brennan Lee Mulligan's mother. I liked all the characters a lot, individually and as a group, and the whole cast was great. There is the occasional illustration and 3d model of the characters and sets, which added to the immersion. Like all the actual play I've listened to, it was sometimes meandering and got bogged down in dice rolling mechanics, so I often had it running in the background while I was doing other things.
I haven't decided which Dimension 20 I'm going to watch next, I've heard the noir Unsleeping City is good but am not sure I'm in the mood for it right now. Maybe Tiny Heist, that has the McElroys and is short.
It's about $9AU/$6US a month for access to a large backlog of generally humourous shows. The two I have been watching the most are the nerdy game show Um Actually, and the scifi roleplaying show Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey, both of which I've really enjoyed, but there's also a bunch of other silly game shows, comedy skits, and roleplaying.
The College Humour Youtube channel has a bunch of trailers, which imo generally aren't very good, and little clips of funny moments, which are what actually got me to try out the free trial. There's also full episodes and in some cases entire runs of a few shows. Dropout.tv has pretty good closed captions, from a brief check the Youtube ones aren't as consistent. It looks like you can subscribe on youtube instead and see all current subscriber-only releases but I'm not sure it has the full backlog.
The cast are fairly diverse, with a moderate number of POC and queer people, and the humour is generally good natured and coming from a progressive place. They also have cameos by minor nerd celebrities like Matt Mercer, Sungwon Cho etc. The site is owned and run by members of the cast, so while it's entirely plausible that there's some sort of inequality behind the scenes, it is nice knowing my money is actually supporting the creators and not mostly being swallowed up by some evil megacorp.
If you do sign up for the free trial note that it defaults to signing you up for a year instead of month by month. The video streaming functionality on Dropout.tv is pretty bare bones, you can add shows and videos to your favourites but it doesn't have any way I can see of keeping your place within the season or any individual video. Since Dimension 20 videos are often over an hour long I literally write down where I'm up to if I want to pause and close the browser. Skipping forward to where I was up to works fine, at least.
So! The specific shows I have watched, with some illustrative free youtube videos.
Um Actually: Nerdy contestants compete to see who has the most in-depth knowledge of the obscure details of nerd-loved canons like Star Wars, D&D, Wrestling etc. The only prize is the satisfaction of being right, and wins via technical pedantry are encouraged. Everyone is very good natured and funny, and on board with the show being both a celebration and gentle critique of the nerdy desire to butt in and correct people about the details of your favourite canon. This is especially fun to watch with Cam, since then we have someone to be impressed when we notice a super obscure detail before the contestants.
Game Changer: a humourous game show where the specific rules change every episode. Some of this was very funny but some of the challenges contestants had to do got a bit mean/unpleasant. They didn't seem to mind too much but I don't enjoy that sort of thing.
Make Some Noise: A subset of Game Changer episodes, and then a spin-off, where comedian contestants have to improvise a sound based based on a description, which can be anything from squelchy noises for "Slime ASMR" to an in-character monologue for "An Ad for the new McDonalds Burger: The MacBeth". What I've seen of this is pretty great but it can get repetitive so I only watch it occasionally.
Dimension 20: "actual-play", where a group of roleplayers and a game-master create original stories through table-top roleplaying. There's a wide variety of these, which afaict are all stand-alone stories, though some have multiple seasons. The main game-master is Brennan Lee Mulligan, who I had previously noticed as the funniest one in various College Humour skits I'd seen linked on tumblr. And he's really good at it! Funny, clever, great at creating vivid characters and stories and the kind of quick-thinking, generous improviser who works with everyone else to help create a collaborative story instead of rail-roading his own ideas. His demeanor can be a little too over the top for my tastes sometimes, especially when I'm pretty sure he's faking the "OMG the bad guys somehow ALL missed, what a LUCKY SURPRISE!!!". The rest of the cast varies but includes the non-binary Ally Beardsley who plays a mix of genders of characters.
Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey: Scifi about a spaceship of rag-tag misfits getting into scrapes as they try to survive in a chaotic galaxy full of unpredictable danger, evil corporations, and secrets. Like Firefly with aliens, robots and diversity. Delightful mix of silliness and sincerity, with social commentary and parody mixed with genuinely good scifi, and lots of incidental queerness, including multiple non-binary characters. Based on a comic, Starstruck, I've never heard of, written by Brennan Lee Mulligan's mother. I liked all the characters a lot, individually and as a group, and the whole cast was great. There is the occasional illustration and 3d model of the characters and sets, which added to the immersion. Like all the actual play I've listened to, it was sometimes meandering and got bogged down in dice rolling mechanics, so I often had it running in the background while I was doing other things.
I haven't decided which Dimension 20 I'm going to watch next, I've heard the noir Unsleeping City is good but am not sure I'm in the mood for it right now. Maybe Tiny Heist, that has the McElroys and is short.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-17 03:06 pm (UTC)Ordinarily I'd agree with you about Brennan faking it when the villains miss, but I've spent enough time hearing him talk about tabletop at this point that I believe him. He really loves letting the dice tell the story. The PCs tend to be kind of overpowered, though; he lets them have a lot of cool powers and level up fairly frequently, so it makes sense that they win as much as they do.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-21 06:46 am (UTC)That makes sense! Thanks for the further recs.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-18 06:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-21 06:45 am (UTC)me too!