Meet Blake Simpson: He Watched 17 Videos About It. Here's What They All Left Out.

Hi. I'm Blake.

And I have watched approximately seventeen YouTube videos about whatever you're currently holding in your hand.

Not an exaggeration. That's just how I operate. I cannot help it. I have accepted this. My friends have also accepted this, mostly because I send them the videos.

Here's the thing about YouTube research: there's a specific type of video I'm looking for and it takes a while to find it. Not the one where the guy holds it up and says "wow, the build quality on this is really premium" while visibly reading off a script. Not the unboxing with the satisfying sounds and zero information. I want the one where someone actually used it. Under real conditions. For real reasons. And then came back three months later to say "update: it died." THAT video. That's the one. Finding it is genuinely one of my favorite activities and I will not be apologizing for that.

My name is Blake Simpson. I hang out with Annie and David, which means I'm technically always somewhere in the middle of learning AI, oftentimes against my will -- progress varies, results are mixed, Astro judges me sometimes. At my actual core though, foundationally, where it counts: I'm a gamer. I have strong opinions about which gaming chair is actually worth it versus which gaming chair is just a regular chair with aggressive color choices and a price tag that implies otherwise. I consider ComicCon a legitimate vacation destination and I will not be taking questions on this.

Aidan and I together are, as someone once put it, "a lot." He finds the thing and immediately needs everyone to know about it at full volume. I find the thing, watch the videos, read the comment section, find the update comment, THEN need everyone to know about it. Between us we have logged approximately ten thousand hours of content about things we then went and bought. We have Thoughts. Collectively and individually.

When I cover something here, I'm coming from one specific angle: I did the research, I had expectations going in, and here is the thing the seventeen videos didn't tell me.

That's consistently the most useful part. That's what I'm here for.

Also gaming. Obviously.

-- Blake