Dr. Wife and I took a cruise for our honeymoon aboard Royal Caribbean‘s Explorer of the Seas. The artwork impressed, delighted, and even confounded me.
As such, I put together a brief video showcasing some of the art onboard the ship. This video only captures a small fraction of the collages, paintings, photographs, mosaics, etc., aboard Explorer of the Seas. The selections were often odd, but they really fit the atmosphere of the ship, and added a touch of elegance and class to the cruise.
Last Saturday I wrote in detail about the three-soundboard setup I used for a school play. It’s a rather technical topic (although I don’t get overly technical with it), but I made a little video that will either a.) clarify how the setup worked or b.) deepen readers’ confusion.
Let’s find out which!
The cruise bug has latched onto me with its luxurious pincers and won’t let go. Dr. Wife and I enjoyed an amazing honeymoon on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, the Explorer of the Seas, which visited the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas. It was my first cruise, and I loved it.
Naturally, I took the opportunity to film some silly YouTube Shorts, three of which I’m sharing up today:
In my never-ending quest for lo-fi, low-effort YouTube (and blog) content, I make the most of whatever limited assets and time I have to churn out highly-compressed but—I hope—charming content for the masses.
Such is the case with today’s post. I made this video with just one picture I took with my iPhone SE’s camera (mainly to show Dr. Fiancée that I was playing as Blackbeard the Pirate in Civilization VII). I recorded the voiceover with the Voice Memo app on my phone, and used iMovie (again, on my phone) to put in the picture (three times) against the voice message.
Apparently, when I send the finished video file to Telegram, it deeply compresses the video quality (although I think it does the same if I save the video to my phone and upload it to YouTube from there). The most it can muster is 360p, which might as well be a VHS recording that I’ve sloppily converted to a digital format.
Whatever the case, the video was a fun experiment. I hope you agree!
Lately yours portly has been losing weight (I’m down about thirty-one pounds since July 2025), so I’ll often search for calorie counts for unusual food items to make sure I’m not going to blow my entire caloric budget for the day with one ill-considered snack. That has sent me down some gut-bustingly hilarious rabbit holes, where I will ask Google’s Gemini AI insane questions like, “how many calories would be in a four-pound baked potato, into which I cut canals and holes to increase fat absorption, and which I soaked overnight in pure goose fat; then, I bore holes into either end and insert luscious Italian sausage in the middle of the potato, after which I wrap it in thick-cut bacon and deep-fry it in beef tallow?”
The AI then usually scolds me for how unhealthy consuming such a sumptuous, greasy feast would be, at which point I try to double-down on the absudity.
Clearly, yours portly has an odd (and probably unhealthy, given my medical history) relationship with food. That strange obsession has manifested itself on my YouTube page.
Don’t worry, dear readers: I’m not a “lolcow,” consuming vast quantities of food for the sick and twisted pleasure of a hate-watching audience. I just like to do what every mother warns against: I play with my food.
Today’s videos are examples of that tendency to elevate food into absurdist humor:
Halloween is a week past, but I still have some episodes of 31 Days of Halloween to share! By now, most interested readers have sought these final videos out on their own, but in case you missed any of the later episodes, I wanted to share them today.
On 1 October 2025 I launched a YouTube Shorts series, 31 Days of Halloween. The concept is simple: one, one-minute (or shorter) Halloween/horror movie review every day for the month of October. These reviews are super lo-fi—just yours portly recording on a phone, sitting at a desk. No frills, no fancy editing, just me giving my impressions of the films in an unscripted, fast way.
A quick note: most of the links below are Amazon Affiliate links, typically linking to the movie on DVD or Blu-Ray, as well as the books they’re based upon (or the novelizations of the films). I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you.
Day 23 is the 1922 German Expressionist silent film classic Nosferatu.
Grab it on Blu-Ray here: https://amzn.to/4oaPdlG
Or DVD here: https://amzn.to/4o1Et8P
Day 24 is Werner Herzog’s adaptation of Nosferatu (1922), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).
Grab it on 4K here: https://amzn.to/4owQsLF
Or DVD here: https://amzn.to/4hvMBME
Day 25 is Robert Eggers’s adaptation of Nosferatu (1922), Nosferatu (2024).
Grab it on 4K here: https://amzn.to/47drBqx
Or Blu-ray here: https://amzn.to/3Wekckm
Or DVD here: https://amzn.to/3WekcAS
Day 26 returns to another silent film classic with 1925’s The Phantom of the Opera.
Grab it on Blu-ray here: https://amzn.to/47Hoh63
Or DVD here: https://amzn.to/4o4WGCF
Or get the novel here: https://amzn.to/3J8f5PN
Day 27 looks at a film on the border between horror and thriller, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).
Grab it on Blu-ray here: https://amzn.to/42TXr97
Or DVD here: https://amzn.to/3Jo6R63
Or get the novel here: https://amzn.to/47oiuC1
Day 28 is a personal favorite, Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954).
Grab it on 4K & Blu-ray here: https://amzn.to/4hup92o
Day 29 is the most unusual of the Halloween films, 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
Grab it on 4K here: https://amzn.to/472YMgi
Or Blu-ray here: https://amzn.to/3WmPEwO
Or DVD here: https://amzn.to/3J0TvN7
Day 30 is the John Carpenter slashic Halloween (1978)!
Grab it on 4K here: https://amzn.to/4oxycBC
Day 31 is one of my favorite films, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).
Grab it on 4K here: https://amzn.to/4ntEaCB
Or Blu-ray here: https://amzn.to/3WL3SrH
Or DVD here: https://amzn.to/47bthkd
Thanks for watching 31 Days of Halloween! 🎃🎃🎃
Re-watch the entire series here:
Happy Friday! Until next Halloween!
—TPP
Today is Guy Fawkes Day (or Night) in merry old England, a holiday that is unapologetically nationalist, monarchist (in the best English tradition of that form of government) and Protestant Christian. There’s something fun and refreshingly patriotic about a holiday dedicated to burning a treacherous Papist in effigy. Not to make everything about America, but it smacks of the Fourth of July, albeit without the anti-monarchist undertones.
Most Americans will be familiar with Guy Fawkes Day and the iconic mask from the film V for Vendetta (2005), in which the meaning of Guy Fawkes focuses on the man’s role as a would-be freedom fighter for English Catholics against an oppressive Protestant regime. In the context of the film, the titular V dons the mask in the context of a freedom fighter against a fascistic, quasi-religious British government.
We’re living in heretical times. All sorts of New Age nonsense is afoot.
The thing is, all the “New Age nonsense” is just Old World paganism and Gnosticism wrapped in therapeutic language. People are looking for answers—the easier the better. I’ve been reading the classic, authoritative book on the subject, The Kingdom of the Cults (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link, as are several others links in this post; I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links at no additional cost to you), by theologian Walter Martin, and it is wild how many of these cults share the same basic qualities—claiming to be “Christian” while perverting and distorting the very heart of the Gospels.
With that, here is 14 October 2024’s “Rooting Out Heresy: The Cathars“:
On 1 October 2025 I launched a YouTube Shorts series, 31 Days of Halloween. The concept is simple: one, one-minute (or shorter) Halloween/horror movie review every day for the month of October. These reviews are super lo-fi—just yours portly recording on a phone, sitting at a desk. No frills, no fancy editing, just me giving my impressions of the films in an unscripted, fast way.
In case you’ve missed any installments, I’m featuring the several days of reviews. If you want to catchup on Days 10-16, check out last week’s YouTube Roundup.
A quick note: most of the links below are Amazon Affiliate links, typically linking to the movie on DVD or Blu-Ray, as well as the books they’re based upon (or the novelizations of the films). I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you.
On 1 October 2025 I launched a YouTube Shorts series, 31 Days of Halloween. The concept is simple: one, one-minute (or shorter) Halloween/horror movie review every day for the month of October. These reviews are super lo-fi—just yours portly recording on a phone, sitting at a desk. No frills, no fancy editing, just me giving my impressions of the films in an unscripted, fast way.
In case you’ve missed any installments, I’m featuring the several days of reviews. If you want to catchup on Days 1-9, check out last week’s YouTube Roundup.
A quick note: most of the links below are Amazon Affiliate links, typically linking to the movie on DVD or Blu-Ray, as well as the books they’re based upon (or the novelizations of the films). I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you.
The Portly Politico 