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You are a truly beautiful human being. Not a single one of your videos that I watched over the past 2 two years or so, failed to raise my level of awareness for the finer details of human existence. I feel blessed.
I got severe whiplash from the contrast of Head Transplants, which distressed me on a very profound level, and the love letter to Revengance that followed it.
As someone who has wanted to be a forensic pathologist since I was a kid, the suspicion aspect really hits home. The looks I get when someone asks me what I want to go to medical school for have eventually lead me to start lying and saying "oh, I'm open to any specialty really." My own fiance will sometimes flinch away at my hands when she's reminded I've dissected a cadaver for class before. She says she can't imagine how such a nice person could do such a thing, as if I were a murderer or something.
One of my favorite episodes of Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities is The Autopsy. In it, a group of miners die suddenly in a "bomb" accident. There is more going on of course. Way more. The context is quite disturbing, but they don't know if it's what killed the men or not. That's the goal. What killed the men? The Coroner is a good man. He shows respect to the corpses and is as noninvasive as possible to find out what happened. While still being curious. Its an excellent episode. And a good answer to "how someone so kind can cut someone up." He saves a lot of lives in the end.
I vibe with this in phrases such as “The sin of knowing enough to keep yourselves busy, or at least long enough to forget why you ask why.” or “Open to the redundancy of the conversation while exhausted of simple tasks that take the pain away.” or another “Livid through the world you create, only to poison the water for everyone who dares to feed the worthy, so called ‘progress.’”
Wendigoon! That's so funny. I was just appreciating that I'd found a channel that reminds me of yours', and I end up finding you in the comment section
Lol I hate to break it to you, but Kim is the character in disco Elysium he refers to quite a few times. He’s alive and well, spoilers, if you don’t screw up.
@@gimpscam9976 Do we have confirmation on that? He could just have easily been dedicating the video to an actual person named Kim if we aren't sure, Kim is a very common name after all.
From someone in the pathology community I can expand on the crisis you mentioned. Its not simply about the money, its about 2 very large filters. First, the way medical school admissions is structured already biases selecting against those who are interested in pathology as a specialty. Constructing a narrative about your motivations to pursue medicine often requires speaking about the emotional impact of interactions with patients. People wanting to go into fields that are not patient facing therefore either have to essentially lie/embellish/hide their interests or are screened out during the application process. Then, once someone has entered residency to become a pathologist, they have a plethora of subspecialty fellowship options to choose from. Autopsy is one of only many options for residents to pursue and THEN you add on top of that that its salary is generally lower and working conditions are less desirable (actually dissecting a corpse compared to say just looking at slides in your office) and you end up with very few people who want to become forensic pathologists.
The phrase "Before you is a temple of pain that knew little tenderness in life" is something that has haunted my mind from the very first moment I read it. So much suffering condensed into a mere 13 words.
The sudden transition in his body language from “TH-camr doing a video essay” to “A sad sigh born from grief” at the end and then the cut to “For Kim” really did it for me. Rest In Peace Kim, whoever you are.
as someone with a rare genetic disease, im planning on donating my body to science. this video is amazing. i want to spend my life advocating for others like me, and i want to further research long after i am dead. we have so much to learn from our dead, and it’s a shame the topic is so taboo in western culture.
This makes me reflect on how many funerary traditions around the world incorporate some form of "cannibalism", whether that outright eating their flesh or imbibing their ashes, or even spreading their ashes onto the bodies of others. From a certain perspective, you can see how it's an intimate act; a desperate attempt to internalize and make someone else, someone lost and mourned, a part of yourself again.
i feel similarly about victorian hair charms. Victorian Brits would often keep locks of hair from deceased loved ones close to them in jewelry (often encased in glass in a small broach, but occasionally as larger pieces) and seeing them feels simultaneously macabre and the closest i could ever come to touching a human that lived so long before me.
I didn’t even know there were traditions like that, I just had a natural urge to do it. I wanted a bit of my loved one’s hair. I wanted to remember what they smelled like because I always said they smelled like pure sunshine. I can’t smell it on the hair, because the smell came from their skin when alive. But I can still recall that feeling of being with them like being in the warm sun
On any other comment, I probably would've left the likes at 666 cause "haha funny number" but a comment like this doesn't deserve to be associated with ideas of evil, even as a joke.
Several months after a dear friend of mine died, I was finally informed of how. A heart attack at the age of 36. They'd had a heart condition all of their life and I figured that it was what had taken them from the world so soon. But they were also depressed. And while we hadn't truly worried about it, consciously, there was still a relief in knowing that they hadn't left us intentionally. Life just... happened. And then it ended. And we learned what happened and even though I was pulled back headfirst into grieving, I am glad for it.
This hit me hard. I buried my cat last week after he died in my arms over a very traumatic hour. We were incredibly close and seeing him go from full of life to a cold stiff cadaver really made me recontextualise life, the soul, and how it's all wrapped up in such a well adapted yet so specifically vulnerable organic form. Your videos on mortality have been unexpectedly helpful in this process. Your writing is truly moving. Many thanks and here's hoping for happier topics around the corner.
I've been through something similar with my childhood pet cat that I had for about 17 years. It's a very rough time and I wish you nothing but the best moving forward.
My childhood cat was my best friend and he died 2 years ago in my arms too. You never get used to it. It does certainly help to adopt another cat. I have a new buddy now and he is awesome.
I’m a medical student, have been one for the last six years, and this episode strikes a particular nerve with me. During my years of study and experience at the hospital, the one thing that i couldn’t handle at an emotional level involved a corpse, and this always stuck with me. I mean, I got used to seeing wounds and illnesses and their effects on people, from limb amputations to extensive burns to suppurating lesions, and of course there is empathy for the patients and their conditions, but all my interactions with them never felt “wrong” or “out of place” in any particular way. The one time this particular feeling arose, it was during the study and subsequent experience of a type of autopsy ; it was with a corpse, and the fact that the not living, bodies that used to be persons and are now things, made me “feel” more than living breathing persons ended up exposing a number of questions about myself and what I can or can’t do. The particular procedure was the study of the corpse of a newborn to determine if it had ever lived or if it was a stillbirth, to distinguish between infanticide and concealement of the corpse. In Italian it is called “study of docimacies” , but from my understanding the word “docimasia” has a more restrictive meaning in English.
Why have you been a med a try debt for more than four years… that doesn’t make sense haha. Med school is 4 years and residency is 3-5 years (plus more if you do a fellowship).
@@DOC_951 I’m from Italy : here med school requires six years of basic study (with exams on all the different specialties and internships in most wards) and then 4 to 6 years of residency to achieve specialization (with surgical specialties requiring the longest)
@@DOC_951I know this is an old comment but I just want to clarify since my boyfriend was in premed: you have to get a 4 yr degree in biology and that’s known as pre med. then you go 4 years in medical school THEN you do a 2-3 year residency. This is standard for Drs in America. It takes about 10-13 years to become a Dr.
I remember years ago on an old Fluffe talks video hearing a story about how in Spain an apparent trampling occured during a panic in a riot and a bunch of people had been trampled to death. So much so they had brought a truck to load them and send them to the mourge. It was only when they were being organized that one person woke up and asked for a glass of water. He didn't die he had just been brutally injured
the bit about the body giving one last word or message hit me very hard. My father died of a sudden heart attack, it was only through autopsy we figured out why and revealed a physiological, most likely genetic, predisposition in the men of my family that I suddenly was aware that I was carrying as well. He was himself a doctor. This video hit me hard, grief is funny, but in a good way.
The bit about Mia's dissection in RE reminds me of this line Andrey Stamatin says in Pathologic -- "Who can tell if the body wants to be opened? How is it meant to be cut? A carcass only welcomes the touch of a master. The cut of a master follows the line that liberates the body from itself." A body liberated from itself... Like unpicking seams on a garment and laying all the pieces flat, or finding the joints on a mannequin and taking them apart. Idk, maybe this only makes sense to me.
your comparison with a garment is interesting, as garments that have been picked apart often wish to lay a certain way after being sewn in one direction. Especially in antiques, I've seen someone say "it's as if it wants to go back to its original shape." Regardless of separation, it knows in its shape that it belonged to an original body.
This is one of the best "Death Positive" videos I've seen. I'll be forwarding this to a *lot* of people. Tempted to send it to Ask a Mortician, but it'll probably get lost in the wash.
"What an unexpected blessing for us to be able to learn from a loved one, one final time." Wow. What a line... I'll admit that some tears were (and are currently still as of writing this comment) shed. I'm usually just about the least emotional person I know, but the tone and writing of the entire video was just so beautiful, especially towards the end. Your videos are a masterclass in how to make someone feel the full gravity of any subject.
Maybe I'm just a sociopath, but strapping my corpse into a Honda and firing it at a wall just seemed...sensible. It's cheaper than cremation, and my life is the direct benefit of many other corpses shot at walls. It's just inedible meat.
i'm a medical student and this hit me very hard. i just had my dissection module, and even before that i had some anatomy classes with dead bodys, it's strange because we call them anatomy pieces but they were a fucking person, most of the corpses were from homeless people and it really makes you sad when you start wondering how much those person had suffered. thank you for this video, it is a masterpiece, as always
The ending reminds me of what a priest character in Vinland Saga says about a dead body. "He is dead, and therefore more beautiful than anyone alive. You might say he is love itself. For you see... he will not hate, nor kill, nor steal. Don't you find that wonderful? His body will be abandoned here... and his flesh will feed the beasts and insects. He will be blown about by the wind... and pelted by the rain... and he will not raise a single word in complaint. It is death that completes a man."
Pathologic would have been a great fit for this video, considering how much of a spiritual experience cutting into a body is in that game. They even call the main character "butcher" and draw parallels between performing autopsies and removing organs with butchering livestock. But then again, the game does fall short eventually and focuses more on other parts.
The first time I saw a body was my grandfather's at his funeral when I was 11. It was brief but after that every funeral I went to I'd have a panic attack. I just couldn't handle it. After my grandmother's a few years ago I felt different. She had Alzheimer's so the last few years were rough to say the least. For years I saw her either smiling at people and things that weren't there or on the verge of tears from not knowing just wtf going on around her. Seeing her at her funeral was the first time I saw her at peace in a while. She was cold but resting for once. I feel, now, that death's beauty comes from it's acceptance. It doesn't love or hate you for the life you've lived. It doesn't see you as a burden or villain. Regardless of what you've done or haven't done it doesn't judge you, change it's perception of you, treat you differently, or any of that. It just accepts you.
I think a lot about Speaker for the Dead in general, but specifically, a line near the end as Ender explains the true tragedy of their actions to the piggies. “Never take another human being to the third life, because we don't know how to go.”
that line was honestly what broke me when I read the book like, there's an unbelievable amount of suffering and trauma through everything, but I was able to stay mostly neutral as an observer but something about that moment made it all sink in for real
@@SeanWinters some people don’t like to acknowledge people who are different from themselves. They want to ease those people from history and the present. Really narrow minded, but what can you do.
@@SeanWinters dude it's the internet. If he didn't mention it himself commenters on his video would say things like "um actually you shouldn't read his books because blah blah blah" Saying it himself is a defensive move to avoid those annoying comments
I'm an emotionally damaged, and therefore quite numb man. I still feel all the same, but expression is harder than it should be. Your videos always make me emote. A smile, a laugh, a few tears. These videos mean a great lot to me, and for that I thank you.
To you @SporeHam and others like you, check out exurb1a. Great videos are, "and then we'll be okay", "the rememberer" and literally every other video on that channel. If you like Jacob, you will like Exurb1a.
Outstanding. I spent years in the death care industry, and had an immense amount of contact with embalming and autopsies, and (of course) with grieving next of kin. This video put neatly and unambiguously into place my conflicted feelings on the conflation I often witnessed of the superfluity of embalming with the importance of autopsy.
Has your experience in the industry changed how you yourself want to be prepared for burial? I personally would rather have a natural burial. Preferably somewhere with plant growth. I'm content to be fertilizer :)
@@adamhall6902 ABSOLUTELY! Yes, and thank you for the reply! Due to the limitations of death care in my state, I plan on cremation, but green burial or alkaline hydrolysis are my distinct preferences. I have a hard time thinking of any of my colleagues in the industry who professed wanting to be embalmed - to wit, we generally accept it's a racket. Caitlin Doughty (Ask A Mortician here on YT) is an excellent resource - her memoir, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, is what got me into the field to begin with. Have a lovely day!
@@NormDeMoss I want to work in the funeral industry. I just started to figure out my schooling journey but I’ve read a lot of books related to it and talked to a lot people. Seeing your comment really made me happy and I have this huge advocacy calling inside of me and want to nurture it in ways that are meaningful to me.
I know right? I'm a funeral director, and it was lovely to feel so seen, to have someone else articulate that contradictory feeling of caring for the dead, without being consumed by fear or sadness.
I read Stiff as a teen after getting it as a wacky gift from a distant uncle trying to connect with someone they only meet once a year at holiday events. Years later I reached out and told him how much it meant to me. How it ignited my passion for learning after discovering a world of science that's rarely talked about.
"The corpses [...] can chill" is such a short but profound line with a double meaning. And a great video overall just as well! I particularly enjoyed how smoothly we're guided from Resident Evil right until the very end to Stiff.
i also highly recommend A Certain Kind of Death which has been free on YT for over a decade. cw hardcore gore/nudity but if you can't tell by where i'm recommending it, it's sensitive and dry and not a circus.
I’ve been replaying Disco Elysium recently, so the moment you started talking about autopsies that game immediately came into my head. I’d actually never considered that the Hanged Man talking to you was such a clear-cut metaphor fo anything, just thought it was another bit of never-truly-explained weirdness.
There is also a more literal explanation that's hinted-at, but never stated outright. _Harry is actually psychic._ Some of his sixth senses actually are just that. The metaphysics of Disco Elysium aren't what they seem at first glance. Which you will find when you start to learn about the Pale, the Innocences, the early expeditions into the Pale, find the megarich billionaire in the cargo bin, talk to the Insulidian Phasmid or do the communard side quest or learn about the tiny hole in reality. It's just easy to dismiss Harry as a blowhard for all the obvious reasons, but not all of Harry's insights are a product of his rich internal life. Jacob touched on this with the Shivers skill. But I think one or two others actually are partly "supernatural." The Hanged Man mentions that both love and communism killed him. Which, as it turns out, was prophetic. This is not something Harry could've known simply by detective's intuition. Though you're prone to dismissing him because it just seems like his typically unhinged drug-fueled nonsense. There are also dialogue options where Harry can try to make everything in the murder investigation about sex, which Kim Katsuragi dismisses in his usual put-upon professional way. Except it turns out the The Deserter really was a sexually-frustrated man obsessed with punishing what he perceived to be the degeneracy of the society he hated. Though in a more figurative sense, the victim was involved in a semi-romantic physical relationship with Katja and died for it.
this video is just beautiful, i have no words. last month, i found my fathers body in our house, and had to fruitlessly do chest compressions on his body while waiting for emergency services. ive been having so much trouble grabbling with encountering my father like that, but this video eased that some amount.
My heart goes to you, Felix. While your experience is not the complete root of this video, it is not far from what we experienced with Kim. Be well, and may the memories of your father always be a blessing to you.
Hey, you were there for him, remember that. Even at the end you were with him and that's good he wasn't alone even if he was already gone not everyone gets the care or dignity of being found by a loved one, many people just sit until paramedics end up being called. You did all you could and if my father is any judge of how a dad can feel I'm sure he was glad he had you there, even if it was extremely bitter and no child should have to see their parents like that just like a parent shouldn't have to bury their children however again the fact that you were there for him is beautiful. I hope you're doing good
Love how Jacob is able to mix together soundtracks with dialog in such a beautiful way that heightens what he's presenting. Very descriptive and beautiful!!
Orson Scott card is an exceptionally sad author for me. His works, especially the earlier ones, brilliantly cry for everything he seems to be against. Enders game is a book that cries for us to try harder to understand others, that some people are different, and that indoctrination is awful. It tells us that war is hell and children can be made into tools by extremism of any kind. Speaker for the dead teaches us again to try to understand things that are different, to expand our worldviews, to challenge whatever we think we know. It’s a gutturally emotional book that takes its time to drive home that it’s important we don’t give in to those who cry for violence or intolerance. It presents highly complex views on religion and how it spreads and what makes religion good and bad. Xenocide is a book that teaches us all about moral ambiguity, and how sometimes there isn’t a right choice, and you can’t force that onto anyone. Which is why it amazes me that he became the way he did. His current self is almost a paradoxical representation of what his earlier works would villanize. This parallel is in so many of his other works and I don’t know how he fell into the almost perfect pit he described. It is really saddening how he constantly proves how right he was.
Yeah, this has baffled me for years and will probably baffle me for the rest of my life. I can only guess as to why and how the hell a man like that can write books like that, and all my my guesses feel far too outlandish. Mr card you are incomprehensible
That's...what being an artist is. If someone is able to hit on a truth which strongly resonates with you, they themself not embodying that truth doesn't undermine the message. Whether you choose to directly support individuals you find reprehensible is a different matter.
@@wladdaimpala88 yes but it's extremely difficult to write that resonance without it directly affecting yourself. There needs to be a massive emotional disconnect to write something without apparently realizing what it is you've written, which is what's so strange. Further comments on the video pointed out that he fell into Mormonism at some point, which clarifies some things and explains the disconnect happening here since that sort of thing is a core part of how cults function
@@countessofcats5549 Ah, well that explains it. No different than if he got grabbed by Scientology, or Jehova's Witnesses or any other perfidious cult. Cults prey on people when they are emotionally vulnerable, drawing them in by promising a sense of belonging or answers and then slowly twist them into mockeries of their former self. Any individuality, all that is bright and compassionate is slowly squeezed out as it serves no use to the cult. And this emptiness is filled in with repressive and contradictory dogma to both chain the victim down and emotionally insulate them from outsiders, until all that is left is another drone unquestingly serving their higher ups and soullessly parroting their talking points, convincing themselves and the other victims that everyone different is their enemy and only the cult can protect them. The former person is at this point gone, replaced by a malleable template copied countless times. And the drone has to prove time and time again that it is the truest believer of them all, as everyone is always policed by their fellows under suspicion of being a traitor. A successful cult is one of the most frightening social systems that humans have ever devised. And Mormonism has perfected its craft to such a degree that they control an entire US state with an iron fist.
I keep a playlist of “Key Reading” and it blows me away that seemingly every one of your videos goes on there. It only gets a video or two a month, and seems to be transforming into basically a Jacob Geller playlist
Speaker for the Dead was one of the quintessential books of my adolescence. It sparked the fire of true empathy inside me, and I can say for certain I would not be who I am today without it. Re-reading an uncensored pdf version of Ender's Game was what threw me down the tragic rabbit hole that is Mr. Card. Ender literally calls another child the n-word during practice; it's displayed as banter. This is not in printed versions and threw me off so hard I had to look into it. After hours of research and a slow decay of any respect I had for the man himself I had to suffocate his presence in my mind permanently. Speaker for the Dead was written by no one; the author is well and truly Dead.
Completely agree, I'll never understand how he could write books explicitly about understanding and having compassion for seemingly horrible things like violent aliens, but could never do the same for his lovely fellow human beings!
Your intricate exploration of the human psyche and video games never ceases to amaze me. This has quickly become my favourite channel of 2022. Keep it up man! :)
hooo baby time to get messed up watching another bodily dissection jacob geller video edit: as someone who’s studying forensics in college right now this video has really affected me in a way i didn’t think it would. my respect for bodies has never been more clearly stated, it’s making me really emotional right now.
I watched Fear of Cold when it popped up in my recs, and immediately knew I had to watch your entire videography in chronological order. It feels very bittersweet being here.
So glad that you mentioned Speaker for the Dead! ...And that you mentioned how horrible Card is, I will never understand how he could write books explicitly about understanding and having compassion for seemingly horrible things like violent aliens, but could never do the same for his lovely fellow human beings. Regardless, Speaker is one of my favorite books of all time, and I also loved this video!
Unfortunately that kind of doublethink is endemic of Mormonism. It's a different and far more frustrating situation than Rowling I think, while her books are just entertaining kids' stories that never meant anything to begin with Card's are ABOUT the very things that make him such an awful man today. The lack of introspection is baffling.
It is often times the case that people are interested in topics they don't understand fully. Perhaps he's attempting to understand compassion, learned enough about it to write a book, but never managed to embody it in his personal life? It's a similar case with a teacher's assistant specializing in ethics and moral philosophy, that attacked someone at a protest that Antifa was a part of. A person, whose sole purpose was to study / educate others on ETHICS falling to base violent impulses is ironic. But is also awfully similar to Card's case. Sauce for the antifa case: th-cam.com/video/muoR8Td44UE/w-d-xo.html *The Bikelock Fugitive of Berkeley* by *Internet Historian*, if you don't trust the link.
If you've not met Card, you've got no basis for judging him as a person. No, you don't have to like his politics. You don't even have to like his religious principles. But he's got more guts than all the people who flock to bash him for what essentially amounts to sins against Wokeness.
@@bradrtorgersen_videos "sins against wokeness" why can't you come with the same evidence you're asking of others? You want Card to be given a proper platform it's only fair, why would you be afraid to discuss what he actually believes in with clear terms instead of buzzwords?
I went into this video expecting to feel awful, or disturbed, or sad. Instead, all I got was insight and understanding and it was so sobering, the immense respect you put into every word of your script... and yet, the final piece of this video, the "superheroes", that broke me. I was all tranquil and immersed, doing my laundry, and then I started bawling, hard. The final interaction we get with another human, both us playing a part to help the ones left behind in mutual respect (in a sense, since dead people can't feel but I'm positive that's what we'd feel knowing the circumstances), and we both, cadaver and mortician, are met with disgust and contempt, respectively, from the ones we're trying to help. It's mortifyingly sad.
I have seen most of his videos. Jacob always hold his speaker composure. But his sigh and break of “character” moved me more than all of his videos I’ve seen.
Much appreciate these "unclickable" topics. It's nice to listen to someone connect the dots between concepts and ideas that I previously might not have thought had any connection. Also: watched this on nebula first, and just wanted to mention how it feels quiet (?) over there. TH-cam is "noisy" - due to adhd i'll often find myself scrolling down to read comments and then scrolling back up to realise I've missed a chunk of the video, so then I'll have to rewind and watch it again. Nebula has been good for my attention span, knowing that there's no comments means I just watch the videos. (I'm not advertising for them lol, just something I was thinking while watching this)
I'm a middle aged woman who hasn't played a video game since Adventures of Lolo on NES. I have no interest in playing video games, nor do I have time for them but I never miss a Jacob Geller video. Not only do I watch them, I find myself entirely absorbed. It's the top tier storytelling, insightful analysis and video quality that pulls me in , leaving me with unblinked eyes and an open mouth.
As a person trying to take apart a loved one after the fact and getting no answers, this video was painful and cathartic. As usual, in your thoughtful assessment of media, I find peace in the 'not knowing,' and the sharing of the 'seeking anyway.'
I was literally holding my breath and sweating during the disco elysium scene when checking the mouth. Afterwards, I was shocked that a scene that happened almost entirely in my own mind while digesting the words onscreen could have felt so tense and tactile. And a little bit after that, a sense of exhilaration, heaviness, and triumph. It's been a long time since I felt completely in sync what the characters I was playing/seeing was probably feeling in that moment
It is such an electric scene, establishing Cuno and Cunoesse beforehand and showing that even *they* are completely enraptured, if only for a few moments by these two Fucking Pigs that walked onto *their* turf and doing the "coin behind your ear" trick but with a bullet in a man's brain. Truly amazing shit
Nothing has managed to keep me engrossed quite like the Hanged Man’a Autopsy… And nothing has made me feel so damn satisfied and happy for a character like Harry finding out the hidden thing about the Hanged Man and showing that, in spite of being blitzed into complete amnesia, despite looking so sad and miserable, despite being a wreck of a person… He *is* the best at what he does.
I remember when I played Disco Elysium for the first time a few weeks ago. When I was doing the field autopsy of the hanged man the check I got for finding the bullet in his brainstem was 3%, and yet, I still got it. I remember for the rest of that playthrough just thinking about how special finding that detail was to me
God this is a beautiful video. The way we conceptualize, or fail to conceptualize, death feels like such a fundamental part of culture that is often ignored. The discussion reminds me of What Remains of Edith Finch, which is just in its premise intently focused on understanding life through death.
this reminds me of the show Bones, when she describes the life lived by the victim. a fracture in young age, maybe from riding a bike or climbing trees. that they were a dancer. if they liked to work with their hands, build things. all these signs of a life lived, telling a story. and while seeming callous in interactions with most living people, she has such compassion for the dead she works with. when she tells their story like this it moved me so much
Currently going through mortuary school, and I gotta say, this is my favourite vid of your's. A lot of what you said about the nature of the dead and how the living interact with them was very poignant, and reflects a lot of the reasons I chose to persue this profession
My uncle died exactly a week ago as I’m writing this. The diagnosis didn’t need to be confirmed, we’d known it was coming for years now, but this video provided a weird sort of comfort at the exact time I needed it
Mary Roach is a criminally underrated author, I recommend her work any chance I get! Both her and Caitlin Doughty (her YT channel is Ask A Mortician) are excellent authors, especially if people are interested in learning more about death. Awesome video, Jacob!
I wanted to be a medical examiner. Got a great scholarship and everything. My mother refused to sign my papers because it was "gross". I didn't turn 18 until after the due date so I couldn't sign them myself. I will always regret I couldn't follow my first choice.
How did I end up crying by the end of this video? Beautiful script writing with such a gentle delivery. I kept thinking back to Laura Palmer and her autopsy. How the agent wanted to spend more time discovering the mystery around her final days but the town wanted her in the ground, essentially. And it's interesting to think about the town of Twin Peaks and how burying Laura is so parallel to "sweeping things under the rug" since an autopsy can provide so many answers, especially if more care and time is taken. We're taught funerals are for the living but I always thought having them so soon after the death was negligent. Dismissive. And now I have a little more context for that feeling. A little more justification.
yeah this whole thing really reminded me of laura, practically the whole point of twin peaks is seeing all the different sides of a character we don't get to interact with
One of the most beautiful things about keeping corpses around to dissect them, is that it has allowed us to learn how to transplant organs. A parting gift that can literally save somebody's life, and as a line in a song about organ donation actually, "And know the love inside a dying human's final gesture, I will cut and dry be leaving with your liver." The song is called: Organs by The Uncluded, by the way in case anyone would be curious.
I look forward to every upload you do, and I genuinely tell my friends about your videos when they come out. Thats rare, I can't think of anyone else I subscribe to that has that much of an impact. Thank you so much, Jacob!
The thing I love most about this channel is that it has no middle round videos, it's either "How wonderful it is that we get to live and experience the beauty of art, people, and everything life offers." or "Oh god, we are the only sentient parts of the universe, the only entities capable of suffering and existential dread, and we are alone with it, trapped in our prisions of flesh".
I wish his audience was as cool as him and not chock full of pretentious pseudointellectuals. I get so sad every time I try and scroll through his comments looking for anything interesting said. Yall suck
I recently got the coroner's report about a close family member. It was written with such care and compassion for my relative's life as well as his death. It detailed how his death would be used to make changes and prevent more future deaths. It was healing to read.
FWIW, autopsies are expensive and generally aren’t ordered unless there’s some reason to suspect a misdiagnosis or foul play-which might account for the high rate of autopsies changing the official cause of death.
Great striking of tone in this video. Feels like the beautiful discomfort of overwhelming intimacy. Much like an autopsy itself, it seems. Working through "The Anthropocene Reviewed" on audible right now but Stiff looks like a good followup!
In Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye, there's a similar kind of care- called mnemosurgery- which is used in alive patients as trauma recovery ('editing'/blacking out sections for their own safety), but in the events we see, is often as part of an autopsy to recover memories and afterimages. To be able to perform them, the surgeons have to have special needles installed in their fingertips, and inject into the patient's memory core. It's a hyper-specialized, highly stigmatized field, because every mnemosurgeon is killing themselves by doing it- it is simultaneously sensitive care via witnessing + storing someone's trauma, and a literal addiction that at best makes you inherit trauma, at worst, kills you mid-operation. It's a scary thing all-around, but being in a war for millennia made many people Need the surgery, just to live with 'normal' C-PTSD rather than 24/7 screaming terror. MTMTE is 80% psychological horror, and one of the biggest sources of it comes from a 'clinic' that specialized in it. Some things that happened in that clinic were so convoluted and horrific that there's torture strategies and war crimes named after the surgeons. The biggest "contribution" it made was a new form of torture called Shadowplay- where minds get altered, triggers get planted, people put into never-ending nightmares, or are completely wiped so their bodies can be used. Even worse, some knew that this is what the clinic was doing, and saw it as a way to contribute to the war effort (similar to blood/organ donations) while committing s*icide. A fair amount of them were near-death mnemosurgeons themselves. "It is the fate of every mnemosurgeon to die on the job-a victim of their addiction. We know when death is near: we can feel it creeping closer-but never close enough to make us stop. The fatal injection is always the next injection-until one day it isn't," - MTMTE issue #49.
Humble bundle will sometimes sell all the IDW transformers comics in a big bundle, it changes from MTMTE to lost light after a while but it’s the same series!
man i was not expecting to see discussion of mnemosurgery in the comments of this lol. the scenes w/ chromedome and brainstorm that touch on his addiction to removing his memories of his dead conjunx's to not have to deal with the pain mess me up every time i read them. also shout out to sunder because him forcing people to turn their own bodies inside out great body horror
The two pieces of media I kept thinking off while watching this were Ask A Mortician who is very vocal in talking about death and the dead (and also comforting a dead loved one as part of grieving similar to what Harry does) and Haunting of Hill House (the netflix one). I don't really recall the characters' names but one of them is a mortician and she wants to become one after seeing her mother's corpse look peaceful (the last interaction she had with her was frightning and violent) and she also has to do the funeral for her sister after she has been autopsied. She's very frank about talking to her brother what that entails and how an autopsy leaves a corpse, how rough and brutal it seems, the way they took her apart and haphazardly put her back together. And I think this video nicely shows the other side and the need for it. Neat :)
Ask A Mortician is one of the best channels on the platform, I think Jacob would appreciate the channel for sure if he hasn't come across her in his research.
I'm late to this video but man was it so great. I'm going to school to be a forensic pathologist/medical examiner and it's so hard trying to find up with ways to tell my peers. The stigma behind this line of work is so dismissing and restrictive when I tell people this is what I want to do. I am doing an internship with a local coroner and it is truly eye opening. My state rotates forensic pathologists for autopsies because each county can't have one. Coroners don't always need a medical license, so pathologists need to come in to actually examine a corpse. A lot of people don't realize how a body gets places, coroners do that. I've been in more people's homes than I can count, seeing how they lived and having to take them away from where the once spent most of their time. This job has been so insightful and this video hit so close to home for me so thank you so much for this vid!
I read speaker for the dead when I was probably 10 years old, and I recall being mildly disturbed and deeply bored by it. It is not a book for a 10 year old. But I never stopped thinking about it, the mystery of why a culture does the things it does, its rituals and traditions, typified in how they treat death. The effort required to understand these things and the value in doing so, it all stuck with me. I just graduated college with a degree in communications, which I initially chose sort of on a whim because I was into movies and my school didn't have a film major, but over my time in college I focused in on folklore studies, because I never stopped being fascinated by the things explored in this book. I hadn't realized the connection until now. My favorite professor, who is a folklorist and teaches truly profound classes on alcohol, humor, and horror, describes each of these things as how humans attempt to overcome "the devil of a task that is living together," how we face the impossible feat that is communication to achieve mutual understanding. And in each of these classes he touches on how society approaches death, what we do with bodies, but I really think he could easily get a whole class out of the topic. Just as there is so much to learn from the dead, there is so much to learn from what we do with the dead
I honeslty never thought that I would hear someone actually talk about Speaker For the Dead. I loved the idea of funerals in that book and im suprised i wasnt the only one. I enjoyed this book so much and I always had dreams of what someone would say about me.
House Beneviento is easily one of my favorite gaming moments in recent memory. The escape room level design, the atmosphere, the tension. It's so well crafted.
this video is once again confirming that jacob is one of the best content creators on the platform. the short lingering of the camera during the sigh at the end of the essay, along with the "for kim" made me tear up. you got me again man
Hey, Stiff is one of my favorite books! I've often considered working at a morgue or in a forensic setting, but was never sure if I could take it. I'm still not sure, but I think this video is a healthier look at working with the dead than just "ew dead people gross".
May I recommend a TH-cam channel run by an actual mortician who is also very funny and insightful? Channel name is Ask a Mortician th-cam.com/users/AskAMortician There is also a Wired Ask an Expert of a mortician everyone seems to like. th-cam.com/video/W4ktLen9cVM/w-d-xo.html
11:25 Never before has a Jacob Geller video hit me this hard. No piece of media, written or otherwise, has knocked me down to such a state of intense thought.
Every time I watch one of these videos, at least once throughout my viewing, I say to myself... "Holy shit, this is all still the one take; he hasn't cut away yet." Your speaking skills are absolutely amazing sir, bravo!
I'm really excited to see someone talking about Speaker For The Dead! Despite the author being a total POS, he managed to create one of my favorite fictional universes of all time, to the point where the themes of it are practically omnipresent in my mind. I really appreciate the care you put into telling the story, without spoiling enough to tell everything, and also the PSA on Orson Scott Card was done very well. 10/10 video Mr Geller! (the past few have actually been some of my favorite of all time, keep up the good work! :) )
Commenting pre-viewing : I saw this on my feed and immediately felt that rush of anticipation that I get when I see you've put up a new video. Your work is fantastic! The fact that you've included my favorite game from last year in your work just makes my day! Thank you!
I saw Exhalation at the end sponsor part and I just wanted to say how much I love that book and the author. Ted Chiang crafts such beautiful and intricate short stories, and I am grateful you are helping spread his words.
Between this and the beheading video you've really gotten me to reflect on death in ways that would ordinarily be far more difficult than doing so through the scope of video games and your soothing voice. Slightly weird side note, your voice is as I just said soothing but also slightly scratchy in a way that's reminiscent of a vinyl record, I don't know if I got that across quite right, but you've got a great voice and you write incredible video essays so thanks for another grim but enjoyable talk about what happens after we die.
I see myself as kind of a rough, straight guy who doesn't get emotional to often, keeping my thoughts in line, remaining stoic. But every time I watch one of Gellers videos I find myself on the verge of crying. This man has a gift. Thank you.
Hey, I have a thought about tears for you. When it comes to tears for things like this I like to think of tears as a kind of gift you give to whatever media made you cry. It's a demonstration that it succeeded in making you feel strongly enough to bring forth tears. Not to say something failed if it doesn't produce tears, just that it didn't resonate with you as it might for others.
Every video of yours feels like you've taken me by the hand and led me through a beautiful garden, explaining what we see along the way as it morphs and changes. Then, at the end I see it as something totally different. Always a disorienting pleasure. Thank you so much for your videos.
got very excited when i woke up and saw this in my feed. been rewatching all your old essays and patiently waiting for another! your production seems to get cleaner and more pleasing with every video and the constant evolution and improvement is very inspiring! i wish nothing but the best for you in everything you do
This was so lovely. Thank you for sharing. This puts me in mind of two stories. The first is Brian Catling's The Vorrh: Chapter 1 opens with a man undertaking ritual funerary rites as his late wife described them to him, and he hears her voice as he works. From her body he fashions a bow, to shoot arrows she crafted that would fly to his fate when he shot them, and guide him into the titular forest's magically confounding depths. Yeah, it's kind of a lot. I do recommend the book, though-the figurative language is consumptively compelling. The other story this puts me in mind of is the folk tale 'The Twa Sisters' and its modern reprise by Loreena McKennitt, 'The Bonny Swans'. A woman is murdered and sent downstream, and a passing harpist fashions her ribcage into a harp, and her hair into harpstrings, and in so doing she is able to name her murderer when he plays her. The dichotomy of violence and honor you mention is one I find particularly resonant; people committed to making bad faith interpretations may sneer and turn their nose up at the viseral contents of these stories; but beyond first blush is the philosophical heart of the matter you rightfully named. Tenderness, intimacy, interpersonal connection. Anyway, thank you once again. I appreciate your insight as always.
I always get such an alive feeling watching your videos, thank you for all the time and hard work you put in. I’m part of the notification squad now ❤️
So much of Jacob's work that starts out ominous ends up beautiful, & the videos that start beautiful end up ominous. Juxtapositional genius, that Jacob Geller.
I remember some news about a small town in the American South that did not have requirements for medical examiner and so the sheriff was doing them and possibly covering for the murders performed by cops.
I don't know what else to say but thank you. Thank you so much. I don't have the words right now. I love words but my heart is taken. Thank you so much.
your videos re so incredible. I often return to horror games music and timeloop nihilism video. The music segment when you talk about the book with the music in the background is incredible. Or the simpsons video. The way you slowly zoom in the camera, together with tone of your voice and slow music. perfection
I was fascinated by the way autopsies (and their practitioners) were presented in Pathologic 2. It does a good job of presenting a cultural and social standard that's is different from ours and translating that into game mechanics
The Haunting of Hill House by Mike Flanagan portrayed a funeral home in a very loving way, haunting, heartbreaking, but so full of love, caring so much for this corpse that was once a person, gently fixing their makeup after all of the grizzly stuff is done, it makes me cry every time.
Is it just me, or are Jacob Geller videos filled with insightful, introspective, emotionally evocative soliloquies that examine profound topics, with just enough amusing quips to bulwark against spiraling into being mere morose dissertations? I find almost every single one delightful. Thank you.
jacob, something i really enjoy about your videos is that you just *talk*. you bring up whatever example is on your mind when you talk about a topic. the videos are educational, but they teach me more about how jacob geller thinks about things rather than a specific topic, and i like that a lot. thank you for the great video today.
I was genuinely surprised to hear Stiff mentioned! I read the book a couple years back and I was shocked at how thorough, genuine, and riveting a book about dead bodies could be. I'm glad you gave it an extra shoutout at the end there. Love you vids man! Keep up the amazing work.
I can make videos on "unclickable" topics like these because of the support of my patrons. To support more like it in the future, please consider joining: www.patreon.com/JacobGeller
You are a truly beautiful human being. Not a single one of your videos that I watched over the past 2 two years or so, failed to raise my level of awareness for the finer details of human existence. I feel blessed.
Shout out to Jacob Geller for showing the music used in the video in the description
Un-clickable 🙃
I called that it was going to be disco Elysium immediately.
Such a great scene.
"unclickable" my man you have 677 thousands subscribers
I'm glad Mr Geller seems to be bouncing between "videogames are cool" and "oh my God we are souls trapped within meat machines"
the endless cycle
Consciousness is just too much of a mind f%#*.
we're one with the machines, we are the machines.
The Brain is just another organ.
I got severe whiplash from the contrast of Head Transplants, which distressed me on a very profound level, and the love letter to Revengance that followed it.
@@JDKDKDLDKDKDKDKKKDERYY I'd agree if I couldn't feel the separation from flesh and thought so often
As someone who has wanted to be a forensic pathologist since I was a kid, the suspicion aspect really hits home. The looks I get when someone asks me what I want to go to medical school for have eventually lead me to start lying and saying "oh, I'm open to any specialty really." My own fiance will sometimes flinch away at my hands when she's reminded I've dissected a cadaver for class before. She says she can't imagine how such a nice person could do such a thing, as if I were a murderer or something.
It’s always sad when such essential fields have such severe stigmas
Well that must be really disappointing coming from your fiance. Sorry about that. 😔😔
One of my favorite episodes of Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities is The Autopsy. In it, a group of miners die suddenly in a "bomb" accident.
There is more going on of course. Way more. The context is quite disturbing, but they don't know if it's what killed the men or not.
That's the goal. What killed the men?
The Coroner is a good man. He shows respect to the corpses and is as noninvasive as possible to find out what happened. While still being curious.
Its an excellent episode. And a good answer to "how someone so kind can cut someone up."
He saves a lot of lives in the end.
The taboo is worse when your a man.
I hope your fiancé has matured in the year since you posted this, work with the dead is important and deserving of respect.
I've come to call Jacob's vibe as "the blessing and burden of consciousness"
I vibe with this in phrases such as “The sin of knowing enough to keep yourselves busy, or at least long enough to forget why you ask why.” or “Open to the redundancy of the conversation while exhausted of simple tasks that take the pain away.” or another “Livid through the world you create, only to poison the water for everyone who dares to feed the worthy, so called ‘progress.’”
That sounds like something he'd title a video as, too. Spot on
[COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS STARTS BLASTING ON THE SPEAKERS]
SCARY or DEEP Architecture of NaissanceE!
@@bsodcat damn, which videos did they come from? I've watched plenty of Jacob but can't remember any of them
This has to be my favorite TH-cam channel
Thanks king
It really is such a unique and charming TH-cam channel. Thanks for always making great content Jacob!
Wendigoon! That's so funny. I was just appreciating that I'd found a channel that reminds me of yours', and I end up finding you in the comment section
Wow
Legends supporting legends
Jacob just HAD to slip in the phrase "boss baby"
Stellar video as always. My genuine favourite content creator on TH-cam.
My eyes exploded out of my head the second I saw it in the subtitles. My ears exploded a few moments later.
A little dude. A little man in a suit. A little u know. Boss baby.
Da Baby? less goooo
@@zymosan99 👉😂👈
Where is it?
Whoever Kim is, I hope they found peace. My Condolences, Jacob.
Lol I hate to break it to you, but Kim is the character in disco Elysium he refers to quite a few times. He’s alive and well, spoilers, if you don’t screw up.
@@gimpscam9976 OH
@@gimpscam9976 Do we have confirmation on that? He could just have easily been dedicating the video to an actual person named Kim if we aren't sure, Kim is a very common name after all.
@@gimpscam9976Kim can die?
@@novamarpo3shut up bruh you corny asf
From someone in the pathology community I can expand on the crisis you mentioned. Its not simply about the money, its about 2 very large filters. First, the way medical school admissions is structured already biases selecting against those who are interested in pathology as a specialty. Constructing a narrative about your motivations to pursue medicine often requires speaking about the emotional impact of interactions with patients. People wanting to go into fields that are not patient facing therefore either have to essentially lie/embellish/hide their interests or are screened out during the application process. Then, once someone has entered residency to become a pathologist, they have a plethora of subspecialty fellowship options to choose from. Autopsy is one of only many options for residents to pursue and THEN you add on top of that that its salary is generally lower and working conditions are less desirable (actually dissecting a corpse compared to say just looking at slides in your office) and you end up with very few people who want to become forensic pathologists.
This is super interesting, thank you!
wow that's... kinda tragic
An essential job with little benefit for the worker. That is sad, particularly given the current state of the economy.
The phrase "Before you is a temple of pain that knew little tenderness in life" is something that has haunted my mind from the very first moment I read it.
So much suffering condensed into a mere 13 words.
"For Kim" carried such a shocking level of emotional weight that I welled up unexpectedly.
who is kim?
@@whiteb09 maybe someone he holds dear
I was hoping someone else would say that. It really holds a lot of weight to it. Thank you Kim.
The sudden transition in his body language from “TH-camr doing a video essay” to “A sad sigh born from grief” at the end and then the cut to “For Kim” really did it for me. Rest In Peace Kim, whoever you are.
I really hope its just a reference to kim from disco elysium. But my heart goes out either way
as someone with a rare genetic disease, im planning on donating my body to science. this video is amazing. i want to spend my life advocating for others like me, and i want to further research long after i am dead. we have so much to learn from our dead, and it’s a shame the topic is so taboo in western culture.
Mostly we just put corpses in cars and drive them into walls.
This has been INCREDIBLY PRODUCTIVE.
@@jrshaul or exploded it with bomb
It really isn't a taboo at all in my experience.
Chances are you will be left to rot outside or cut into a million slices
@@ryanboscoe9670 damn bro that's like??? The entire point????
This makes me reflect on how many funerary traditions around the world incorporate some form of "cannibalism", whether that outright eating their flesh or imbibing their ashes, or even spreading their ashes onto the bodies of others. From a certain perspective, you can see how it's an intimate act; a desperate attempt to internalize and make someone else, someone lost and mourned, a part of yourself again.
i feel similarly about victorian hair charms. Victorian Brits would often keep locks of hair from deceased loved ones close to them in jewelry (often encased in glass in a small broach, but occasionally as larger pieces) and seeing them feels simultaneously macabre and the closest i could ever come to touching a human that lived so long before me.
@@swagathachristie5242 I remember reading about braided hair necklaces way back when when I read The Sin Eater.
"I won't scatter your sorrow to the heartless sea. I will always be with you. Plant your roots in me."
I didn’t even know there were traditions like that, I just had a natural urge to do it. I wanted a bit of my loved one’s hair. I wanted to remember what they smelled like because I always said they smelled like pure sunshine. I can’t smell it on the hair, because the smell came from their skin when alive. But I can still recall that feeling of being with them like being in the warm sun
On any other comment, I probably would've left the likes at 666 cause "haha funny number" but a comment like this doesn't deserve to be associated with ideas of evil, even as a joke.
Several months after a dear friend of mine died, I was finally informed of how. A heart attack at the age of 36. They'd had a heart condition all of their life and I figured that it was what had taken them from the world so soon. But they were also depressed. And while we hadn't truly worried about it, consciously, there was still a relief in knowing that they hadn't left us intentionally. Life just... happened. And then it ended. And we learned what happened and even though I was pulled back headfirst into grieving, I am glad for it.
Heart attacks are unfortunately strongly correlated with depression. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is the extreme case.
Sadness is lethal.
@@jrshaul that is interesting info but i'm not sure if it's a helpful thing to share with someone grieving their friend that died this way
This hit me hard. I buried my cat last week after he died in my arms over a very traumatic hour. We were incredibly close and seeing him go from full of life to a cold stiff cadaver really made me recontextualise life, the soul, and how it's all wrapped up in such a well adapted yet so specifically vulnerable organic form. Your videos on mortality have been unexpectedly helpful in this process. Your writing is truly moving. Many thanks and here's hoping for happier topics around the corner.
I'm sorry for your loss
I've been through something similar with my childhood pet cat that I had for about 17 years. It's a very rough time and I wish you nothing but the best moving forward.
I hope you're able to properly heal, I can't imagine the heartbreak
My childhood cat was my best friend and he died 2 years ago in my arms too. You never get used to it. It does certainly help to adopt another cat. I have a new buddy now and he is awesome.
RIP cat 🐈
I’m a medical student, have been one for the last six years, and this episode strikes a particular nerve with me. During my years of study and experience at the hospital, the one thing that i couldn’t handle at an emotional level involved a corpse, and this always stuck with me. I mean, I got used to seeing wounds and illnesses and their effects on people, from limb amputations to extensive burns to suppurating lesions, and of course there is empathy for the patients and their conditions, but all my interactions with them never felt “wrong” or “out of place” in any particular way. The one time this particular feeling arose, it was during the study and subsequent experience of a type of autopsy ; it was with a corpse, and the fact that the not living, bodies that used to be persons and are now things, made me “feel” more than living breathing persons ended up exposing a number of questions about myself and what I can or can’t do.
The particular procedure was the study of the corpse of a newborn to determine if it had ever lived or if it was a stillbirth, to distinguish between infanticide and concealement of the corpse. In Italian it is called “study of docimacies” , but from my understanding the word “docimasia” has a more restrictive meaning in English.
It's like disconnecting a power station. After years of 60hz hum, the silence is deafening.
Why have you been a med a try debt for more than four years… that doesn’t make sense haha. Med school is 4 years and residency is 3-5 years (plus more if you do a fellowship).
@@DOC_951 I’m from Italy : here med school requires six years of basic study (with exams on all the different specialties and internships in most wards) and then 4 to 6 years of residency to achieve specialization (with surgical specialties requiring the longest)
@@DOC_951The internet is not America.
@@DOC_951I know this is an old comment but I just want to clarify since my boyfriend was in premed: you have to get a 4 yr degree in biology and that’s known as pre med. then you go 4 years in medical school THEN you do a 2-3 year residency. This is standard for Drs in America. It takes about 10-13 years to become a Dr.
Here's a a joke I heard from my father: "After finishing the autopsy we can confirm that cause of death was the autopsy"
perfect
grim.
perfect grim.
I remember years ago on an old Fluffe talks video hearing a story about how in Spain an apparent trampling occured during a panic in a riot and a bunch of people had been trampled to death. So much so they had brought a truck to load them and send them to the mourge. It was only when they were being organized that one person woke up and asked for a glass of water. He didn't die he had just been brutally injured
Wupps!
the bit about the body giving one last word or message hit me very hard. My father died of a sudden heart attack, it was only through autopsy we figured out why and revealed a physiological, most likely genetic, predisposition in the men of my family that I suddenly was aware that I was carrying as well. He was himself a doctor. This video hit me hard, grief is funny, but in a good way.
The bit about Mia's dissection in RE reminds me of this line Andrey Stamatin says in Pathologic -- "Who can tell if the body wants to be opened? How is it meant to be cut? A carcass only welcomes the touch of a master. The cut of a master follows the line that liberates the body from itself." A body liberated from itself... Like unpicking seams on a garment and laying all the pieces flat, or finding the joints on a mannequin and taking them apart. Idk, maybe this only makes sense to me.
Creepy shit. In a good way
I WAS HOPING for a Pathologic mention lmao, I've seen too many "Tender Vivisection" fic tags from this fandom and I love it XD
your comparison with a garment is interesting, as garments that have been picked apart often wish to lay a certain way after being sewn in one direction. Especially in antiques, I've seen someone say "it's as if it wants to go back to its original shape." Regardless of separation, it knows in its shape that it belonged to an original body.
Every single day, I go to bed praying that Jacob plays pathologic
As a meat cutter- yes
This is one of the best "Death Positive" videos I've seen. I'll be forwarding this to a *lot* of people. Tempted to send it to Ask a Mortician, but it'll probably get lost in the wash.
I was thinking the same thing, and think Caitlin would definitely appreciate this vid.
"What an unexpected blessing for us to be able to learn from a loved one, one final time." Wow. What a line... I'll admit that some tears were (and are currently still as of writing this comment) shed.
I'm usually just about the least emotional person I know, but the tone and writing of the entire video was just so beautiful, especially towards the end. Your videos are a masterclass in how to make someone feel the full gravity of any subject.
"Your videos are a masterclass in how to make someone feel the full gravity of any subject." good line.
Me too.
He's great at what he does, and I thank him for it. I wouldn't be who I am today without him.
Maybe I'm just a sociopath, but strapping my corpse into a Honda and firing it at a wall just seemed...sensible.
It's cheaper than cremation, and my life is the direct benefit of many other corpses shot at walls.
It's just inedible meat.
i'm a medical student and this hit me very hard. i just had my dissection module, and even before that i had some anatomy classes with dead bodys, it's strange because we call them anatomy pieces but they were a fucking person, most of the corpses were from homeless people and it really makes you sad when you start wondering how much those person had suffered. thank you for this video, it is a masterpiece, as always
It's not like they care what you call them
@@realdragonare you dumb or tryna pick a fight
@@realdragonyou didn't get the point huh
The ending reminds me of what a priest character in Vinland Saga says about a dead body.
"He is dead, and therefore more beautiful than anyone alive. You might say he is love itself. For you see... he will not hate, nor kill, nor steal. Don't you find that wonderful? His body will be abandoned here... and his flesh will feed the beasts and insects. He will be blown about by the wind... and pelted by the rain... and he will not raise a single word in complaint. It is death that completes a man."
Damn.
I haven’t seen Vinland saga but I’ve heard so many great things about it and this just completes the final straw for me
Good ol Christian hatred for life
@@WilliamNobleBonnin isnt his comment the literal opposite of that?
@@cristinaestrella lately vindland saga on decline on its plot
Pathologic would have been a great fit for this video, considering how much of a spiritual experience cutting into a body is in that game. They even call the main character "butcher" and draw parallels between performing autopsies and removing organs with butchering livestock. But then again, the game does fall short eventually and focuses more on other parts.
Pathologic 2 would have fit even more
Had to pause at the Disco Elysium part as I haven't played it. One day I shall return.
I don't think it really spoils anything from the game, but if it gets you to play it then that's a victory! Haha
Lol, same.
@@JacobGeller Hints at a twist that I completely missed my first run, so a bit spoliery even if it doesn't mention the twist.
It's worth it brother
Go play Disco Elysium. It's worth every penny
The first time I saw a body was my grandfather's at his funeral when I was 11. It was brief but after that every funeral I went to I'd have a panic attack. I just couldn't handle it. After my grandmother's a few years ago I felt different. She had Alzheimer's so the last few years were rough to say the least. For years I saw her either smiling at people and things that weren't there or on the verge of tears from not knowing just wtf going on around her. Seeing her at her funeral was the first time I saw her at peace in a while. She was cold but resting for once. I feel, now, that death's beauty comes from it's acceptance. It doesn't love or hate you for the life you've lived. It doesn't see you as a burden or villain. Regardless of what you've done or haven't done it doesn't judge you, change it's perception of you, treat you differently, or any of that. It just accepts you.
I think a lot about Speaker for the Dead in general, but specifically, a line near the end as Ender explains the true tragedy of their actions to the piggies.
“Never take another human being to the third life, because we don't know how to go.”
that line was honestly what broke me when I read the book
like, there's an unbelievable amount of suffering and trauma through everything, but I was able to stay mostly neutral as an observer
but something about that moment made it all sink in for real
What was up with that out of place distancing though? Does anyone truly cate about what an author of a great book thinks on climate change?
@@SeanWinters some people don’t like to acknowledge people who are different from themselves. They want to ease those people from history and the present. Really narrow minded, but what can you do.
@@SeanWinters dude it's the internet. If he didn't mention it himself commenters on his video would say things like "um actually you shouldn't read his books because blah blah blah"
Saying it himself is a defensive move to avoid those annoying comments
@@SeanWinters Its not just the climate change but also the high grade homophobia
I'm an emotionally damaged, and therefore quite numb man. I still feel all the same, but expression is harder than it should be. Your videos always make me emote. A smile, a laugh, a few tears. These videos mean a great lot to me, and for that I thank you.
I'm kinda the same. Wishing you the best and more smiles in this world.
Same here! I wish the best for you.
To you @SporeHam and others like you, check out exurb1a. Great videos are, "and then we'll be okay", "the rememberer" and literally every other video on that channel. If you like Jacob, you will like Exurb1a.
Outstanding.
I spent years in the death care industry, and had an immense amount of contact with embalming and autopsies, and (of course) with grieving next of kin. This video put neatly and unambiguously into place my conflicted feelings on the conflation I often witnessed of the superfluity of embalming with the importance of autopsy.
Has your experience in the industry changed how you yourself want to be prepared for burial?
I personally would rather have a natural burial. Preferably somewhere with plant growth. I'm content to be fertilizer :)
@@adamhall6902
ABSOLUTELY!
Yes, and thank you for the reply! Due to the limitations of death care in my state, I plan on cremation, but green burial or alkaline hydrolysis are my distinct preferences. I have a hard time thinking of any of my colleagues in the industry who professed wanting to be embalmed - to wit, we generally accept it's a racket.
Caitlin Doughty (Ask A Mortician here on YT) is an excellent resource - her memoir, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, is what got me into the field to begin with.
Have a lovely day!
@@NormDeMoss I want to work in the funeral industry. I just started to figure out my schooling journey but I’ve read a lot of books related to it and talked to a lot people. Seeing your comment really made me happy and I have this huge advocacy calling inside of me and want to nurture it in ways that are meaningful to me.
I know right? I'm a funeral director, and it was lovely to feel so seen, to have someone else articulate that contradictory feeling of caring for the dead, without being consumed by fear or sadness.
What did you go to school for? How does one get into this line of work?
I read Stiff as a teen after getting it as a wacky gift from a distant uncle trying to connect with someone they only meet once a year at holiday events. Years later I reached out and told him how much it meant to me. How it ignited my passion for learning after discovering a world of science that's rarely talked about.
I know it's been a while since you commented, but thanks for commenting
"The corpses [...] can chill" is such a short but profound line with a double meaning. And a great video overall just as well! I particularly enjoyed how smoothly we're guided from Resident Evil right until the very end to Stiff.
If anyone watching this found it interesting and hasn't watched "The Autopsy of Jane Doe", you absolutely should.
Honestly I kept thinking about that movie while watching this lmao I'm surprised it wasn't brought up
Jumanji but it's a corpse
Yess! That movie stayed with me
i also highly recommend A Certain Kind of Death which has been free on YT for over a decade. cw hardcore gore/nudity but if you can't tell by where i'm recommending it, it's sensitive and dry and not a circus.
@@Lisonwasp02 haha same
I’ve been replaying Disco Elysium recently, so the moment you started talking about autopsies that game immediately came into my head. I’d actually never considered that the Hanged Man talking to you was such a clear-cut metaphor fo anything, just thought it was another bit of never-truly-explained weirdness.
Harry is actually a very experienced and skillful detective, but his brain tends to present his insights in very strange ways
There is also a more literal explanation that's hinted-at, but never stated outright. _Harry is actually psychic._ Some of his sixth senses actually are just that. The metaphysics of Disco Elysium aren't what they seem at first glance. Which you will find when you start to learn about the Pale, the Innocences, the early expeditions into the Pale, find the megarich billionaire in the cargo bin, talk to the Insulidian Phasmid or do the communard side quest or learn about the tiny hole in reality. It's just easy to dismiss Harry as a blowhard for all the obvious reasons, but not all of Harry's insights are a product of his rich internal life. Jacob touched on this with the Shivers skill. But I think one or two others actually are partly "supernatural."
The Hanged Man mentions that both love and communism killed him. Which, as it turns out, was prophetic. This is not something Harry could've known simply by detective's intuition. Though you're prone to dismissing him because it just seems like his typically unhinged drug-fueled nonsense. There are also dialogue options where Harry can try to make everything in the murder investigation about sex, which Kim Katsuragi dismisses in his usual put-upon professional way. Except it turns out the The Deserter really was a sexually-frustrated man obsessed with punishing what he perceived to be the degeneracy of the society he hated. Though in a more figurative sense, the victim was involved in a semi-romantic physical relationship with Katja and died for it.
this video is just beautiful, i have no words.
last month, i found my fathers body in our house, and had to fruitlessly do chest compressions on his body while waiting for emergency services. ive been having so much trouble grabbling with encountering my father like that, but this video eased that some amount.
My heart goes to you, Felix. While your experience is not the complete root of this video, it is not far from what we experienced with Kim. Be well, and may the memories of your father always be a blessing to you.
Hey, you were there for him, remember that. Even at the end you were with him and that's good he wasn't alone even if he was already gone not everyone gets the care or dignity of being found by a loved one, many people just sit until paramedics end up being called. You did all you could and if my father is any judge of how a dad can feel I'm sure he was glad he had you there, even if it was extremely bitter and no child should have to see their parents like that just like a parent shouldn't have to bury their children however again the fact that you were there for him is beautiful.
I hope you're doing good
Love how Jacob is able to mix together soundtracks with dialog in such a beautiful way that heightens what he's presenting. Very descriptive and beautiful!!
Yeah lol my old landlord was named Craig
Orson Scott card is an exceptionally sad author for me. His works, especially the earlier ones, brilliantly cry for everything he seems to be against. Enders game is a book that cries for us to try harder to understand others, that some people are different, and that indoctrination is awful. It tells us that war is hell and children can be made into tools by extremism of any kind.
Speaker for the dead teaches us again to try to understand things that are different, to expand our worldviews, to challenge whatever we think we know. It’s a gutturally emotional book that takes its time to drive home that it’s important we don’t give in to those who cry for violence or intolerance. It presents highly complex views on religion and how it spreads and what makes religion good and bad.
Xenocide is a book that teaches us all about moral ambiguity, and how sometimes there isn’t a right choice, and you can’t force that onto anyone.
Which is why it amazes me that he became the way he did. His current self is almost a paradoxical representation of what his earlier works would villanize. This parallel is in so many of his other works and I don’t know how he fell into the almost perfect pit he described. It is really saddening how he constantly proves how right he was.
Yeah, this has baffled me for years and will probably baffle me for the rest of my life. I can only guess as to why and how the hell a man like that can write books like that, and all my my guesses feel far too outlandish. Mr card you are incomprehensible
That's...what being an artist is. If someone is able to hit on a truth which strongly resonates with you, they themself not embodying that truth doesn't undermine the message. Whether you choose to directly support individuals you find reprehensible is a different matter.
@@wladdaimpala88 yes but it's extremely difficult to write that resonance without it directly affecting yourself. There needs to be a massive emotional disconnect to write something without apparently realizing what it is you've written, which is what's so strange. Further comments on the video pointed out that he fell into Mormonism at some point, which clarifies some things and explains the disconnect happening here since that sort of thing is a core part of how cults function
@@countessofcats5549 religious fundamentalism is one hell of a drug it seems.
@@countessofcats5549
Ah, well that explains it. No different than if he got grabbed by Scientology, or Jehova's Witnesses or any other perfidious cult.
Cults prey on people when they are emotionally vulnerable, drawing them in by promising a sense of belonging or answers and then slowly twist them into mockeries of their former self. Any individuality, all that is bright and compassionate is slowly squeezed out as it serves no use to the cult. And this emptiness is filled in with repressive and contradictory dogma to both chain the victim down and emotionally insulate them from outsiders, until all that is left is another drone unquestingly serving their higher ups and soullessly parroting their talking points, convincing themselves and the other victims that everyone different is their enemy and only the cult can protect them. The former person is at this point gone, replaced by a malleable template copied countless times. And the drone has to prove time and time again that it is the truest believer of them all, as everyone is always policed by their fellows under suspicion of being a traitor.
A successful cult is one of the most frightening social systems that humans have ever devised. And Mormonism has perfected its craft to such a degree that they control an entire US state with an iron fist.
The true horror comes from seeing Jacob grow such a thick beard so quickly between videos
Rivals Brian David Gilbert and his mustache capabilities
It is impressive
he's quite the hairy boy, ill give you that
Jewish superpowers
imagine how fat he is if the beard doesn't hog all of the resources
I keep a playlist of “Key Reading” and it blows me away that seemingly every one of your videos goes on there. It only gets a video or two a month, and seems to be transforming into basically a Jacob Geller playlist
mine is almost entirely him and Yhara Zayd lol
Speaker for the Dead was one of the quintessential books of my adolescence. It sparked the fire of true empathy inside me, and I can say for certain I would not be who I am today without it.
Re-reading an uncensored pdf version of Ender's Game was what threw me down the tragic rabbit hole that is Mr. Card. Ender literally calls another child the n-word during practice; it's displayed as banter. This is not in printed versions and threw me off so hard I had to look into it. After hours of research and a slow decay of any respect I had for the man himself I had to suffocate his presence in my mind permanently. Speaker for the Dead was written by no one; the author is well and truly Dead.
"Sparked the fire of true empathy."
That's exactly what I hope everyone reading gets out of it. Perfect.
Completely agree, I'll never understand how he could write books explicitly about understanding and having compassion for seemingly horrible things like violent aliens, but could never do the same for his lovely fellow human beings!
@@sepiar7682 the duality of man
You are allowed to take meaning and value from despicable people.
@@anomitas The intrinsic brutality of nature
Your intricate exploration of the human psyche and video games never ceases to amaze me. This has quickly become my favourite channel of 2022. Keep it up man! :)
hooo baby time to get messed up watching another bodily dissection jacob geller video
edit: as someone who’s studying forensics in college right now this video has really affected me in a way i didn’t think it would. my respect for bodies has never been more clearly stated, it’s making me really emotional right now.
I watched Fear of Cold when it popped up in my recs, and immediately knew I had to watch your entire videography in chronological order. It feels very bittersweet being here.
So glad that you mentioned Speaker for the Dead! ...And that you mentioned how horrible Card is, I will never understand how he could write books explicitly about understanding and having compassion for seemingly horrible things like violent aliens, but could never do the same for his lovely fellow human beings. Regardless, Speaker is one of my favorite books of all time, and I also loved this video!
Unfortunately that kind of doublethink is endemic of Mormonism. It's a different and far more frustrating situation than Rowling I think, while her books are just entertaining kids' stories that never meant anything to begin with Card's are ABOUT the very things that make him such an awful man today. The lack of introspection is baffling.
It is often times the case that people are interested in topics they don't understand fully.
Perhaps he's attempting to understand compassion, learned enough about it to write a book, but never managed to embody it in his personal life?
It's a similar case with a teacher's assistant specializing in ethics and moral philosophy, that attacked someone at a protest that Antifa was a part of. A person, whose sole purpose was to study / educate others on ETHICS falling to base violent impulses is ironic.
But is also awfully similar to Card's case.
Sauce for the antifa case: th-cam.com/video/muoR8Td44UE/w-d-xo.html
*The Bikelock Fugitive of Berkeley* by *Internet Historian*, if you don't trust the link.
If you've not met Card, you've got no basis for judging him as a person. No, you don't have to like his politics. You don't even have to like his religious principles. But he's got more guts than all the people who flock to bash him for what essentially amounts to sins against Wokeness.
Its it just a persecution complex? Writing about how he feels like his people are persecuted , and deserve more empathy?
@@bradrtorgersen_videos "sins against wokeness" why can't you come with the same evidence you're asking of others? You want Card to be given a proper platform it's only fair, why would you be afraid to discuss what he actually believes in with clear terms instead of buzzwords?
I went into this video expecting to feel awful, or disturbed, or sad. Instead, all I got was insight and understanding and it was so sobering, the immense respect you put into every word of your script... and yet, the final piece of this video, the "superheroes", that broke me. I was all tranquil and immersed, doing my laundry, and then I started bawling, hard. The final interaction we get with another human, both us playing a part to help the ones left behind in mutual respect (in a sense, since dead people can't feel but I'm positive that's what we'd feel knowing the circumstances), and we both, cadaver and mortician, are met with disgust and contempt, respectively, from the ones we're trying to help. It's mortifyingly sad.
I almost cried when I saw "for Kim" I'm not sure why it made me so sad but damn.
I have seen most of his videos. Jacob always hold his speaker composure. But his sigh and break of “character” moved me more than all of his videos I’ve seen.
Much appreciate these "unclickable" topics. It's nice to listen to someone connect the dots between concepts and ideas that I previously might not have thought had any connection.
Also: watched this on nebula first, and just wanted to mention how it feels quiet (?) over there. TH-cam is "noisy" - due to adhd i'll often find myself scrolling down to read comments and then scrolling back up to realise I've missed a chunk of the video, so then I'll have to rewind and watch it again. Nebula has been good for my attention span, knowing that there's no comments means I just watch the videos. (I'm not advertising for them lol, just something I was thinking while watching this)
I'm a middle aged woman who hasn't played a video game since Adventures of Lolo on NES. I have no interest in playing video games, nor do I have time for them but I never miss a Jacob Geller video. Not only do I watch them, I find myself entirely absorbed. It's the top tier storytelling, insightful analysis and video quality that pulls me in , leaving me with unblinked eyes and an open mouth.
As a person trying to take apart a loved one after the fact and getting no answers, this video was painful and cathartic. As usual, in your thoughtful assessment of media, I find peace in the 'not knowing,' and the sharing of the 'seeking anyway.'
I was literally holding my breath and sweating during the disco elysium scene when checking the mouth. Afterwards, I was shocked that a scene that happened almost entirely in my own mind while digesting the words onscreen could have felt so tense and tactile.
And a little bit after that, a sense of exhilaration, heaviness, and triumph. It's been a long time since I felt completely in sync what the characters I was playing/seeing was probably feeling in that moment
Good writing is insane; you look at words and hallucinate.
It is such an electric scene, establishing Cuno and Cunoesse beforehand and showing that even *they* are completely enraptured, if only for a few moments by these two Fucking Pigs that walked onto *their* turf and doing the "coin behind your ear" trick but with a bullet in a man's brain. Truly amazing shit
Nothing has managed to keep me engrossed quite like the Hanged Man’a Autopsy… And nothing has made me feel so damn satisfied and happy for a character like Harry finding out the hidden thing about the Hanged Man and showing that, in spite of being blitzed into complete amnesia, despite looking so sad and miserable, despite being a wreck of a person… He *is* the best at what he does.
I remember when I played Disco Elysium for the first time a few weeks ago. When I was doing the field autopsy of the hanged man the check I got for finding the bullet in his brainstem was 3%, and yet, I still got it. I remember for the rest of that playthrough just thinking about how special finding that detail was to me
God this is a beautiful video. The way we conceptualize, or fail to conceptualize, death feels like such a fundamental part of culture that is often ignored. The discussion reminds me of What Remains of Edith Finch, which is just in its premise intently focused on understanding life through death.
@@pyton1d752 patreon lol
this reminds me of the show Bones, when she describes the life lived by the victim. a fracture in young age, maybe from riding a bike or climbing trees. that they were a dancer. if they liked to work with their hands, build things. all these signs of a life lived, telling a story. and while seeming callous in interactions with most living people, she has such compassion for the dead she works with. when she tells their story like this it moved me so much
Currently going through mortuary school, and I gotta say, this is my favourite vid of your's. A lot of what you said about the nature of the dead and how the living interact with them was very poignant, and reflects a lot of the reasons I chose to persue this profession
Thank you for taking that path and I wish you all the best in your journey!
Gosh, me too.
@@sepiasmith5065 thanks!
My uncle died exactly a week ago as I’m writing this. The diagnosis didn’t need to be confirmed, we’d known it was coming for years now, but this video provided a weird sort of comfort at the exact time I needed it
Mary Roach is a criminally underrated author, I recommend her work any chance I get! Both her and Caitlin Doughty (her YT channel is Ask A Mortician) are excellent authors, especially if people are interested in learning more about death. Awesome video, Jacob!
I wanted to be a medical examiner. Got a great scholarship and everything. My mother refused to sign my papers because it was "gross". I didn't turn 18 until after the due date so I couldn't sign them myself. I will always regret I couldn't follow my first choice.
Your mother is a bad person.
Bs
How did I end up crying by the end of this video? Beautiful script writing with such a gentle delivery.
I kept thinking back to Laura Palmer and her autopsy. How the agent wanted to spend more time discovering the mystery around her final days but the town wanted her in the ground, essentially. And it's interesting to think about the town of Twin Peaks and how burying Laura is so parallel to "sweeping things under the rug" since an autopsy can provide so many answers, especially if more care and time is taken.
We're taught funerals are for the living but I always thought having them so soon after the death was negligent. Dismissive.
And now I have a little more context for that feeling. A little more justification.
yeah this whole thing really reminded me of laura, practically the whole point of twin peaks is seeing all the different sides of a character we don't get to interact with
One of the most beautiful things about keeping corpses around to dissect them, is that it has allowed us to learn how to transplant organs. A parting gift that can literally save somebody's life, and as a line in a song about organ donation actually, "And know the love inside a dying human's final gesture, I will cut and dry be leaving with your liver."
The song is called: Organs by The Uncluded, by the way in case anyone would be curious.
I look forward to every upload you do, and I genuinely tell my friends about your videos when they come out. Thats rare, I can't think of anyone else I subscribe to that has that much of an impact. Thank you so much, Jacob!
The thing I love most about this channel is that it has no middle round videos, it's either "How wonderful it is that we get to live and experience the beauty of art, people, and everything life offers." or "Oh god, we are the only sentient parts of the universe, the only entities capable of suffering and existential dread, and we are alone with it, trapped in our prisions of flesh".
This video was somegow the most emotional experience I had in the past fortnight. Incredible work as always Jacob.
I wish his audience was as cool as him and not chock full of pretentious pseudointellectuals. I get so sad every time I try and scroll through his comments looking for anything interesting said. Yall suck
I recently got the coroner's report about a close family member. It was written with such care and compassion for my relative's life as well as his death. It detailed how his death would be used to make changes and prevent more future deaths. It was healing to read.
Bro who’s Kim, I don’t even know Kim but the ending made me cry
FWIW, autopsies are expensive and generally aren’t ordered unless there’s some reason to suspect a misdiagnosis or foul play-which might account for the high rate of autopsies changing the official cause of death.
Great striking of tone in this video. Feels like the beautiful discomfort of overwhelming intimacy. Much like an autopsy itself, it seems. Working through "The Anthropocene Reviewed" on audible right now but Stiff looks like a good followup!
In Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye, there's a similar kind of care- called mnemosurgery- which is used in alive patients as trauma recovery ('editing'/blacking out sections for their own safety), but in the events we see, is often as part of an autopsy to recover memories and afterimages.
To be able to perform them, the surgeons have to have special needles installed in their fingertips, and inject into the patient's memory core. It's a hyper-specialized, highly stigmatized field, because every mnemosurgeon is killing themselves by doing it- it is simultaneously sensitive care via witnessing + storing someone's trauma, and a literal addiction that at best makes you inherit trauma, at worst, kills you mid-operation.
It's a scary thing all-around, but being in a war for millennia made many people Need the surgery, just to live with 'normal' C-PTSD rather than 24/7 screaming terror.
MTMTE is 80% psychological horror, and one of the biggest sources of it comes from a 'clinic' that specialized in it. Some things that happened in that clinic were so convoluted and horrific that there's torture strategies and war crimes named after the surgeons.
The biggest "contribution" it made was a new form of torture called Shadowplay- where minds get altered, triggers get planted, people put into never-ending nightmares, or are completely wiped so their bodies can be used.
Even worse, some knew that this is what the clinic was doing, and saw it as a way to contribute to the war effort (similar to blood/organ donations) while committing s*icide. A fair amount of them were near-death mnemosurgeons themselves.
"It is the fate of every mnemosurgeon to die on the job-a victim of their addiction. We know when death is near: we can feel it creeping closer-but never close enough to make us stop. The fatal injection is always the next injection-until one day it isn't," - MTMTE issue #49.
Clearly transformers is on something else
that sounds incredible. where can i read it?
Humble bundle will sometimes sell all the IDW transformers comics in a big bundle, it changes from MTMTE to lost light after a while but it’s the same series!
@@artemiscrimson thank u!!! I've read a few of the IDW transformers comics a long time ago and really enjoyed them. i'll keep an eye out : )
man i was not expecting to see discussion of mnemosurgery in the comments of this lol. the scenes w/ chromedome and brainstorm that touch on his addiction to removing his memories of his dead conjunx's to not have to deal with the pain mess me up every time i read them. also shout out to sunder because him forcing people to turn their own bodies inside out great body horror
The two pieces of media I kept thinking off while watching this were Ask A Mortician who is very vocal in talking about death and the dead (and also comforting a dead loved one as part of grieving similar to what Harry does) and Haunting of Hill House (the netflix one). I don't really recall the characters' names but one of them is a mortician and she wants to become one after seeing her mother's corpse look peaceful (the last interaction she had with her was frightning and violent) and she also has to do the funeral for her sister after she has been autopsied. She's very frank about talking to her brother what that entails and how an autopsy leaves a corpse, how rough and brutal it seems, the way they took her apart and haphazardly put her back together. And I think this video nicely shows the other side and the need for it.
Neat :)
Ask A Mortician is one of the best channels on the platform, I think Jacob would appreciate the channel for sure if he hasn't come across her in his research.
I'm late to this video but man was it so great. I'm going to school to be a forensic pathologist/medical examiner and it's so hard trying to find up with ways to tell my peers. The stigma behind this line of work is so dismissing and restrictive when I tell people this is what I want to do.
I am doing an internship with a local coroner and it is truly eye opening. My state rotates forensic pathologists for autopsies because each county can't have one. Coroners don't always need a medical license, so pathologists need to come in to actually examine a corpse. A lot of people don't realize how a body gets places, coroners do that. I've been in more people's homes than I can count, seeing how they lived and having to take them away from where the once spent most of their time. This job has been so insightful and this video hit so close to home for me so thank you so much for this vid!
I read speaker for the dead when I was probably 10 years old, and I recall being mildly disturbed and deeply bored by it. It is not a book for a 10 year old. But I never stopped thinking about it, the mystery of why a culture does the things it does, its rituals and traditions, typified in how they treat death. The effort required to understand these things and the value in doing so, it all stuck with me. I just graduated college with a degree in communications, which I initially chose sort of on a whim because I was into movies and my school didn't have a film major, but over my time in college I focused in on folklore studies, because I never stopped being fascinated by the things explored in this book. I hadn't realized the connection until now.
My favorite professor, who is a folklorist and teaches truly profound classes on alcohol, humor, and horror, describes each of these things as how humans attempt to overcome "the devil of a task that is living together," how we face the impossible feat that is communication to achieve mutual understanding. And in each of these classes he touches on how society approaches death, what we do with bodies, but I really think he could easily get a whole class out of the topic. Just as there is so much to learn from the dead, there is so much to learn from what we do with the dead
You've got an incredible talent for asking questions I never would have thought of.
I honeslty never thought that I would hear someone actually talk about Speaker For the Dead. I loved the idea of funerals in that book and im suprised i wasnt the only one. I enjoyed this book so much and I always had dreams of what someone would say about me.
House Beneviento is easily one of my favorite gaming moments in recent memory. The escape room level design, the atmosphere, the tension. It's so well crafted.
this video is once again confirming that jacob is one of the best content creators on the platform. the short lingering of the camera during the sigh at the end of the essay, along with the "for kim" made me tear up. you got me again man
Hey, Stiff is one of my favorite books! I've often considered working at a morgue or in a forensic setting, but was never sure if I could take it. I'm still not sure, but I think this video is a healthier look at working with the dead than just "ew dead people gross".
May I recommend a TH-cam channel run by an actual mortician who is also very funny and insightful? Channel name is Ask a Mortician th-cam.com/users/AskAMortician
There is also a Wired Ask an Expert of a mortician everyone seems to like. th-cam.com/video/W4ktLen9cVM/w-d-xo.html
11:25 Never before has a Jacob Geller video hit me this hard. No piece of media, written or otherwise, has knocked me down to such a state of intense thought.
Every time I watch one of these videos, at least once throughout my viewing, I say to myself... "Holy shit, this is all still the one take; he hasn't cut away yet." Your speaking skills are absolutely amazing sir, bravo!
I'm really excited to see someone talking about Speaker For The Dead!
Despite the author being a total POS, he managed to create one of my favorite fictional universes of all time, to the point where the themes of it are practically omnipresent in my mind. I really appreciate the care you put into telling the story, without spoiling enough to tell everything, and also the PSA on Orson Scott Card was done very well.
10/10 video Mr Geller! (the past few have actually been some of my favorite of all time, keep up the good work! :) )
What does POS mean?
@@cyncynshop it stands for piece of shit! :)
Commenting pre-viewing : I saw this on my feed and immediately felt that rush of anticipation that I get when I see you've put up a new video. Your work is fantastic! The fact that you've included my favorite game from last year in your work just makes my day! Thank you!
If you are talking about Disco Elysium, there's already a video dedicated to it on this channel! Search for "Searching for Disco Elysium".
I saw Exhalation at the end sponsor part and I just wanted to say how much I love that book and the author. Ted Chiang crafts such beautiful and intricate short stories, and I am grateful you are helping spread his words.
Between this and the beheading video you've really gotten me to reflect on death in ways that would ordinarily be far more difficult than doing so through the scope of video games and your soothing voice. Slightly weird side note, your voice is as I just said soothing but also slightly scratchy in a way that's reminiscent of a vinyl record, I don't know if I got that across quite right, but you've got a great voice and you write incredible video essays so thanks for another grim but enjoyable talk about what happens after we die.
Lo-fi video essays to study and reflect on life, death, and the meaning of everything to
You're so right. His voice is like a comforting vinyl record.
I absolutely adored the visual autopsy scene in Disco Elysium, it really struck me in the chest, I'm so glad you're talking about it.
You are such a human.
Really incredible work.
I see myself as kind of a rough, straight guy who doesn't get emotional to often, keeping my thoughts in line, remaining stoic. But every time I watch one of Gellers videos I find myself on the verge of crying. This man has a gift. Thank you.
Hey, I have a thought about tears for you. When it comes to tears for things like this I like to think of tears as a kind of gift you give to whatever media made you cry. It's a demonstration that it succeeded in making you feel strongly enough to bring forth tears. Not to say something failed if it doesn't produce tears, just that it didn't resonate with you as it might for others.
Every video of yours feels like you've taken me by the hand and led me through a beautiful garden, explaining what we see along the way as it morphs and changes. Then, at the end I see it as something totally different.
Always a disorienting pleasure.
Thank you so much for your videos.
Wasn't sure what to tell the cops, but now I can just show them this video.
my dream is to be a forensic pathologist. I love how you were able to communicate what is truly beautiful about the profession.
Best wishes for your dream, hope it becomes a reality!
got very excited when i woke up and saw this in my feed. been rewatching all your old essays and patiently waiting for another! your production seems to get cleaner and more pleasing with every video and the constant evolution and improvement is very inspiring! i wish nothing but the best for you in everything you do
This was so lovely. Thank you for sharing.
This puts me in mind of two stories. The first is Brian Catling's The Vorrh: Chapter 1 opens with a man undertaking ritual funerary rites as his late wife described them to him, and he hears her voice as he works. From her body he fashions a bow, to shoot arrows she crafted that would fly to his fate when he shot them, and guide him into the titular forest's magically confounding depths. Yeah, it's kind of a lot. I do recommend the book, though-the figurative language is consumptively compelling.
The other story this puts me in mind of is the folk tale 'The Twa Sisters' and its modern reprise by Loreena McKennitt, 'The Bonny Swans'. A woman is murdered and sent downstream, and a passing harpist fashions her ribcage into a harp, and her hair into harpstrings, and in so doing she is able to name her murderer when he plays her.
The dichotomy of violence and honor you mention is one I find particularly resonant; people committed to making bad faith interpretations may sneer and turn their nose up at the viseral contents of these stories; but beyond first blush is the philosophical heart of the matter you rightfully named. Tenderness, intimacy, interpersonal connection.
Anyway, thank you once again. I appreciate your insight as always.
I always get such an alive feeling watching your videos, thank you for all the time and hard work you put in. I’m part of the notification squad now ❤️
So much of Jacob's work that starts out ominous ends up beautiful, & the videos that start beautiful end up ominous.
Juxtapositional genius, that Jacob Geller.
I remember some news about a small town in the American South that did not have requirements for medical examiner and so the sheriff was doing them and possibly covering for the murders performed by cops.
I don't know what else to say but thank you. Thank you so much. I don't have the words right now. I love words but my heart is taken. Thank you so much.
your videos re so incredible. I often return to horror games music and timeloop nihilism video. The music segment when you talk about the book with the music in the background is incredible. Or the simpsons video.
The way you slowly zoom in the camera, together with tone of your voice and slow music. perfection
I’m so happy that I immediately knew where you were going when you said “my number one writing about an autopsy” because it’s such a good game moment
You sounded pained when talking about card. Me too man, me too
I was fascinated by the way autopsies (and their practitioners) were presented in Pathologic 2. It does a good job of presenting a cultural and social standard that's is different from ours and translating that into game mechanics
The Haunting of Hill House by Mike Flanagan portrayed a funeral home in a very loving way, haunting, heartbreaking, but so full of love, caring so much for this corpse that was once a person, gently fixing their makeup after all of the grizzly stuff is done, it makes me cry every time.
Is it just me, or are Jacob Geller videos filled with insightful, introspective, emotionally evocative soliloquies that examine profound topics, with just enough amusing quips to bulwark against spiraling into being mere morose dissertations? I find almost every single one delightful. Thank you.
jacob, something i really enjoy about your videos is that you just *talk*. you bring up whatever example is on your mind when you talk about a topic. the videos are educational, but they teach me more about how jacob geller thinks about things rather than a specific topic, and i like that a lot. thank you for the great video today.
I was genuinely surprised to hear Stiff mentioned! I read the book a couple years back and I was shocked at how thorough, genuine, and riveting a book about dead bodies could be. I'm glad you gave it an extra shoutout at the end there. Love you vids man! Keep up the amazing work.
Speaker for the Dead is my favorite sci-fi book and I’m so glad you talked about it. Great video!
Edit: I have reached the end and am now crying.