DankPods / Garbage Time / The Trash Network - An Australian man and his warehouse full of MP3 players, shitboxes, exotic drums, and snake

[Crant]

Meanwhile, I'm disappointed in James. He's started shilling LTT merch in every single video description. I thought he was better than that.

Yeah, same. All I can say is that he's a dad and Wade isn't, so that's probably the biggest reason there.

 

[my penis is on fire]

Bunch of new Drum Thing videos recently, not a fan of the new format. Instead of just showing the symbol and messing around with it, now there's 10 minutes of Drum Stream added on where he plays along to random royalty-free music.

 

[Dread First]

I think DankPods as a "brand" has more or less reached its logical conclusion. All of Wade's best DankPods videos were before 2024ish. Even then, 2019-2021 was basically where he had the most enthusiasm. You can only do so many lucky nugget dips, visit thrift stores like Cash Converters, break out the standing ears for headphone comparisons, and all that stuff before it gets old.

Wade clearly has his heart set on Garbage Time. He admits that his late father was a nuggeteer, and he took it upon himself to continue that tradition. I learned so much about Ford Australia and the decline of Holden, not to mention just general "what cars actually do without all the jargon." The Drum streams I'm ambivalent on, but I have IRL friends who play music and they just love Wade gushing about Zildjians and doing random bullshit in the streams.

I'm happy he's on Linux, but his exposure to the LTT crowd is what gives me pause for thought. Different rant for a different day.

Meanwhile, I'm disappointed in James. He's started shilling LTT merch in every single video description. I thought he was better than that.

If I really had to be charitable to James, he honestly does come across as a content creator of similar skill and talent to both Dr. Stuart Ashen and Big Clive. Tons of stuff that James reviewed in the past was stuff that ashens covered like 10-15 years ago, or even as recently as 2019-2022. DankPods is a huge fan of Ashens, and I would presume that James is too considering the sheer overlap. The problem is that doing YouTube full-time isn't exactly a stable career path. I'm not even talking about how Ashens and Big Clive themselves have resorted to sponsorships in their "recent" videos (i.e. longer than the last 3 years) and how CPMs dropped off a cliff after 2012 and became especially noticeable after 2016. That stuff is amateur hour and ancient history.

Before James started working for Wade and doing YouTube stuff, James himself was (and presumably still is) a fully licensed master mechanic in South Australia. Wade mentioned numerous times that James worked at a place where he was restoring cars from the 1950s-1970s. He demonstrably had lucrative enough employment to sustain a wife, three children, and have some type of house (rent, own, whatever) while working at the old shop. YouTube isn't a stable business, but James still has the family consideration to make. James, like Stuart and Big Clive, has a ton of retro games, old tech, and random bins of spare parts. Even if James is covering stuff Stuart already covered, it's still nice to have a different take on it. Maybe someone who's willing to tear apart stuff on camera and break down why it works on top of it all. That's a viable content niche, James' videos are excellent, I'm sure the ad revenue isn't insignificant, but he still needs sponsorship money to plug up the gaps where CPMs end.

Bunch of new Drum Thing videos recently, not a fan of the new format. Instead of just showing the symbol and messing around with it, now there's 10 minutes of Drum Stream added on where he plays along to random royalty-free music.

Honestly, I'm kinda just glad that Wade remembered The Drum Thing exists at all. Borkus Time is allegedly his gaming channel but he hardly ever posts there. I miss Borklord burning Dungis in his Pokemon Blue run.

 

[Pee Cola]

Bunch of new Drum Thing videos recently, not a fan of the new format. Instead of just showing the symbol and messing around with it, now there's 10 minutes of Drum Stream added on where he plays along to random royalty-free music.

It looks relatively easy for Wade to smash out drum content because he can just sperg for a couple of minutes about a particular drum or cymbal, and then pad it out with recycled drum stream footage. It's also a teaser for viewers who haven't joined his Floatplane.

Wade clearly has his heart set on Garbage Time. He admits that his late father was a nuggeteer, and he took it upon himself to continue that tradition

In his last GT video, you could tell he was really annoyed that the Rolls had taken up so much of his and James's time over the past couple of months, leading to GT content drying up.