Staring into the Sun, and Other Ways of Capturing Transcendence

If you've finished this video and need 30 more minutes of your life taken up by my ramblings, I highly recommend watching its companion video on Nebula. More sun talk, more impressionist thoughts, and at the end, there's a baked good! nebula.tv/videos/jacob-geller-making-impressionist…

"i dont want to give you a whole history of impressionism" jacob you have no idea how into that i would be. i want to hear you incredulously exclaim "this shit it wild" every few minutes of a two hour long lecture

I appreciate how much beauty and wonder Jacob sees in the world

The "ascension" bit is also very thematic in Hades. If you've finished the game you get similarly rewarded!

Just wanted to stop and say thank you, Jacob, for the flawless captions on your videos! I'm partially deaf and really enjoy the video essay format, but a lot of creators don't use captions (and if they do, it's auto-generated which is often inaccurate and choppy / unnatural), so I REALLY appreciate the accessibility you bring to all of your videos :) I love your content, so thank you again!

Jacob is in his cooking era and it’s leading to a lot of “let him cook” moments

There’s no feeling like clicking on a new Jacob Geller video knowing full well it’s all I’m going to think about for the next week

Turner's painting Mortlake Terrance ( 8:26 ) has a cutout of a dog that was pasted on it by another artist I order to sabotage him. On Varnishing Day, he simply incorporated the dog into the painting.

I remember when I was a teenager, my school went caving in the Yorkshire dales. For those that don’t know, the dales are and expanse of vast, sweeping hills and rock strewn valleys. That day, I had spent hours underneath them, crawling in the wet and the dark, illuminated only by a pale blue torch. I remember we came upon a small pond in a cavern, the first area we’d been in all day where we weren’t constricted in some way. We crawled up a narrow, rising passage way on the other side and I saw something that at first I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. It was a flower, burning red, growing under a crack of sunshine. In that moment, after hours of the dark, It was impossibly beautiful. It was only surpassed by what I saw after I scrambled up the rocks and pulled myself out of an inconspicuous hole in the middle of a field; the sky, the world, suddenly so much vaster and brighter than it ever was before, so bright it was like it was singing to me. My classmates just walked on like it was nothing. I wanted to grab them and cry out “Don’t you see it?!”. I wanted to collapse to the ground and weep. I didn’t though, I was 13 and I didn’t want to look weird. The feeling never left me though.

Uh oh, Jacob uploaded again. Time to cry about the beauty, wonder, and deeper meaning to be found in a game I've never played

As someone who lives in the desert hellscape of Arizona, my relationship with the sun is very love-hate. Like, it's gorgeous sometimes, and it's a pretty big reason why life on this planet even exists; but also, it's a deadly laser and I can't go outside for more than 20 minutes at a time without risking getting a heatstroke.

I'm reminded of reading how someone described the way Ghibli characters cry representing the way it feels to cry, not necessarily how it looks. Zelda, the Last Guardian, and impressionistic paintings play with light in ways that may not be literally visually accurate/realistic, but they are often emotionally accurate. The sunsets in Zelda are what sunsets feel like, they're what you imagine or remember a sunset looking like when you close your eyes. And tapping into that emotional accuracy can often times before more impactful or ressonant (at least personally) than technical accuracy.

Holy crap, Joseph Mallard William Turner, I did a paper on him for art class. He has the most beautiful landscapes, glad to see him get unconventional attention

This video reminds of that one scene in Journey, you know which one I'm talking about. The sun absolutely engulfs you as well as every stone and sand in your vicinity, turning every inch of the world into different hues of gold. It lasts only a few seconds, but it feels longer because you're holding your breath till the very end. It is still one of the most beautiful scenes I've ever seen in a video game (I have yet to play the Last Guardian sadly). Edit: yes, the sand surfing level

It's incredible how even a virtual sun can evoke a multitude of incredibly powerful emotions. Happiness, longing, rest, finality, empowerment and a great many other things

I remember one time playing totk, I hoverbiked up to the highest sky island in the game (directly above Lookout Landing) and stood there from sunset to sunrise thinking ‘God this is stunning’. I only wish I could’ve been there in real life, with someone by my side.

The moment you start talking about paintings is the moment we’re in for another solid Geller video.

I’ve stared the sun as a child a lot. My eyesight isn’t very good now but it was very fun!

It's honestly insane the way Jacob's videos have not only changed how I approach looking at video games and art in general within my own content, but how I approach the real world we live in. These videos are genuinely so important to me.

This video really reminds me, that Art is the conduit through which humans can see each other.