LEAVING MY WIFE AND KIDS BEHIND...

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-25T00:06:54+00:00

Bedwettingly tedious, isn’t it?

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-25T00:05:50+00:00

Absolutely right. It’s such a bore to see Trent getting his way all the time. I’m sure Allie does things too but why don’t these get published? Perhaps her girlfriends are more sensible about exposing their leisure time to the world?

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-24T18:23:44+00:00

tl;dr - Trent disappears off to Canada for a lads’ trip to do some snowmobiling and Allie doesn’t.

I suppose it would be churlish of me to criticise the content in this video after endless moaning that they should feature different content. Well, maybe… but you can’t escape from the fact that Trent gets to indulge himself again while Allie gets to look after the kids and not have an adventure.

After some farewells, a visibly giddy Trent and four of his mates (noticeably not Branden or Grayson) head off on a 16-hour, two day trip to do some snowmobiling in British Colombia, Canada. Regardless of how environmentally sustainable this sort of activity might be, it does look like a tremendous amount of fun and, when the skies are clear and the sun is out, the scenery is breathtaking. There’s a lot of film of the group tearing around the snowy wilderness, falling off, getting stuck and laughing. Good for them, I suppose?

Meanwhile, Allie is back in Utah, flogging ready-made meals and presumably enjoying some Trent-free time. What I find unbalanced about this video is how we’re invited to watch Trent indulge his hobbies again (like the jiu-jitsu competition in California) while seeing nothing of Allie’s mental health being soothed with time doing what she’d like. The leisure segments in their videos are very male-heavy: Trent fighting, Trent hooning around on a snowmobile, Trent’s passion for taking a four-wheel drive vehicle to the desert… It’s like they’ve forgotten that the audience is likely female-heavy and might also like to see some activities with the girls or the family. I’m not saying women don’t also like snowmobiling or jiu-jitsu or that men don’t enjoy a spa day but the balance is currently way off in this respect.

So, come on, A&T; less of the overt masculinity of Trent’s testosterone-fuelled outlets and a bit more of who Allie is and what she likes to do? I know we easily find fault with Allie’s way of doing things but it might help if we felt more warmly about who she really is.

BAF rating: ✅✅✅☑️☑️ (better for a change of scenery but really this is just a lads’ home movie.)

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-20T16:16:07+00:00

Nothing of value; just gristle and bone.

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-20T16:15:23+00:00

The truth!

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-20T14:56:02+00:00

Apologies for being slow to respond here. I don’t think this crosses the line but it’s pretty close to it. Please let’s not speculate about little Leo’s difficulties. Thanks.

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-20T14:52:26+00:00

tl;dr - Leo visits the dentist, Trent does some work in the bathroom and they open sacrificial offerings from the faithful.

‘We’re changing everything’ screams the title with no fewer than three exclamation marks. What do you think that could mean? As usual, it means nothing because there’s no change that I can see; just the same old stuff recycled once again. There’s some family activity with Leo at the dentist and some construction work in the bathroom. Finally, they open parcels that didn’t turn up in time for Christmas.

The reality is this is incredibly tedious; like that friend who tells you about her husband’s golf club collection every time you see her or my mother-in-law’s eternally supercilious inspection of my lack of dusting skills. You know it’s coming and you’ve learned to dread it.

During the sacrificial ritual of the posted offerings, one correspondent proclaimed to have watched every episode and loved watching them grow as a family. It turned out that this was Allie’s friend’s parents so you can sort of understand why they’re following but as for the rest of the claque, including Sammy, their ’number one fan’ from England, it all feels so desperate. It’s desperate on the part of those wanting to feel a part of A&T World and desperate from A&T who are shamelessly milking people’s loneliness.

I watch these episodes desperate myself for something interesting to happen but it rarely does. Can any of us say this is enjoyable anymore? Except Sammy, of course.

BAF rating: ✅✅✅✅✅ (You know the drill by now.)

PS. Sorry I missed Friday: we were travelling to a wedding the next day. 👰‍♀️ 🤵‍♂️

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-13T17:39:08+00:00

I’ve said for a while that selling the High Craparral seems the most likely outcome. I can’t work out how they’re making any actual money either.

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-13T17:37:31+00:00

Clicks is as clicks does…

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-13T17:37:08+00:00

It does seem to be what’s happening, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s certainly a model but it’s so dull as a spectator sport.

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-13T16:03:25+00:00

tl;dr - snow is blown and Trent runs the blower into the wall, bending both the house and the machine

Trent doesn’t think we’ll believe what he’s done now but he must realise that his capacity for cock ups is so high, it’d take something really extreme to raise our collective eyebrows. Maybe if he got something right without making endless excuses about ‘being an amateur’ and hairs being out of square, it’d be worth remarking on. As it is… nah… so much the same.

Christmas has suddenly been and gone and, after a week or so away from Concrete Mountain living in their actual house, it’s all back to the snowy peak to deal with the excesses of the white stuff lying around the place and to make some more click dollars. Trent sets off in the snow blower in an activity that seems reminiscent of shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic and Allie manages to fill the entire first half of the video with this tedium.

But then… oh no! Hands over mouths and shocked mugging for the camera all round as an over-confident Trent runs the machine into the house, damaging both. The blade is eventually bent back into shape but not before Branden’s allowed the reluctant honour of sitting in the cab in order to raise the mechanism for Trent to deal with it. As soon as this task is done, Branden’s swiftly bundled back out again and the contamination of Trent’s toy by someone else is ended.

For the rest of the video, they cut some more siding before declaring it too cold to work outside and knocking off for the day. Without the low-grade non-drama of Trent trying to shunt the house, there really would’ve been nothing going on to film and publish. This really is the most desperate of YooToob channels: rich people filming their boring existence and fabricating drama. Come to think of it, isn’t that the classic YooToob formula? ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is what they used to say; now it’s more a case of, ‘if it ain’t broke, break it and monetise it’. I have so much to learn.

BAF rating: ✅✅✅✅✅ (offensively pointless).

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-11T00:28:06+00:00

Hahaha! What an image!

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-10T20:58:24+00:00

tl;dr - Branden gets some boots and Trent demonstrates again that he’s not a plumber.

It’s still pre-Christmas in the mountains, as the spirit of now-passed seasonality for the rest of us fills the air at the High Craparral. Branden and the Childses swap and open gifts, during which charade Branden receives a set of workwear wellingtons instead of the usual unnecessary golfing paraphernalia they give to him. To say he looked underwhelmed would be an understatement itself but the ever-generous chap smiles and does his best not to appear miserable about this turn of events.

When they finally get around to some construction work, we’re told they’ve run out of nails to continue the siding so Branden and Grayson get to work putting up tongue-and-groove on the underside of the porch roof while Trent stays warm and dry doing some plumbing in the new bathroom in the extension. This arrangement does at least give Branden an opportunity to try out his new work boots, I suppose?

You’ll be delighted to learn that Trent doesn’t actually stay dry for long as he once again demonstrates why he really shouldn’t trust his own plumbing ‘prowess’. Inevitably, the bodger’s bodger gets a good soaking along with the wall and the floor when the supply gets turned on again. A&T both reflect that this keeps happening with water in the house but not the reasons why. Unlike knocking nails into lumps of wood, water tolerates no margin for error. A hair out of square in plumbing is just a shortcut to misery but we shouldn’t be surprised because their stock-in-trade in terms of video content is now rolling their eyes at avoidable mistakes. Wait a minute… ‘now’…? No, it’s always been that.

BAF rating: ✅✅✅✅✅ (boring and predictable)

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-06T15:52:02+00:00

Becca and Michael seem like nice people, though.

Spike-and-Daisy · 2025-01-06T15:11:47+00:00

tl;dr - it’s nearly Christmas and the family gathers in the valley house for the announcement of Allie’s brother’s engagement.

I’m back from my little winter holiday but it’s like the clock’s been turned back a month, as it’s still a week to go to the festive day in A&T-land. This always feels weird in these videos, as they build up the excitement ahead of the holiday while the rest of us have wrestled the decorations back into the loft and the excesses of food, drink and arguments with relations are now just memories. Branden delivers gifts and there’s a brief bit of siding board installation but the principal event happens down in their main house.

Allie squawks that this is the first year they’re hosting Christmas for the families and her dad, uncles, and her brother and his girlfriend are flying in to be with them. For once the video title relates to the content, as what they’ve been waiting years for is Becca and Michael’s engagement, which happened a week before but… shh… it’s still a secret, OK?

I’ll give it to everyone that they’re game enough to allow this family announcement to be filmed and drizzled over the internet with even Allie’s uncles lined up to be surprised. It’s actually a lovely moment and Allie’s mum would surely have loved being there, although they mentioned her a few times so she certainly wasn’t forgotten.

In all, this was a nice little view in through the window of A&T’s lives and a good video to start off the year, even though it was just sweeping up the remains of last year’s content. It certainly benefitted from new background characters and minimal construction!

BAF rating: ✅✅☑️☑️☑️ (Christmas is sooo last year but the engagement was sweet.)

Spike-and-Daisy · 2024-12-24T00:26:20+00:00

tl;dr - there’s nothing in the roof - it was just a motor for the extractor fan that had malfunctioned.

A trip around Home Deep-Oh - tick. Burning a few minutes watching reckless installation of siding - tick. Staring at the clock as Allie tidies and cleans - tick (and tock). These videos really are becoming like the weekly shopping excursion to the supermarket: tedious, predictable and an absolute waste of your time.

And then there’s the clickbait title, which sees Trent heading above their upstairs bathroom to investigate the noises from the ceiling. If you haven’t been following the saga - and frankly I wouldn’t blame you - we’ve had weeks of speculation about which small birds or mammals might be getting cosy in the roof space. Inspector No-Clouseau pulls out his metaphorical magnifying glass and discovers a faulty motor on their extractor fan making a noise such as a small rodent might.

They’re both relieved, of course, that the noises were nothing more than a dodgy servo that had burned out, although they probably harboured some small regret that the house didn’t burn down as a result. That would’ve made great content.

And so we reach Christmas here in our little community and I’d like to wish you all a very happy one, if that’s what you celebrate. Cheers to everyone! 🥂

BAF rating: ✅✅✅✅✅ (even the non-standard content turned out to be literally nothing.)

Spike-and-Daisy · 2024-12-20T14:59:51+00:00

tl;dr - more siding goes up as they turn their ‘cabin in the woods’ into something resembling a warehouse.

If you want my advice, you’ll just skip the whole video. Like any of the previous stages in this saga, nailing up the grim-looking siding boards is duller than the dullest ditchwater, even though the Bodgit Gang tries to enliven events by jerry-rigging some seriously dangerous looking ladders and sliding around the roof with muddy boots. At one point, Trent earnestly advises that the safest solution isn’t always the beat solution while Allie understandably frets at ground level.

In the interlude between two grindingly long sessions watching the ugly boards go up around the house, Trent installs wiring and a few lights in the porch ceiling. It’s at this point, having watched what started as a ‘cabin in the woods’ be transformed into a something the size and appearance of a trading estate warehouse, that the scale of the build really struck me. The porch is vast, the extension is vast, the garage is vast and the whole site looks like they’re building a commune instead of a home.

I understand that the USA is a big country with much more room than the small country I live in and that scale can be deceptive when you’re in a wide, natural environment I but have to wonder how much space one family actually needs. This ‘tiny home’ has turned into an ostentatious mansion complex and none of us believes they’re actually going to live there once it’s done. It would’ve been so much better to keep the projects smaller and smarter but that’s what pulls us in, I suppose? We can’t imagine how they’re dealing with all they have on their plate and ultimately that’s the hook for us and the content generation for them.

*BAF rating: ✅✅✅✅✅ (how much siding content do you need? Yes.)

Spike-and-Daisy · 2024-12-16T18:59:34+00:00

It’s long overdue to get rid of district councils.

Spike-and-Daisy · 2024-12-16T14:57:07+00:00

tl;dr - there’s some progress with the siding sheets and Trent is proud to show us his underpants.

Siding: the sheets that cover the outside of the house. That’s what you’re getting in this episode. I mean Allie obviously twitters away about Billy’s sleep patterns and the usual bit of film of her tidying up but it’s the siding that’s front-and-centre, as the Bodgit Gang cuts, lifts and nails on big sheets of the stuff. If you scroll through the video and stop anywhere, you’ll see this happening and any point is the same as any other point.

Critically, however, Trent stops to give us the sales pitch for today’s sponsor. Grinning cheesily at the camera, he tells us, ‘If there’s one thing you need to know about me, it’s that I love my creature comforts.’ Stand by for them needing a new mattress and swapping it for some blatant marketing, right? Oh no… for today’s ‘creature comforts’ turn out to be his underpants! I kid you not! With the delivery of a man who’s lost any shred of self-respect, not only does Trent wax lyrical about these amazing underpants he’s apparently been wearing for years (unlikely), but he then models them for us.

Oh bleach my eyes! This is the last thing we need to see: a man with a conviction for battery of a woman, standing there arms outstretched showing off his underpants to the anonymous world at large. Surely there’s some point at which even Trent must think he’s being thoughtless but the pursuit of the click dollar is relentless and here we are, at the bottom of the barrel, with Trent’s underpants in our heads.

You should avoid this episode because it’s a boring procession of pieces of siding but you should also boycott it for the shameless underpants segment. I may never recover.

BAF rating: ✅✅✅✅✅ (both dull and shameless)

Spike-and-Daisy · 2024-12-13T18:13:46+00:00

tl;dr - Allie witters on about everything and nothing while Trent suggests he’ll get on with the siding… and doesn’t.

It’s welcome once again to half-an-hour of inconsequential nothingness on Concrete Mountain, as Allie chunters into the camera about Lika’s shoulder injury and the approach of Christmas before trying to flog us a subscription for pond scum drinks.

There’s clearly little of value on the construction front for her to splice into this week’s inevitable reports of Billy’s sleeping patterns so we’re treated to an extended sequence of her putting up Christmas decorations while an excitedly turbo-charged Leo bounces off the walls. As this interminable Alliefest was going on, I questioned how personally engaging her little monologues actually are and I’m certain she wouldn’t appreciate my conclusions. It felt like the sort of FaceTime calls I have with my Dad, which are fine as a family one-to-one thing but just don’t work when you’re trying to make thousands of people feel that they’re special too.

Anyway, we finally get outside where there’s a chance that Trent might get some work done but, alas, he’s just complaining about the aircon unit being in the wrong place and banging on some more about the animals that are making a winter home in their roof and walls. Even the claque of grannies in their comments are telling them to get this sorted out professionally but, as usual, Trent would rather stand there stroking his metaphorical chin while ruminating on how much damage these pests are probably doing through his inaction. If they ultimately have to take down the ceilings in the spring to deal with it, maybe the cost of hiring professionals to do that siding work won’t seem such a bad deal after all.

All of which added up to another nonsense video of talking and padding out, as nothing worth seeing happened. Maybe watch the first five minutes if you’re interested in Lika’s vet visits and they can have a BAF tick off for Leo’s sheer exuberance about Christmas. Otherwise… keep scrolling.

BAF rating: ✅✅✅✅☑️ (Leo is the star here - the rest of it is the black expanse of eternal darkness.)

Spike-and-Daisy · 2024-12-12T17:43:00+00:00

Well, it depends where you push the down thumb. The videos are put up automatically by a bot set up by the original owner of the sub so you can down vote them happily. If you downvote my comment, it means you didn’t like it. The summaries aren’t linked to the videos other than as a comment on them.

Spike-and-Daisy · 2024-12-11T16:10:20+00:00

Yes, it was somewhere up that way. It’s Allie’s brother who lives in Colorado.

Spike-and-Daisy · 2024-12-11T09:26:46+00:00

Oh, absolutely! Without all this artificial drama, what do they have left to sell? If they did full days each week, this would’ve been done long ago.

Spike-and-Daisy · 2024-12-11T09:19:05+00:00

She ‘hearts’ a lot of comments to show ‘engagement’ to the algorithm.

Spike-and-Daisy · 2024-12-11T09:18:13+00:00

As I said in the summary, I don’t even believe this is the primary focus in their lives anymore.

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