Thursday 17 January 2013

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

First of all, there's this:

Doobleydoo:

Horsemeat has been found in beefburgers in British and Irish supermarkets.  Although the issue is primarily to do with tracking food sources and the food chain, the peculiar horror this creates is more to do with food taboo among the German people stemming from horse worship, as evinced by the Uffington hill carving and horse burials than it is with that.

For some reason, we won't eat horsemeat but we will eat other meat.  Well, i won't of course because i'm vegetarian.  This is more like kosher and halal than anything else.  It also reflects the fact that horses are more useful to us alive than dead and that we establish a relationship with them by riding on their backs.

This is my third attempt to upload this video.  It's also to demonstrate that i now have a webcam which hasn't broken yet and will be Skyping for Big Science and herbal stuff, and probably a load of other reasons, so you won't just end up seeing me on YouTube but we can talk face to face.  But it's no substitute for hands on of course.


This is, i hope, the first in a series i'm going to call "Webcam Wednesdays".  Wednesdays are rather hectic and i get little time to make a video, so i've decided to make webcam videos on that day every week instead.  This also serves to advertise the fact that for the time being, we have a webcam.  This is something like the fourth webcam which has entered this house because they very rapidly get trashed, usually by falling off the monitor.  A previous webcam can be seen in this video, incidentally:

The horsemeat vid only processed correctly on the third attempt, so it ended up not saving as much time as i'd hoped.  There seemed to be some problem with Chrome, and in fact Chrome seems to be a bit of a mess in that respect.

Speaking of messes, today's is this:

There are various problems with this video, which i shall now explain.  The biggest one is the audio.  Once i'd recorded it, i realise i was umming, er-ing and clearing my throat all the way through it.  Since i can't seem to find a way of keeping audio and video synched in Windows Live Movie Maker, i went through it turning the volume down on all of them.  The result is an annoying audio track with blanks in it.  Also, the above thumbnail is inserted at a random point in the video.  It's really not very good and i wish i hadn't made a hash of it.

Yesterday's video is doing fairly well so far, which is both a joy and to be expected in a way, although we should of course expect the unexpected, which often happens with this.  The trouble with doing topical videos is that they do well at first, then drop off the radar as the news changes.  There's presumably a way round that.

I've also put extra thumbnails linking to the previous and following video on the outro for the last couple of days.

Rather annoyingly, YT counted the views from mobile devices wrongly on Monday, overestimating them considerably.  Until they told me that, i was under the impression i'd had five hundred views on that day.

On a different topic, i've rethought the contention that i put no effort into the Other Channel.  Although i only upload to it infrequently, the actual amount of work i put into some of the videos is considerable.  For instance, the hypnosis video, of which incidentally there are meant to be three sets, did involve writing a fairly elaborate script, pacing it carefully, compiling slides, tracing images and so forth, and the current animation project is taking weeks, for a seven-minute video.  Therefore, i suppose in a way i do put in the effort there.  The difference is that on that channel i'm, frankly, driven by primal urges and therefore don't notice the effort, just as one is often unaware of the work one puts into parenting.  I'm able to continue on this channel while pursuing activity on the other.  Therefore, it seems feasible that given the right ideas, i could still produce pretty good videos on the main channel, taking even several weeks over them.

I'm sorry man, no tags today.

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