We no longer have a telly in the legal sense, although in other ways we have two television sets, neither of whom could now be used to pick up television broadcasts as they are, er, broadcast. To this end:
In order not to repeat the exact content of the above, i want to share my idea of how to overcome the iPlayer problem - watching BBC TV live in the UK on the internet is illegal without a licence and the iPlayer is blocked outside Britain (except presumably for bits of Ulster). To me, it seems that the solution to this is to do pay-per-view - get people outside Britain to pay for access to the iPlayer and live streaming altogether and have people within Britain register a payment method which is deducted pro rata as they watch, then give them a discount on their next TV licence. If it costs £145 a year, which i think is roughly right, charge them 2p an hour, which makes it slightly more expensive than the licence fee. If they go over, which is a LOT of telly but maybe they have it on all the time for company or something, give them a discount on BBC merchandise as well. That way, very few people end up watching TV illegally and the BBC gets an extra revenue source from outside the country. Any thoughts?
is about looking at the Sabbath as a weekly Buy Nothing Day. It was made and uploaded on a Saturday, which for me is not the Sabbath, but this entry is being written on a Sunday, so i'm breaking the Sabbath myself now by writing and posting this. But then, Christian hypocrisy is nothing new and is in fact a continuation of the Pharisaic hypocrisy against which Jesus spoke (even if he was a fictional character, incidentally). So, does this mean Christianity is a failure?
Due to the fact that like other human beings i suffer from confirmation bias, i'm gonna say no. The fact that i am sinning right now by writing and posting this article is a negative reflection on me and not on Christ or the Holy Ghost, or any of those guys/that guy in fact. At the same time, it is cause for concern. Any value Christianity might have is entirely dependent on the extent to which Christians behave better than they used to before conversion, or perhaps better than how they would be acting now were they not Christian.
This is where it gets complicated. Firstly, how someone would have behaved if they weren't Christian is a counterfactual conditional, and it's possible to project all sort of negative stuff onto that hypothetical scenario just to support your belief in your own position. Secondly, when people referred to as Christians behave badly, three issues arise: maybe they're only Christian in name, maybe they would've been even worse otherwise and maybe they're resisting God's will to change them. The central problem here, however, is that i'm trying to apply the principle to others when i should be applying it to myself. I am, even more than usual, in no position to judge here because right now, i have a huge plank in my eye and it would be nice to be able to point the finger at others' behaviour.
As a result, what i have to do now is turn it round onto myself. I know i'm Christian and of course don't know who else is, so i'm aware that i'm not just Christian in name, so that leaves how i would've behaved were i not Christian, something to which my conscious mind probably has no access because of cognitive bias, and one more issue: resisting God's will to change me. This may imply belief in the existence of free will, which is philosophically interesting.
A couple of other things: i have run out of milk and won't be buying any until tomorrow because of my Sabbatarianism, but as a result i will be consuming Liz's milk supply instead. Also, whereas i won't be buying milk, i fully intend to buy ingredients to feed my son this evening. Clearly i am obliged to him in this way, but i still could've anticipated that that would become necessary before the Sabbath actually started. Then again, that would involve increasing my consumption on another day of the week. Hmm.
On a different note, here's an interesting pair of graphs:
Apparently, interesting and small, and unfortunately also a JPEG, rather than something more sensible. Just to fill you in on the details, both cover about the same period of time on YouTube, the lower one is the channel i promote here, the upper one is the Other Channel and the upper one's Y-axis has values in the thousands and the lower one only in the hundreds. The sudden drop in views which took place just over halfway through is the first anniversary of that channel, several months after i'd abandoned it. My task is to make the bottom graph like the top, and i've decided that that task is similar to trying to get a girlfriend - you have to stop trying and just be yourself. I don't think i've ever been more myself so publicly as i was on the top channel. Having said that, i don't plan to be myself in the same way on the bottom channel as i have on the top because it would frighten the horses.
This is a bit blatant. Also, the bit at the start won't make any sense unless you watch it on YouTube. After the other day's giveaway directing people to FB, this is a shameless attempt to get more subscribers. As i'll say in tomorrow's video, i'm endlessly mystified by the success of the other channel compared to this one. I'm giving away samples of 'You Could've Thought Of That' and doing a sub 4 sub as well as asking people to share. However, i don't want empty subscriptions but people who watch the videos and like them, and are prepared to criticise constructively. Other people won't be interested in the giveaway anyway, so their only benefit would be to get a sub, which would be good for them and for me but not if it was ephemeral and both they and i were still lost in the crowd, just a crowd of subscribed YouTubers who are never watched.
Anyway, the free ebooks are:
About a tenth of 'You Could've Thought Of That' in ebook form, and:
similarly, a free sample of 'Here Be Dragons', which i'm beginning to suspect will never see the light of day due to its dearth of illustrations. I'm not blaming anyone for this, but i do see it as a sign that one should try to pursue projects without help because of the difficulty of interacting with people. I can say that here with confidence of not annoying anyone because i know hardly anyone reads this.
In that vein, tomorrow's video will be about the Other Channel. Friday's will be on the I-Thou relationship and then this current phase of navel-gazing will finally be at an end.
Having done the other video on upside-downness, it occurred to me that there might be more to being upside down than that, namely actually being upside down and what it does to you. Therefore i decided to make another video while being upside down. Here it is:
This is poorly framed, among other things. Chief among these is that it's almost as hard to concentrate on making a video properly while upside down as it is when - moving swiftly on! However, i basically wanted to make three points, which are in the video so please watch it.
The after effects of this video included, as suggested in the video itself, diuresis, and also a headache, frontal on the left. However, some of that might be eyestrain due to the lack of glasses.
Liz has now made her first YouTube video of the current batch and we will shortly be uploading it, on the same channel.
Remarkably, i'm not currently suffering from burnout, partly because i don't do much. However, i can easily remember a time when i did, and notably i did it a lot in my early twenties. There is a good video waiting to be made about this, but this one is not it:
The story behind this is that i've noticed Charlie McDonnell getting a lot of stick about not uploading more videos, but when i look at the accounts of the people making those complaints they have not themselves uploaded any videos on those accounts. Daniel says they're trolling, but i'm not so sure because they sound quite sincere. My personal take on this is that the people concerned may be going through a quarter-life crisis. Insofar as life crises even exist, the quarter-life one is about feeling daunted by being stuck doing the same thing for the next four decades or so and nostalgia for the recent past when things seemed easier and nicer in retrospect.
We only think we know these people of course, and the reading of the situation may be completely incorrect, but burnout and the quarter-life crisis do exist.
In other news, my video on Yoga and flatulence has had a lot of views. What to make of this? Hmm. High dubium.
Today's video was supposed to be about lung volumes but since i wanted to try out the new camera, i made a video on the world i missed out on when i described 'Here Be Dragons'. I then accidentally uploaded the unedited version, but in any case Avidemux didn't like the codec, so it was a bit of a struggle and clearly a work in progress. As a result, this is the real me, testing the quality of the video camera:
This is completely over the top of course, because doing a 1080p version of a talking head video is utterly ridiculous for its content. However, according to my YouTube guru, who also happens to be my son, the quality of the audio and video has to be good.
Just on the subject matter, i've noticed that there are in fact six worlds in 'Here Be Dragons': World Zero, Ancient World, West World, Realistic World, Aphrodite's Children and Ragnarok. I'd previous said there were four, i think. Ragnarok is the most realistic. It's an alternate timeline of this world where a superrnova generated a blast of radiation which destroyed all life on one hemisphere of this planet in the late tenth century. A minority of palaeontologists attribute the mass extinction of the late Ordivician 444 million years ago to such an event. As a result, a mass extinction is underway and there are only a few hundred thousand people living in Ragnarok today. Ragnarok is linked to Ancient World via an interdimensional portal called the Rainbow Bridge.
Two interesting things have happened on YouTube. One is that someone i don't know has actually shown interest in the forthcoming book, which is great. The other is that someone only one degree of separation from a subscriber to the Other Channel has commented on a video. This is a bit weird, but good. Maybe they will come together one day after all.
...as my musical namesake once sang, but i think it was a cover.
Anyway, here's the latest vid:
A couple of things about this. The children are currently taking a rather dim view of home education. Since we sort of "did it for them", this might be thought to lead to some degree of distress on the part of Liz and myself, but no. Not for me at least. This may be because my rationalisation circuits are very advanced, or it may be because i have good reason for being fine about it.
The reason i think i'm fine about it is that there are several prominent examples of adults whose parents focussed on raising them full-time who later went on to say they wished they'd gone to school, but who are successful because they didn't. One of them had a weekly column in a national newspaper at the age of sixteen and the other wrote a play which was put on in the West End, also while she was in her teens. The second person is particularly remarkable because when she chose to go to school, quite late on in her adolescence, she was rather disappointed that the teachers weren't interested in what they talked and that the lessons came to an end abruptly with no opportunities to explore further. My take on this is, well, what did she expect? She chose to go to an institution where education is structured in that way.
So there's cognitive dissonance there as well. In spite of the facts that school was not up to scratch in her own judgement, and that she was successful in an artistic and creative sense as well as in a worldly sense, that is, by a wide range of standards, as a result of being home educated, she still wished she'd been to school. This strikes me as odd. However, i think there's a healthy and honest explanation for this, which also applies to the children. They are trying to feel good about their life choices and breaking away from their parents' lifestyle, and as such it's to be expected that they are positive about being at college. They are also academically successful, engaged in college life and motivated to learn the explicit curriculum. They were also given the choice at every point to go to school if they chose, and they never did so, unless you count the decision to go to college early. As such, it makes perfect sense and I have no problem with it.
Here's the other video:
This is about comfrey, a herb banned for internal use in the UK. I've basically said all i want to in the video, so i'll talk about making it. This is in my father's front yard. I felt somewhat self-conscious doing it due to people walking past, and i'd rather there'd been more comfrey cream in the tub when i filmed it. You might also notice that the first video is slanted.
Just on the subject of YouTube videos, two things have just happened. One is that i have a new camera, so if i can get the computer to work with it, the quality of the videos should improve from now on - Daniel's advice is that only HD videos get watched much, and since he's an avid YouTube viewer and a digital native, i trust him on that. The other is that yesterday, someone only one degree of separation from a subscriber to the Other Channel commented on one of my videos. This is slightly disconcerting, but might resolve the weird audience asymmetry problem between the two, where one is just slapdash and unpublicised but gets hundreds of thousands of views, and the other is meticulously planned and promoted and gets hardly any.
