Back To The Future

This is going to be incestuous and navel-gazy because of The Silence.

Here's tomorrow's video:

Yes, it's another leggings video, but to give it some context there was stuff in the media in the past few days about "meggings" - leggings for men.  That thumbnail (and YT have reintroduced custom thumbnails - yay!) reveals the common crotch erosion problem which used to afflict twentieth-century leggings, which gives you some idea of their antiquity.  This is also a bit of a cheat because i'm wearing them as underwear and just took off my trackie bottoms for the video.

So, the periodic quixotic persuasion drive by the fashion industry to get men into leggings has yet again recurred.  This is getting really old.  IT AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN!  It didn't work with skirts in the '70s, leotards in the '90s, and it didn't work the last umpteen times with men's leggings.  It won't work this time either.  In fact, i'm starting to wonder if it's actually about promoting men's leggings at all or something else, such as attracting attention generally to fashion and getting people to go "hell no" a hell of a lot to bump up some profile or other.

As it happens, whereas it'd be nice to be relieved of the tired old sniggers and corny jokes about what i wear on my lower half, there's also an oddly positive side to the continued failure of the industry to double the size of the market for their more subjectively gendered products, which is that market forces are not queen (or king).  Try as they might, they can't increase the number of units shifted in this area and that means that there are more powerful things in the world than the market and that people are not infinitely malleable.  The only trouble is, why does it have to be this which is not flexible rather than something else?  The rigidity is the result of conservatism rather than radicalism, specifically the rather pathetic issues of not wanting to appear "girly" or wear clothes that make one's genitals visible.

The reason for the title of this post is that i've once again got ahead of myself.  I have crept into the future, which may be problematic because it misses current events, but the thing about current events is that they frequently become past events, at which point people stop watching the videos.  So today's video was made yesterday, and here it is:

This is about how we should try to transfer life lessons from areas of success to areas of failure and again i talk about the issue of the peripheral working better than the central, which is apparently my unique issue and not a widespread problem.  One key factor seems to be caring too much, which is for some reason the kiss of death.  It even works to kill something off if i start caring about something about which i was formerly apathetic, as happened with Big Science and maths.  I think this is linked to the difficulty i had in getting a girlfriend when i was younger, a problem which was solved by giving up, and the impossibility of finding a job, whose solution was to give up and become self-employed, which incidentally isn't a particularly good solution, unlike my marriage which is.

The other interesting YouTube thing which happened today can be illustrated by this graph:

The first bit is the entire history of the channel and mainly makes sense.  The lower graph is its history over the past month or so, and shows two inexplicable peaks and what i'm hoping is a recent rise to a plateau, or even the start of a rise to a plateau.  Interestingly, it shows no weekly or even periodic pattern of peaks and troughs so far as i can see.  One of the problems with YT analytics is that they don't cover the day before you look at them, so you have to try to remember what's happened and can't tell if something you're doing right now is working.  I haven't managed to track down where that rise is coming from yet, and it could just be a random fluctuation.

Just out of interest, here's a comparison with this blog - i never look at these things on here but this is my all-time view graph on Minus2909:

I have yet to look at shorter term views, but at a glance it looks quite easy to understand.  The flat line for the first couple of years is connected rather intimately with the fact that at the time this wasn't my main blog.  The other blog has been deleted by the way, in keeping with my very tempting policy described on this abandoned channel (Handsonisbetter, abandoned because of this very policy, which led to complete absence of videos apart from a couple i couldn't delete because of other people wanting them kept up)

I am currently ignoring this policy, or rather the effects of feeling ignored, and consider the fact that this blog is unread as a plus.

Anyway, there's then a climb from July onwards, i think probably due to daily postings and links from social network sites.  In December, there's a fall, but this may be due to the fact that the month is not even half over.  I hope that's not why because i'm working on making this blog less read, and that's a serious statement - i can learn from making this blog unpopular because it becomes a "horrible" warning.

Now this next bit is sort of in real time.  I have yet to look at the stats over the short term.  I'm now a little worried about that peak over the summer because it looks like a climb, which is not what i want.  It kind of confirms my peripheral activity problem i'm trying to conquer.  I've stopped tagging, but i don't know if tags make any difference to reads or page ranks, or whether they're just so people can find posts, about which i don't care because this is a "door ajar" diary which nonetheless avoids anything i'm not comfortable sharing.  This is the kind of graph i'm hoping to see in a minute when i fiddle with the analytics on here (or whatever they call it):

If i don't see this, it means my usual peripheral activity problem is repeating itself.

Right, so - sharp intake of breath!  Bear with me while i fiddle with the as yet unseen views graph for December 2012 and confront the truth:

Right, well i find that somewhat encouraging because i reckon the general trend there is downwards, which is as it should be.  I am however quite happy that the Patrick Moore entry is one of the most popular.

Now i feel very slightly like Rachel Green(e) of the indeterminate final vowel.  There's no point in explaining that, or at least i hope there's not.

By the way, if you happen to be reading this, please feel free to continue.  It's just that i would like to know what's behind peripheral success and central failure, and it's a kind of quantum thing.