Hey Nineteen

Put it this way:  if there's a song which refers to the subject of today's video, which incidentally has yet to be uploaded, i don't want to know about it.  In the meantime, this:

which is yesterday's video of course, seems to have done spectangularly badly.  It has had seven views, five of which were acquired before i even published it and therefore don't really count, and has already acquired a thumbs-down, from one of the two views i got after publishing.  It's rather fraudulently a response to a Nerimon vid, so maybe it's just not worth the effort responding to his videos.  However, i am particularly disappointed by this because unlike many other videos, it's a direct attempt to engage with other YouTubers as YouTubers, and the fact that it's so poorly received is entirely mysterious to me, unless it's something to do with the mysterious "trying too hard" thing.  I have now changed its name because "Why did you choose your username?" got it nowhere, and unless it's a slow burner, i might as well make it about what it's about.  I suppose i could call it Giordano Bruno.

To be frank, i'm absolutely gutted that this didn't fare better.  Speaking of which...

Today's video was going to be about the Chinese New Year, which is on Sunday, but i've decided it's more than a one-day job so it'll now be tomorrow's.  Instead, it's about IBS:

I have had IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) since i was a child although it changed during my late teens.  It initially manifested itself as flatulence combined with constipation - i used to go about once every five days.  Then, soon after i left home, the farting continued but was accompanied by constant diarrhoea - i ended up going twenty times a day, which was inconvenient as it meant i had to stay near a toilet most of the time.  I eventually dealt with it using a combination of lifestyle changes and agrimony, one of a number of herbs which can be useful for it.

However, this video is also partly about the phenomenology of IBS.  My bowels are usually at their worst when i am in a situation i would expect to be stressful but am not consciously experiencing emotional stress.  I see the situation as symbolising pushing the emotional stuff you want to eliminate down into the bowel so it can be voided, and in fact i wonder whether that's close to literally true.

One of the answers to me was to chew my food slowly and a lot - around fifty times a mouthful.  Some of the problem is aerophagy - you swallow air when you eat and it ends up causing bloating and flatulence.  Drinking also helps to lubricate the bowel.  Cramping can be helped with relaxants.

One of the most interesting things i think IBS illustrates is that even if you are physicalist, it's narrow-minded to see the brain alone as the seat of consciousness.  I believe that the enteric nervous system, with its many millions of nerve cells, is likely to play some role in the existence of consciousness.  I intend to expand upon this in a future video.

By the way - situs inversus!

 The last comment refers to the fact that the thumbnail is backwards.  The caecum seems to be on the left hand side.  This is because the gap into which i've plonked the text looked wrong when it was on the right hand side, so i flipped the image and pasted the text onto the left.

To be honest, i'm feeling pretty despondent about the whole thing right now.  I'm not sure why though, since the views have been above a gross a day since the end of January.  I think what it is, is that i've specifically tried to elicit a response and not got one.  Various things are pissing me off about this project right now.  One is that i can't see what's distinctive about popular videos.  I've generally done the same things with all the videos for quite some time now:  eye-catching thumbnail, noteable title, published at peak viewing time, and they also tend to be topical.  However, this seems not to correlate at all with success.  I should take a longer look at all this.

The most successful video of all on the channel is of course Liz on TV drinking her wee, and it's clear why.  It's the oldest surviving video (with the exception of the one taken by Holly before the advent of the site), it was up for longest, it has the best production values, it has potentially erotic and Yoga-related content and everything is on its side.

The second most popular video is this:

 This is a low-quality video from the olden days of the channel.  It's there because a patient was using it and complained about me deleting it, so i remade it, reuploaded it and it's therefore in the old style i used to use for this channel.  Again, the Yoga connection helps, and both this and the other video pre-date YouTube's reorganisation.  However, this one was also adopted by a site in India, and i've linked various other videos to it in an attempt to get them to work better.

Both of these are partly the most watched because they pre-date the reorganisation of view counts and are old.  They may reflect the kind of view counts i would've ended up with if i'd left my older videos up, although to be honest they were rather lacklustre and hampered by poor image quality.  These two videos are probably not very helpful due to their age.

Here's the third most popular:

This has the advantage of capturing the Zeitgeist and being right in the centre of my image.  It appeals to people who get off on leggings or find it funny.  I am in fact trying to learn from this video by doing others in the same vein.  Oddly, the first leggings video didn't do anything like as well.  Of the vids in this genre, it would probably be a good idea to analyse them quite closely, so here goes.  This one:

peaked on its first day at fifty-five, unlike the one above it here, which rose to a peak of 177 after three days.

Once it's been up for as long as the other one, it can probably be expected to have been viewed about 550 times.  However, as Mickeleh said:

 

(the bit about Heraclitus).  You never have the same YouTube channel twice.  Every time you make and upload a video, it changes you and the channel.

I think my current problem is that i'm somehow not meshing with YouTube but am using the hinterland.  However, these two videos are successful for another reason:

 

 

and:

 

 

are both posted elsewhere.  They have performed pretty well - the first currently has 136 views, the second 622.  This reflects my ability to be aware of where they would appeal, of course - i'm particularly adept at targetting those.

In fact, i've just posted a link to the first on IMDB.

The other thing to do, possibly, is personal site promotion via Y!A R&S.  All of these seem cheap and dirty, but to be honest i can't see another way of doing this.

I'm not posting this to FB.  Bye!