I Was The Victim Of A Series Of Accidents, As Are We All

Or, 'Soho, Needless To Say'.  Different Richard though.

This is about another royal Richard:

I visit the site where King Richard III's remains have been found.  Of course, i can't get in.

Richard III was the last English monarch to die in battle, at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.  His true story is particularly difficult to work out due to apparent Tudor propaganda.  I visit the site (but of course not to enter it itself) and show a couple of other Richard III-related landmarks in the immediate area around it.  He will apparently be buried at Leicester Cathedral next year.  Although he seems not to have had a withered hand or a club foot as suggested by Shakespeare, he clearly did suffer from scoliosis - he had a hunchback.  I also briefly mention the Great Man Theory of history and DNA testing, which was done on his closest living relative Michael Ibsen, including the difference between mitochondrial and Y chromosomal DNA.  Interestingly, DNA testing was developed here, at Leicester University.  I think, like all of us, he is nothing more than a tool of impersonal historical forces manifesting themselves through an individual and he cannot escape from his time, so whereas he does appear to have killed the princes in the tower, and i'm interested to know the Richard III society view on this possibility - children's skeletons were found in the Tower in 1647 - and could be seen as a murderer, he was a man of his time and that's just what a medieval monarch could be expected to do.

 Yes, this is tentpole, and as usual it's lagging behind.  Nonetheless, i've done it.

Another thing that's lagging behind, or in fact may have died completely, is YT's views count, which jumped by a couple of zagier yesterday before falling off a chair and having a fight with a pig.  Here's another tedious screenshot:

 (Thank God no-one reads this).  These two figures have stood absolutely still since yesterday afternoon, having jumped by about four thousand views - there's my concession to you decimal people.  Just out of interest, this is what it looks like in sane world where they use the right number base:

Just to point out that whereas i have little choice but to type the letters A and B for ten and eleven, that's not what i do in real life, hence the "upside down" andras, and i'd also like to point out that you already use an upside down zenis, also known as scelentis.  I suppose, beyond this, i should point out that there are actual names for the symbols used as digits and they're not just called "one", "two" &c.

Anyway, i've just gone off on a massive tangent, so no change there.

What i think has happened is that linking my channel to CaptionTube has made YouTube go weird for me for some reason.  The situation is this.  I would like to provide closed captions for my videos, so i've signed up for a site called CaptionTube, which enables one to produce subtitles files semi-automatically by going through the video and typing what's said on them line by line.  This is of course rather time-consuming although for some videos there is almost a transcription underneath them, so it could be worse.  I want to do this for two reasons.  One is to increase accessibility.  It's clearly good to have access to videos if you're deaf, and for me it would be fairly straightforward to subtitle quite a lot of them.  It also increases search rankings because unless you just put completely misleading captions throughout, which would be a lot of rather weird effort just to annoy a lot of people, which YT would in any case pick up with engagement stats, it gives their computators some idea of what the heck your videos are about. In my case, even the human brain can't work that one out.

Anyway, this is what i think is happening.  CaptionTube accessed my account, which i gave it permission to do, and for some reason this has boosted my views artificially and as a result YouTube has frozen my views count.

In any case, YouTube view counts are rather odd.  There are at least three ways of looking at view count for one's own channel.  One is the "headline" figure i've just screencapped above.  A second method is to look at the individual videos, which can be higher than the headline.  There is also a third method.  When you look at the analytics for each video from the video manager, the figures are very often different.  They are usually either higher or "n/a", which i interpret as meaning nil but come to think of it i may be wrong.  I could presumably go on calculating figures through summing the individual view counts, but is it worth it?  I suppose that depends on how long the view count is frozen.

Does it matter?  Well, according to Theintrostealer, i am "way too obsessed with views", which is kind of true but one reason for that is that they bring critique.  It's also important if viewers look at views for a channel and subscribe on that basis.  In other ways, this view freeze is probably good for me.  I am way too obsessed with view counts, as this blog shows.  It's hard, though, to feel the freedom to create and follow my muse when there's a huge clanking monster of grinding poverty on my tail all the time, when i'm wondering how the heck i'm going to feed my family every day and when the Inland Revenue are - and i'm not going to mince words here - demanding money with menaces just because they can and are deaf to my attempts to communicate with them.

Yesterday, someone suggested i monetise my videos!  Somehow they were unaware of the little ad that pops up at the start of each video apart from the few which are not monetised for various reasons.  This is interesting for a couple of reasons.  One is that it kind of demonstrates why monetisation is not very successful.  If she didn't herself even notice the ads were there when she was focussed on the idea of monetisation, what are the chances of click-through?  Another is that her method of monetisation is to allow video ads, which presumably pay more.  That's a good way of doing it if your viewer is prepared to wait five seconds for a video, or even all the way through an ad.  However, i feel very confident that the value assigned a video would have to be incredibly high before the viewer would even tolerate a video ad at the start, and actually being prepared to sit through it is up there with Crabstickz and Tobuscus, not the likes of my inept pixelated daubs.

Even so, it is possible to derive money from making videos, in more efficient ways than that.  Come to think of it, i should probably upload a video about that rather than talk about it here!

Stop Ger (geddit?):  they've started rising again and are now at 68 344.  Also, i've lost another subscriber.  I wish i knew what i was doing wrong.  I've uploaded massive long videos in the last few days, is possibly one thing.  However, maybe i'll also gain subscribers.  I don't know - hard to see what's happening.

I hereby revise my hypothesis.  I now think an algorithm on YouTube has been changed and that the two zagier phantom views were there all along, maybe even for six years.  Looking at them as distributed over that period, that means only two views a day and that's nothing.