I have finally released the video that scared me into the wild. Here it is:
I don't think "parasitic" videos are a good idea, and not for the first time, i'm sort of leeching off Mr McDonnell's fame here. However, on this occasion i was so inspired by something he said, which was that vlogging is a way two people can connect with each other on a very direct and intimate level. This reminded me of the I-Thou relationship and Levinas's ethics of the face, so the above is a rather inept go at intimate vlogging. Clearly it takes genius to do it as well as he does, which is weird because it sets him up on a pedestal because of not being set up on a pedestal, and that reminds me of Jesus. Of course, as a Christian everyone should remind me of Jesus.
I've been rather uncertain and embarrassed about this video. As you may have noticed, it's changed its name several times in the last few days. It was initially called "Oi, Thou", then went through a phase of being called "On The Great Internet Content Creator Existential Crisis Of 2012", which is McDonnell's own title (yep, surname terms there - i would of course still call him "Sie" if i met him and talked to him in person in German, but it's weird because i also feel fatherly towards him - he rarely mentions his father for some reason, compared to his mother), and i've now finally decided to call it "Charlie McDonnell is Jesus", because in a sense, like everyone else, he is in fact Jesus, or rather, we should treat everyone as Jesus, which means relating to them in a face-to-face manner like he does. I hope that wouldn't totally freak him out because he's an atheist, but then we don't actually know that Jesus was not in fact just an extremely tactful atheist, though of course I believe he wasn't - I believe he believed in himself! Which is the point.
The ongoing conundrum of the Other Channel continues. Here's yesterday's video from this channel:
Thus far, this has had eleven views and it's been online for a day and a half. Meanwhile, back on the Other Channel, i posted another video, whereof a piece is hereby uploaded:
It's less than twenty hours old and has had seventy-two views. WTF?
This will probably eventually lead to me doing animations, and on that subject, please take a look at and consider subscribing to Laurasdiversion's new channel. I particularly like this video:
It's made me think that if i maybe stick to eight frames a second and use cels extensively, i could do something similar.
I'm not particularly happy with this video, but i really want to keep up the pace. It is of course currently tomorrow's, not today's, and it's difficult to get Martin Buber's and even more so Emmanuel Levinas's ideas across in this form. Having said that, what's been said on YouTube recently, and in particular the fact that it's a dialogue, illustrates particularly effectively what an I-Thou relationship is. In particular, i was thinking of this:
Levinas is quite difficult to follow and i sometimes wonder if he's worth the effort. However, i think i agree with him about the ethics of the face - the presence of another demands duty to that other, and moreover, the nature of that is prior to ontology. I should probably explain further, but not yet.
Today's video is about my rather annoying other channel and its irritating success:
This was made and uploaded last night and i released it into the wild this morning. This is the one you're supposed to watch today!
So: Several years ago, there was a Wikipedia article on a particular proclivity which i have. My contribution to the article was mainly in the form of the risks and precautions which could be taken. I reasoned that if someone Googled the appropriate words, the chances are that they would encounter the text of the article at the top of the results and would (a) feel less isolated, and (b) either be put off or learn how to do it safely. To provide an analogy, it has sometimes been thought that i practice erotic asphyxiation. It's not that, but if it were, there will be people who try it without keeping themselves as safe as possible and others who would be put off if they knew the likelihood of whatever the risks were. That was why i contributed to the article.
After a bit of argy-bargy on the discussion page, the article got deleted because it was not believed to be about a factual practice and in particular, the absence of peer-reviewed articles on it was considered problematic. This considerably reduced my faith in the credibility of Wikipedia incidentally, because it made me wonder what else had disappeared as a result of these criteria. What it amounts to is that my paraphilia is a Fortean phenomenon, something i pursue in the ebook.
Since i wanted to continue to pursue the agenda of safety and letting people know they weren't alone, i started a second YouTube channel. Unlike most channels on this subject, i openly showed my face and talked directly to camera, although i didn't reveal my name. Due to the remarkable nature of the activities i perform on that channel and my rather blatant attitude towards them, the channel quickly got taken up and blogged about, posted to various websites and the whole thing snowballed. However, i was only active on it for a few months. I went off and ignored the channel for a bit, oblivious of what was going on. I made no effort at all to publicise it, get subs or tie the videos into other people's - it just sat there unattended.
When i went back to it, it had had over 300 000 views and is now heading for half a million, and it has 118 subscribers. I now make the occasional contribution to it, but they're not videos i make much of an effort to make and i don't pay much attention to them. Nonetheless, looking at the analytics show that in particular over 2011 and up to 31st January this year, i was getting a relatively huge number of views. Once it got over a year old, it tailed off a bit, which clearly has some significance but i can't tell what. Presumably if i'd gone on making videos regularly on that channel, it would've climbed to over a million views by now. However, it's not monetisable and it's served its purpose, although i am going to upload a few more in the next couple of weeks.
However, all this is very frustrating! The channel i actually want to succeed, on which this blog is based, has a lot of work put into it but bumps along the bottom of popularity. I am doing it for its own sake but i also believe in what i'm doing and want more people to benefit from it.
What i need to do is work out what it was about that channel which made it popular and transfer those qualities to this channel without replicating it. It can't be on the same subject, but it can be as uniquely me, as attention-grabbing, as unusual and so forth, as the other. There is also now a bit of a cross-over.
Another thing which makes me slightly uneasy about the channel is whether people i know actually know what it is and are just not mentioning it. I have, as i've said, deliberately "left the door ajar" so that if people really want to find it, they can. What i don't know is if they have, or even if my version of dropping hints actually hits home.
It'd be nice if there was a way of tying these two things together at the end here, wouldn't it?
