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?
First of all, some sympathy for Charlie McDonnell:
I just love the way he exposes his vulnerability and honesty in this way and i really feel huge sympathy for him. He must be under an enormous amount of pressure and it's impossible to imagine how things are if you're afraid of disappointing more than one and a half million people. This really makes me feel he's just a normal bloke, and it reminds me of my MA. Poor guy. Even so, he's got the video absolutely right: monochrome, black background, cuts between him being on the right and the left and even L-cuts. He's worrying about nothing.
Anyway, i now think i was right about him having a quarter-life crisis. Not that i'm smug about that, and also, it's really annoying when people try to cram your pain and suffering into some nice, neat theory, although i suppose it might help to have some kind of explanation, or just some recognition that other people have been through the same thing and come out the other side. It's also like writer's block, which in a way i wish i suffered from because for all i know i just spout complete garbage, but very fluent complete garbage. I think if anything i feel fatherly towards him, which is weird because i'm such an underachiever. It must also be really annoying and creepy to have total strangers like me holding forth about him, so i'll shut up now.
Right, so no video of my own today because i accidentally made two scheduled videos public yesterday along with Liz's poetry, which is here:
Mr McDonnell may be scared of us but i'm scared of poetry, so i'll leave it there. I have faith it's good but - well, see the other post.
Superficiality is supposed to be the topic of this entry, so i'd better get on with it. One of the things which postmodernism sought to subvert was the notion of depth, in the sense of "deep and meaningful". Depth, so far as i can tell, has been seen as desirable all over the world, except maybe by the Piraha tribe in the Amazon whom i think are probably a hoax of some kind, perhaps self-perpetrated. For instance, natural phenomena are often seen as needing an explanation, often articulated through myths, way back into the prehistoric past. The idea that this is a mistake is fairly new, at least in academic circles. It's also quite annoying and i'm not sure where it's supposed to go. However, it relates to the issue of hypnosis as mentioned yesterday. My concern that something frightening might happen as a result of relieving a mere symptom through hypnosis is based on a depth-oriented view of psychology. A shallower understanding would include the notion that the only concern is, for example, a phobia or addiction which needs to be addressed, and once it's addressed that's that.
Jimmy Savile once said, while on 'In The Psychiatrist's Chair', that what you saw of him was what you got. In fact, that has turned out not to be so and the statement probably revealed two things: that he probably wanted certain activities to stay hidden, possibly even from himself, and that he may even have believed that himself. Here's a clip of that programme:
So he clearly had something to hide, hence the idea that what we saw was what we got. Returning to post-modernism, isn't it interesting that a philosophical movement popular from the 1980s which effectively killed philosophy should prize superficiality? Maybe we all have something we'd rather not think about.
First of all, credit to charlieissocoollike for the idea of the magic Mars bar (other chocolate bars are available too):
The basic idea is that filesharing is less immoral than stealing Mars bars because the latter involve a lot of work to produce each time, but files such as music or videos, or ebooks for that matter, will still be available after they are "stolen". Douglas Adams might say they're freemantled. As it happens, Adams himself had one of his ideas freemantled - Cannock Chase - and was not amused, so maybe he wouldn't, but then again H2G2's plot is reminiscent of "Kilgore Trout"'s 'Venus On the Half-Shell', so i'm not sure he's in a position to complain.
Another thing Douglas Adams did, of course, was write three excellent Doctor Who adventures and edit Doctor Who scripts for several years. Then Jon Nathan-Turner showed up and, according to some, decided to ruin the whole thing, resulting in it being taken off air. A few years after it came back, Donna Noble appeared as the Doctor's companion. In an episode referred to as 'Silence In The Library'...
SPOILER ALERT!
...she suffered what Adams would call a "total existence failure" and woke up in a virtual world as herself. The Doctor later found a way to restore her to existence, but of course by that point she had in a sense been replaced by an identical copy, a fact about which he seemed rather relaxed. Some might say she had died and been replaced by an identical copy with all her memories intact, but now of course in a sense false.
SPOILERS OVER!
Back to the magic Mars bars, and of course the question of selling your soul (forgot to mention that). Souls are apparently like magic Mars bars, because when you sell it on Ebay its still there to sell and unless you have either a contract or maybe uniquely numbered bits of soul like Voldemort or someone might do. Therefore, clearly souls are intellectual property and when you sell them to the Devil, you sign a contract. You might do something similar when you join a religion.
Now my suggestion is that the Doctor was so relaxed about Donna's recreation from a completely different set of materials with no overlap because he does something similar when he regenerates. I see a regeneration as like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly: the Doctor's matter rearranges, so far into a similar form in the sense of being a white male humanoid, but with potential new characteristics such as ginger hair or no legs. Clearly the tenth Doctor didn't "want to go", so it's not a case of simply changing your face. Major physical characteristics can change too - Romanadvoratrelundar, for example, was at one point a blue dwarf for a few seconds (a life form, by the way, not a star).
So there are a number of issues here. Firstly, this version of a soul is a culturally constructed thing and seems to have nothing to do with consciousness, an afterlife or reincarnation. Secondly, it constitutes one's identity in the same way as the Doctor is the "same" person throughout all his regenerations, and even apparently Donna through her experiences, of which there are many.
This is the sense in which i mean soul, and it's even possible that i use the word in this sense when i think about the afterlife and the resurrection.
I realise that there's a poor fit between the two parts of this video. I have had a tendency for things not to link up well when i've done them, and that's happened here too, so in future, as well as getting better at making videos from a technical perspective, i will also endeavour to do some joined up planning.
