Hyperborea

I will actually talk about Hyperborea itself in a bit.  Before that though, here are yestern's and today's videos.  Actually, no.  Before that, this:

got picked up by a Terry Pratchett discussion forum, presumably via a friend, so that's good.

Anyway, sorry about that.  I've been approaching a hundred, also known as 84, subs, so i made a commitment in this video, which is yesterday's:

to do a shout out to anyone who wanted it in the next three subs.  One person turned me down, one had no videos, then there was Tim Downs, whose channel is here.  He also made this a response to my Patrick Moore video:

Therefore, he definitely should get a call-out, so that's what i'm doing, and that's what the upcoming video (which has yet to render) will be about.

What made things a bit more complicated was that just as i hit the century, for whatever reason (and i probably should try to work out what it was if i can but refrain from speculation before i gather evidence), i also lost a subscriber.  I don't yet know who.  This has, however, somehow given me an idea (can't see the connection but it's there somewhere):  do a showcase every twelve subscribers, though not the whole video.  This means the next one will be once i get nine dozen subs.  There are a couple of problems:  not everyone has any videos at all and even if they have they might not want a shoutout, and also, what happened today could happen again - subs drop below the target number and i either have to do it again with another subscriber or drop it.  Even so, that is the general plan.

The video is now ready:

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/ETj8Q .

This is, as undertaken, a callout to the subscriber who got me to a hundred subs, the musician Tim Downs.  Check out his channel, which is here:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Tinytim3013 .  Thanks for subbing Tim.

However, this process was complicated by the fact that i lost a subscriber just after i hit 100.  For some reason i don't understand, this gave me the idea that instead of waiting for a single, large landmark, i should callout and showcase a channel which has videos on it, with the YouTuber's permission, every dozen subs.  This could turn this channel into a purely showcasing channel, which is too introspective, but i will insert something every twelve if i get enough subscribers who produce their own videos.  The next one will therefore be triggered when i get to nine dozen, also known as 108.

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

So then, Hyperborea, about which i have almost certainly blogged here before.  Hyperborea is the lost continent beyond the North Wind, one of several corresponding to the points of the compass.  It's also seen as the mythical homeland of the German people, i.e. us, though not necessarily by the kind of people you'd invite to a dinner party.  The weird thing about Hyperborea from a contemporary Western perspective is that it's supposed to be warm and sunny, and without night.  This is very difficult to achieve.  I was confronted with this problem when i wrote 'Here Be Dragons', because griffins are from Hyperborea.  My solution was to decide that "north", or rather "boreas", meant something different in sense to the Greeks than it means to us, such as "the direction of Scythia", partly because many of them saw the world as flat, at least during the Bronze Age.  This is what originally gave me the idea of placing the axis of Ancient World through the East and West Indies, which would make both Terra Australis and Hyperborea close to the Equator (though not actually on it - they're tropical but not equatorial.).  Here's a map of Hyperborea:

...and here's a map of Pluto, for obvious reasons:

On the other channel, i have decided to do a web series, probably for the first time ever on that subject.  It will have about five or six episodes.  I have decided that my loyal viewership deserves new material.  Obviously you will never see it.

Grinding to a halt - or not

NaNoWriMo, in which i have not participate this year, is about to end.  I decided to bookend it with two videos.  The first is here:

The second will appear tomorrow morning, and that's what this entry's really about.

I was thinking about the nature of this blog this morning, after this entry on publicising blogs.  It has changed from a place to stick rants to a place to stick ranting videos.  As she points out, you can make a blog private, but as i also point out, i have pen and paper for that.  So why is this here?  I suppose that question is more about cause than reason.

The main reason this has been here in the past is that i wanted to give people the option not to see my rants.  In order to remove that annoyance, i've done what i sometimes do on Facebook - created a place where i can rant away to my heart's content safe in the knowledge that it will never be read.  The questions arise, however, of why this is public, and why this is not a piece of paper. if it isn't.  The answer is that, like my wife, i am afflicted with hyperlexia.

As i sit here doodling on this keyboard, Liz sits behind me at the table with a hand possessed by a demon, writing poetry and the like in a notebook, which is a considerably saner approach than mine.  My own approach is to sit here in a stupor with both hands incessantly clattering the plastic, and it's simply easier to do that on a blog than on paper because paper needs to be bought, we often run out of pens, i sometimes break pens - it's a time-honoured tradition that, actually, going back to the early '70s - and i have to get up and find a wad of paper and a working bic, or make some ink for the quill.  Hence this blog.

Now you could be forgiven for asking why i can't just not write.  Sadly this is unfeasible.  I write anyway, in one way or another.  The result of stopping this blog would be me posting walls of text on other bits of the web and wallpapers of text on this house.  It won't stop.

This is called hypergraphia.  It's a recognised condition.  I see it as something like having a sebaceous cyst or an abscess, incessantly producing a secretion or exudate which i proceed to smear over all available surfaces like some kind of dirty protest, except it's not a protest so much as a compulsion.  It's got to go somewhere.

So is it a problem?  Well, yes.  One of the issues is that just as i cannot evaluate anything else, i cannot evaluate what i write.  I err on the side of caution by assuming it's all rubbish.  I certainly hope it is.  If it isn't, it confers some kind of responsibility on me to filter out the crap, and i probably have more important things to do in my life.

One thing it isn't is an illness.  It's one of the several things which is a sign that i have abnormal temporal lobes, along with my paraphilia and religiousness.  However, abnormal is not the same as pathological, and it's tempting to seek identity and absolve oneself of responsibility through medicalisation.  Therefore i eschew this route - it lets me off the hook too easily.  What i am in fact doing here is wasting my time, and since all i would do if i switched activities would be to waste my time in a different way i don't feel bad about that.  Actually i do, but - well, i still feel the compulsion.

Back to NaNoWriMo.  NaNoWriMo is, as i have said, an annual novel-writing activity which takes place in November each year where authors seek to write a book in a month.  Said book aims to have something like five or six myriad words - i can't recall the exact figure.  I did it last year or the year before, and obviously i found it easy.  Or rather, i found it fiendishly difficult, but for the opposite reasons than you might expect.  It is hugely difficult for me to write only 60 000 words in a month.  As a result, i proposed NaNoNOWriMo, which is the attempt to shorten one's output by 60 000 words.  More specifically, and i think this has morphed a bit from the original notion, you take something you've written and you make it sixty thousand words shorter.  This seems to be a much more laudable aim than lengthening it.  Douglas Adams was good at this, which is why he missed deadlines - he was polishing and honing his text, which usually made it shorter.  Also, i think it was Mark Twain who once apologised for the length of something he wrote because he hadn't had time to make it short.

As it happens, although i'm not taking part in NaNoWriMo, it is the case that i will self-publish a book on 30th November, namely 'Here Be Dragons'.  I'm not happy with it but the deadline is 30th November 2012, so i have to publish it then.  Apart from problems with the text, it hasn't got enough illustrations, which is a bit of a problem for a picture book.  Nonetheless, the deadline is when it is and unlike Douglas Adams i do not miss deadlines, so unfortunately that seems to be it.  I urge "you all", oh spambots, not to buy it.  There will be another one along in a minute which will be much better.

Oh, and here's today's video, which is a God one so probably best ignored too:

On the scrounge

This is a bit blatant.  Also, the bit at the start won't make any sense unless you watch it on YouTube.  After the other day's giveaway directing people to FB, this is a shameless attempt to get more subscribers.  As i'll say in tomorrow's video, i'm endlessly mystified by the success of the other channel compared to this one.  I'm giving away samples of 'You Could've Thought Of That' and doing a sub 4 sub as well as asking people to share.  However, i don't want empty subscriptions but people who watch the videos and like them, and are prepared to criticise constructively.  Other people won't be interested in the giveaway anyway, so their only benefit would be to get a sub, which would be good for them and for me but not if it was ephemeral and both they and i were still lost in the crowd, just a crowd of subscribed YouTubers who are never watched.

Anyway, the free ebooks are:

About a tenth of 'You Could've Thought Of That' in ebook form, and:

similarly, a free sample of 'Here Be Dragons', which i'm beginning to suspect will never see the light of day due to its dearth of illustrations.  I'm not blaming anyone for this, but i do see it as a sign that one should try to pursue projects without help because of the difficulty of interacting with people.  I can say that here with confidence of not annoying anyone because i know hardly anyone reads this.

In that vein, tomorrow's video will be about the Other Channel.  Friday's will be on the I-Thou relationship and then this current phase of navel-gazing will finally be at an end.

Approaching the eight dozen and fourth!

This morning's video expressed my quandary about Mahala Yousafzai and home ed:

It speaks for itself, so just watch it.  Incidentally, there's a mistake in this video because it contains the brand name "Bench", and although i am a HUGE fan of Bench, i know it's unwise to put free advertising in YouTube videos (and i also worry about sweatshops).  This entry is about something else.

Tomorrow will see two videos.  One of them is being uploaded now but scheduled to appear at 12:30 am tomorrow, and the other will be uploaded tomorrow evening.  This is to avoid a spammy traffic jam of vids.  Presumably some of the videos are less than twenty-four hours apart though (i mean intentionally), so putting two maybe twenty-one hours apart on the same date here in Europe will be OK.  Come to think of it, that probably means i've sometimes posted videos twice in a day from an Australasian perspective.  Oops.

So:  the problem with the next two is that if i stick to one video a day, the hundredth video will happen on Sophie Gray's thirteenth birthday, and since i want to do a video around the idea of a hundredth upload and also one about Sophie, they would turn out to be on the same day.  I can avoid this by uploading two videos to appear tomorrow.

One other thing:  i've done the free sample for 'Here Be Dragons' but think the mermaid hair bit may be missing.


It's Sunday, so i won't go on.  That's it for now (and the Sabbath is a subject for a future video).

Lungless

Today's video was supposed to be about lung volumes but since i wanted to try out the new camera, i made a video on the world i missed out on when i described 'Here Be Dragons'.  I then accidentally uploaded the unedited version, but in any case Avidemux didn't like the codec, so it was a bit of a struggle and clearly a work in progress.  As a result, this is the real me, testing the quality of the video camera:

This is completely over the top of course, because doing a 1080p version of a talking head video is utterly ridiculous for its content.  However, according to my YouTube guru, who also happens to be my son, the quality of the audio and video has to be good.

Just on the subject matter, i've noticed that there are in fact six worlds in 'Here Be Dragons':  World Zero, Ancient World, West World, Realistic World, Aphrodite's Children and Ragnarok. I'd previous said there were four, i think.  Ragnarok is the most realistic.  It's an alternate timeline of this world where a superrnova generated a blast of radiation which destroyed all life on one hemisphere of this planet in the late tenth century. A minority of palaeontologists attribute the mass extinction of the late Ordivician 444 million years ago to such an event.  As a result, a mass extinction is underway and there are only a few hundred thousand people living in Ragnarok today.  Ragnarok is linked to Ancient World via an interdimensional portal called the Rainbow Bridge.

Two interesting things have happened on YouTube.  One is that someone i don't know has actually shown interest in the forthcoming book, which is great.  The other is that someone only one degree of separation from a subscriber to the Other Channel has commented on a video.  This is a bit weird, but good.  Maybe they will come together one day after all.

The Cinnamon Challenge?

Just to give away the ending, i didn't do the cinnamon challenge, partly because i'm not a teenage boy any more, partly because it's no longer as popular and i'd look really out of date, and partly because, as i explain in the video, it's a fourfold overdose of cinnamon.  Anyway, here's today's video (whose framing is better than the thumbnail suggests!):

The point of this is basically that the cinnamon challenge acknowledges that herbs can have a profound effect on the body.  There's also a bit of a panic associated with it.  It is true that it's a risky thing to do, but that's because of the physical effect of any powder - it will irritate the throat, it can be harmful if inhaled and so forth, but the same is true of flour.  In larger doses, cinnamon may have direct adverse toxicological actions and the cinnamon challenge is something like a fourfold overdose compared to the maximum recommended dose of 1.2 grammes of the powder.  From this very fact though, it can be seen how safe herbalism often is:  you wouldn't want to take four times the maximum recommended dose of quite a few over-the-counter drugs for a start.

Cinnamon is also relevant to 'Here Be Dragons'.  In ancient and mediaeval Europe, there was an idea that spices, including cinnamon, came from a vaguely defined area called Arabia Felix, which in contradiction to current climatological beliefs was thought to be a warm, humid place with tropical rainforests.  In this environment lived, among many other species, the cinnamon tree with its cinnamon fruits and in its branches nested the Cinnamologus:

This was a bird whose nest was made from cinnamon and therefore could be fetched by throwing stuff at it.  The cinnamon tree itself was too difficult to climb due to fragile branches.

Clearly i need to insert the Cinnamologus into 'Here Be Dragons'.  As it happens, there's a happy coincidence (Coincidencia Felix?) in 'Here Be Dragons' regarding Arabia Felix.  Here's a map of Eurasia in the 'Here Be Dragons' "Ancient World":

In order to accommodate the legend of Hyperborea as a warm continent in the Arctic regions, i decided to flip the planet round so that the land concerned was still "north" but largely tropical, while mainly preserving the climate of western Europe.  It so happened that doing this makes Arabia a tropical rainforest.  Therefore, a serendipitous coincidence enables Arabia Felix to exist as well as Hyperborea in Ancient World.

A few technical comments on the video.  The framing is somewhat off because i needed to include the plate of cinnamon in the picture.  I am still umming too much but am working on this.  Finally, although i am now using a tripod, i have yet to take the plunge and do much proper video editing.  I now have a version of Linux called AVLinux, which is specialised for multimedia applications, and am trying to pluck up the courage to use it properly.  This will somewhat improve the quality of my videos but i don't want to do the excessive thing which i know i'd be tempted to do and add loads of flashy effects which do too much.  Sadly, AVLinux seems to have been discontinued and this version, which was released last month, will probably be the last.