Whaddaya know. Four videos, mine last. Hooda thunk it.

Let’s start off with Craig Ferguson being surprisingly deep.

That is very deep coming from Mimi’s boss.

And I think he is substantially correct. He goes too far and his analysis is not exactly precise, but then again, he’s a talk show host, not a Harvard Dean.

But he is right about a youth-worshipping culture. I would add that the youth demographic is so attractive because not only do you get a chance to instill life-long loyalty in someone (like today’s goldfish-brained corporations care about that), but young people have way more disposable income to waste on stupid shit than any other group.

Big corps used to be after the kid’s candy money, and that’s still going strong, but the real cash cow is young people who have jobs but are still living with their parents rent-free.

All their income is disposable. For them, money is for having fun period. Sure, in the long term, that is tragic, but it makes for very high profit margins for the people willing to exploit them.

I really like Craig’s point about how it’s impossible to worship youth without worshiping stupidity. I mean, what is the point of mutilating body and soul in order to seem young if you spoil it all by displaying wisdom, forethought, and tact?

It’s all so futile. We need to find a way to teach everyone the good and bad things about every age, and give kids some sense of what is in store for them and why their life is not over when they turn 30.

Next up, a little social experiment from South Africa.

Don’t worry, it has nothing to do with race.

And I am sure our experimenters meant well, but I think their results are highly misleading. It does not prove what it purports to prove.

Because here’s the thing. The sound of live drumming is very distinct and unusual. It is going to immediately grab people’s attention and disrupt their lives, and because it is so unusual and so disruptive and so obviously rude that people will have no compunction about going and complaining about it. It’s a simple situation that has a very simple, low-commitment solution, and the complainers are very clearly in the right, so it’s an ideal situation for noise complaints.

Now you might say “Right, and the second half proves that the Kitty Genovese effect of people not wanting to get involved is still in effect, right?”

Wrong. See, human beings have very good hearing, and one of the aural skills we all learn growing up in a media saturated society is how to tell real sounds from those coming from a speaker.

That’s why we don’t react to every sound on television as if it’s really happening. Imagine how bad it would be to lack that skill!

So I think the second night drew no response because everyone just assumed that what they were hearing was a noisy and violent television show.

On a lighter note, here’s some very highly production value fan comedy.

This is what happens when YouTube (owned by Google) puts some of its money muscle behind making high quality content for Geek Week.

Although honestly, this is the Internet. Every week is Geek Week. It’s like having Golf Week on the Golf Channel. Totally redundant.

But damn. That’s about as spot-on as you can get without actually hiring ILM and getting the original actors. Check out that Chewbacca! He’s not quite the right color, but still. Damn!

And the material is pretty good too. Nothing truly spectacular, but solid comedy material that, due to the rapid fire nature of the format, keeps the ball int the air well enough.

Next, another fairly good effort from the folks at Cracked.

For once, they took a decent premise, stuck with it, found genuinely funny observations about the genre that had not been done to death by others before them.

Why, it’s practically original.

And all without falling back on gore and screaming, or SO RANDOM LOL, or any of the other tired bag of cheap tricks endemic to the modern skit com scene.

There has never been more skit comedy in the world than right now. But Sturgeon’s Law is absolute. The more there is of any art form, the more bad examples of it you can find, and as a consequence, the easier it is to get the false impression that it is all crap.

My own extension of said corollary of said Law : the more of an art form there is, then by the natural laws of distribution via differentiation that permeates all human endeavor, the worse the bad stuff gets and the better the good stuff gets.

More samples, more outliers, and the further out they lie.

Aaaand finally, my low-energy video for today.

Explanation as to why at the end.

Another day I spent sleeping. I think the heat is wearing me out. Homeostasis takes up a very large proportion of one’s bodily resources in weather like this, and I am not exactly rolling in excess energy (that I can access, at least) on a good day.

I try not to let excess sleep get to me too badly. I try to just take it as comes and just sort of surrender that part of my life to the whims of fate whenever possible.

I am increasingly convinced that a lot of my problems, and maybe other people’s problems too, have their roots in trying to control the uncontrollable and then punishing oneself for not being able to do it.

There can be great peace and release in surrender. Giving up on unwinnable battles might not be the absolutely maximum of nobility, but it can free up so much energy and release so much pointless pain that what you lose in noble futility, you more than get back in happiness and peace.

Unwinnable battles for control don’t know whether you give up or not.

And if they knew, they wouldn’t care.

You’re just torturing yourself.