So I had just played way too much Tyranny and my brain calories were all used up. But I knew I would have to record a video soon.
So I decided to lay down for 45 minutes then make the vid when I woke up. That would have taken me to 2:30 pm, with blogging at 4 pm.
Kind of tight, but my brain was fatigued.
And as I lay down, I tiredly thought, “Who knows? maybe while I’m laying down I will get a great idea for today’s vid.
The moment I laid down, I had the entire idea for this :
It just sprang full formed into my mind. I’d start a series of one minute thought provoking videos called A Minute To Think. Tight, dense, and full of food for, well, thought. And I would make them into YouTube shorts.
I didn’t quite make it with that one but what the hell, it’s a prototype.
Turns out that in order for your video to be a YouTube Short, it has to be a) one minute or less long and b) “vertical”, which I think means in a 9:16 aspect ratio.
So basically, it has to look like it was shot on a phone. That will take a bit of doing on a PC, but I am sure I can pull it off.
It might even be possible to record in that format and simplify the whole process. I hope so. Converting video formats can be a huge pain in the ass.
Though I dunno. Maybe AI can make that miraculously easy too. It already can separate out all the tracks in a piece of recorded music, which blows my mind.
At some point today, possibly the moment I finish blogging, I am going to start that list of Onion headlines, even if all I can put there is my dumb joke, “Area Man joins with Depth Girl to create Volume Child”.
Ha ha ha.
To come up with these headlines (and the Minute to Thinks) I am going to have to learn to process things a different way and I am looking forward to the challenge.
For the Thinks, I am going to have to learn to be succinct.
I don’t think I normally waste a lot of words but I am definitely not succinct, and so learning to get my thoughts out in under a minute will be tough.
I only got it down to 1 minute 7 seconds today, damn it. There was more I might have been able to trim but by then I was TRULY brain fried so I had to stop.
Oh well, like I just said, it’s a prototype. I will refine the process as I go. Including, and I am gritting my teeth as I type this, being willing to do the whole thing over with tighter phrasing if that’s what it takes.
I hate doing things over. Especially things like my videos. Part of my “brand” is total sincerity and you can’t be completely sincere twice.
But art requires compromises.
For the Onion headlines it’s going to be a matter of learning to process the news in a sharp and satirical way.
Big deal. I already do. Admittedly, I haven’t turned those into Onion style headlines much, but I am a completely natural satirist.
That’s just how I process the world. With irony.
It’s a defense mechanism against hypocrisy.
So I am not worried about coming up with the headlines. I can do the bitingly satirical ones and the quotidian observation ones too.
Area Man Suddenly Worried Taco Bell Not “Authentic”.
He was quoted as saying, “I’m starting to think this might not be what they eat in Mexico at all. I bet they look at this kind of thing and laugh!”.
Excerpt from the potato
And that was just off the top of my head.
Yeah… I could totally write for the Onion.
They just have to be smart enough to hire me.
More after the break.
What is masculinity?
That’s a darn good question, Patrick.
To expand on what I said in the comments : you’ll notice that women don’t sit around debating what it takes to be a woman.
A woman is a woman is a woman. The only qualification is menstruation. I don’t think one woman would ever say to another, “stop being such a little boy!”.
Or accuse another (or themselves) of “not being a real woman”.
The closest they get, I figure, is, like men, wondering if they are a legit grownup.
I know I sure as hell ain’t.
Or they might wonder if they are a good woman, like a good feminist or housekeeper or office worker or whatnot.
But there is no sense that they can just plain not qualify for womanhood.
But like I said in my YouTube comment, I think we men need something like that. The standards of manhood might change over time but the need for them does not.
Of course, things are even more complicated for us gay men. For many decades, gay was synonymous with unmanliness. To be gay was the worst possible crime against masculinity and therefore literally any heterosexual man outranked you.
We’re getting over that now. Slowly and painfully, but we are. Gen X types like myself are still carrying a lot of that negative programming around, asleep but not gone.
In a way it’s easier for us gay nerds because nerds don’t exactly invest much in manliness for a whole number of reasons.
As such, I have always viewed the “manly” world as something interesting and certainly not without its merits but almost completely alien to me.
My Dad did try to instill some in me and my brother Dave. It worked a lot better with Dave. Of the two of us, he’s always been way, way, WAY better at being normal.
Of course, my dyspraxia kind of put manliness out of reach too.
It’s like I am the exact opposite of Nick Offerman.
That’s part of how I know I would be the “woman” in any marriage.
I’m warm, I’m nurturing, I’m a homebody, I’m rather emotional.
Now I just need someone to be my “man”.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.