Keep forgetting to post my videos to here. Time to fix that.

When last we did this thing, it was for this vid :

Like all my attempts to provoke, it didn’t. But I don’t mind. I am still not entirely comfortable with that side of my personality, anyway. I want to make people think, which is the basic function of the trickster. I want to wake people up and get them to think about what they believe and why.

On the other hand, I don’t want to upset them or hurt them. Hence the quandary.

My original vision for that video was way, way more obnoxious. No apologia, no backtracking, no switching into polite academic mode. Just declare myself smarter than the viewer and dare them to prove me wrong. Needle people into responding.

So basically, I would have trolled people. What can I say, I am desperate for validation, and negative attention is still attention. I just want to be noticed.

But clearly, I am not actually capable of being that obnoxious. Not against an unknown target, anyhow.

Give me an obnoxious right winger to attack, and watch the fuck out.

Especially if they are a Stephen Harper supporter.

Next, we have this highly appropriate topic :

Now I am not claiming that following the advice in that video will be easy. It won’t, it will be very hard. Part of us will always resist growing up and learning to truly accept our own role in what happens to us. We all spend 12 years of our lives in a world divided into two parts : school, where all you had to do is do what you were told, and all the planning for your future was done for you.

And everything else was play. All you had to do was amuse yourself. Even the school day had lunch and recess set aside specifically so you could go play.

And people keep that exact attitude when they grow into adulthood. But in adulthood, your future depends on you. It’s not all plotted out for you any more. And that means that you will be called upon to do things you don’t want to do and which nobody is forcing you to do.

That’s where people get stuck. A child doesn’t have to think of their future self. Adults do. Either that, or they have to accept that they have chosen the life they are leading.

Next we have the revival of this fine tradition :

The Sarcastic Slideshow! As you can see, I sampled Uptown Funk for the background music. The sampling isn’t quite perfect, which bugs me, but for whatever reason, I could not make that tiny pause disappear. I set my video editor to maximum magnification and shaved tiny tiny bits off the sample, but it was still there.

What I should have done was take the sample into a sound editing program and looped it there. Oh well, I will know that going into the future. It’s all a learning process.

Then I stuck my toe in the warm waters of sample based music once more, and came up with this :

Meh. It’s not awful, but it’s not exactly inspiring. Ends a little too abruptly too.

When it comes to music, I find it hard to find inspiration. Or maybe motivation. I have all kinds of music in my head, but I lack the skills and knowledge to turn that into reality.

So I end up just trawling through my collection of samples for inspiration, and while that can work, the results almost always end up disappointing me.

I wish I could read and write music.

Then there’s this thing :

From what I gather, this fridge food theft is a widespread problem. Not for me, of course, because I’m an unemployable drain on society and we buy groceries communally in this household, but still. There’s a lot of human suffering and confusion being caused by this seemingly baffling case of rampant disregard for people’s property.

I have had a chance to think about the problem a little more since I recorded that video, and I think I have a partial solution for those who, for whatever reason, don’t like the camera idea.

According to recent research, all you have to do is draw two eyes on the fridge door. Just the feeling of being watched tends to make people a lot more honest. It doesn’t matter that it’s just two googly eyes on a fridge door (two more inside would be good, too), it activates that part of our brain that tells us we are being watched and that makes us less likely to try to get away with something that we know will bring consequences.

Makes me wonder if we should paint giant pairs of eyes all over Wall Street.

Finally, there’s last night’s video :

I know that I am treading on dangerous ground by addressing this issue at all, let alone poking at the presumptions around it, but that’s just the kind of person I am. The more taboo something is, the more interesting it becomes because the bigger the taboo, the more likely it is that it is full of unexamined assumptions.

And part of my function in life seems to be to think about the things nobody else wants to think about.

Since recording that, it has occurred to me that there is another biological basis for determining age of consent/majority, but people would not like it very much : brain growth.

See, our brains don’t stop growing until we are around 25 years old. That’s why the 18-25 age bracket does all the crazy shit they do. They are full of hormones and the urge to explore, but their brain isn’t quite there yet. Hence their inability to think out the long term consequences of their actions.

So really, it would totally make sense to make 25 the new, rational age of majority. The age of reason, even.

Have fun convincing people of that, though.

I will talk talk to you nice people again tomorrow.