Everyone gets addicted to youtube at some period in their lives, its just one of those things that we all go through. I started to get addicted but wasn’t savvy enough and ended up traumatizing myself by clicking on the links that showed up as “related searches” which just ended up being soft porn. I swear, there are enough web cam girls around to pad out an entire series on MTV. In fact there probably already is one which screens back to back with Girls Gone Wild.
So my point is I fucked up my youtube experience and was afraid to go back. However a combination of boredom and the fact that a while ago blogger could only display videos using a youtube URL, forced me crawl back into the world of the tube. I was very excited to learn that strangers had viewed my shithouse videos that I had uploaded. It became one of my favourite games to upload something boring and call it, in opposition, a highly interesting name. For example, an amateur school assembly video could be renamed “High school sluts amateur try-outs”. I gleaned experience from reading things on the news about virtual bullying and online humiliation, thus learning that I could use youtube to exploit my peers. One of my favourite videos involved me taking advantage of a trashed friend of mine by turning the camera on them as they nearly wet themselves during a drug-induced hysteria. Now whenever my friend wants to see what she looks like really wasted, it will all be there online whenever she likes. No real directing flair was required although certain patience is recommended during the uploading process which takes anywhere between seventy thousand through to eleventy billion hours to complete.
Apart from uploading videos of a consistently poor quality and waiting for the suckers to waste their time viewing it, I did some other things. I filmed events where filming was “strictly prohibited” and upon uploading them found myself getting a sort of star-status from people who were happy to watch my video and not pay for that concert I went to. I even got a star rating once which made my day.
I wish I could get star ratings on every aspect of my life…
making breakfast today, quite tasty: 4 stars,
emptying bladder recently: extremely satisfying, 5 stars,
witty blog posting: needs work, 2 stars.
However the most rewarding and addictive part of the youtube experience for me is probably quite similar for most people; the searching of other video material that is much better than your own. Video clips, stupid ads, short films, kiddie porn it’s all there to be found. My favourites folder is getting fatter and fatter and I like nothing more than going back over it and watching it all again. Yeah I’m not a very busy person and I don’t have much going on at the moment.
What disturbed me even more than the ratings I was getting for my kiddie porn uploads was that my favourites folder was dominated very clearly by two topics of video…
Cheesy compilations of cute cat clips synchronized to music and disaster and explosion videos. These two things don’t have anything in common that I can find but it does say something about what’s going on in my unconscious. And that, Dear reader is where I will leave you.
Oh actually, here is a video of an obese cat sitting on a couch watching tv, just like Homer Simpson but feline.
