As I’ve mentioned before, since I have now been without cable a few years, instead of watching TV I usually watch original comedy stuff on YouTube – guys like this one and this one and this one, gals like this one, this piece of citrusy goodness, and, of course – these guys, as they’re the home team.
A month or so ago, I was voting in a Survivor-type contest among YouTubers, and I kept seeing this one three-letter acronym used over and over again in comments on people’s videos. It was confusing me terribly as to why people were repeatedly writing this acronym in regards to YouTubers they apparently liked.
Because when I was in college and thereabouts in the Eighties – and into the Nineties, for that matter – all those bad boys with their Black Flag and Minor Threat and Bad Brains records (i.e., the ones I always wound up with – go figure) used to stencil this three-letter acronym on guitar cases and skateboards and stuff. Or my ex’s slightly nerdy, acid-dropping, D&D-playing friends would fake tattoo it on themselves. It was spray painted on the walls (always either in black or red) of at least three apartments I remember in Murfreesboro and two in Nashville, and on the outside of one garage.
You’d have been hard pressed to walk into Cantrell’s, the Exit/In, or Elliston Square in the Eighties and not seen this acronym scrawled on a t-shirt, an Army jacket, or a pair of torn jeans in black magic marker. After all, it was all, everybody’s an anarchist, yada yada and all that… way back then in the ol’ Dark Ages. After all. (I just wanted to fit “all” into this paragraph somehow, just one more time.)
And it – said three-letter acronym – it wasn’t very, well… nice. (And understandably so, since everybody was an anarchist and all that.)
So a month or so ago, I was really having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around why in the world people kept leaving in comments things like:
“(insert YouTube comedian’s name here)… FTW!”
I guess it’s one of the disadvantages to not having kids/teenagers to set me straight – and next time, maybe I’ll have enough sense to just go straight to Urban Dictionary instead of straining my brain over something like “For The Win!” for days. Or a week and a half exactly.
But I guess at least not having teenagers meant I got to spare myself the inevitable ridicule when Mom asked why all these people on YouTube were telling all these other people to f*ck the world, right?
Also just a reminder to please (if you don’t mind) change any bookmarks and blog links to the Zone to the default WordPress URL of http://thelynnsterzone.wordpress.com/ (and for the music blog, http://lynnstersmusiczone.wordpress.com) – I think the feeds are pointing correctly (but if you’re not finding my new posts in your feed reader, please let me know so I can see what’s up with the feed). I really don’t know when I’m going to be able to get this situation resolved with my domain host and get thelynnsterzone.com pointing back here (donations welcome, LOL) but you can always find me at the default URL anyway. Thanks!
Some probably recall that I deep-sixed cable TV a few years ago. It wasn’t for financial reasons at the time, really, since I was still working a traditional job at the time with a steady paycheck; it was just simply because I was hardly watching any TV at all – cable or network – and most of what I did watch was available to watch online, albeit often a few hours or days after the initial broadcast, but I could always catch up. I just couldn’t justify paying what had grown to nearly $100 a month anymore when I never watched it, and even downgrading to a lesser package was still an expense I couldn’t justify, as little as I watched. Plus I had a Netflix account, so movie and even series watching was just more convenient that way anyway, for the most part.
So I cut cable and pretty much stopped watching TV, and haven’t regretted it since except for once, and that was Internet-related, not TV-related. When I got to the point where I’d just about had it with my increasing frustrations with AT&T and was fed up and thought about switching to Comcast, I discovered that even though it hadn’t been all that long since I’d turned off cable, I wasn’t eligible for the self-installation and Comcast was insisting on sending someone out to install it AND charge me an installation fee, so there went that idea out the window.
So anyway, yeah, I don’t watch TV. Really I don’t even watch TV online anymore, except occasionally. Time that would have in the now-distant past been spent watching some TV, like when I remember to eat dinner every two or three days (yep, I still forget to eat all the time) – instead I read blogs, or (more and more recently) look for interesting stuff on YouTube.
That in itself has its pros and cons. The best part is I have found some really amazing, fun stuff on YouTube in the past year or so. Some really funny, brilliant stuff.
The other side of the coin is that once you start watching one thing, it inevitably leads to a dozen more videos or a dozen other YouTube peeps. This is especially true if you’re a music junkie – you could easily get stuck there for DAYS – but also true of a lot of the comedy/sketch performers, and also just the plain old personal “vloggers” there are these days on the site.
The funny/comedy stuff is really, really great though, and while a lot of it is still pretty raw and rough (which is not a bad thing in itself by any means), a good bit of it’s very nicely professionally done these days as well. For me, the more immature and juvenile the humor, the better, since my sense of humor is pretty twisted and about on the level of a 12 year old boy (LOL), but there’s plenty of more sophisticated fare to be found on YouTube as well.
YouTube humor is cool in the way once upon a time way back in the dark ages, Saturday Night Live (which I haven’t really laughed at in 13 or 14 years) and Fridays (remember Fridays??) used to be cool. Or Fox in the early days, especially when Fox only broadcast a couple of nights a week (jeez, I’m old), and back when Sunday nights meant The Simpsons, Married With Children, In Living Color, and all the other hilarious shows that came and went. Sunday nights on Fox used to be the best.
I like a whole lot of different YouTubers, but the two that make me laugh the most are Matt Brown, better known as SwiftKarateChop, and Shane Dawson of ShaneDawsonTV. Both have become extremely popular on the Internet thanks to YouTube and appear to have a pretty broad following, heavy on the teenage fan side (especially girls), but many others too.
Shane (Twitter bio: “That guy from YouTube that wears his mom’s clothes…”) is an aspiring actor/comic from L.A. and is currently YouTube’s fifth most subscribed, and has a larger Twitter following than most of the verified celebs on Twitter. His YouTube channel is a mix of sketch comedy and personal commentary/vlogging. Just a really talented kid. (Following video NSFW):
Swifty is my favorite, though – (AskSwifty Twitter bio: “I talk funny”) – and I’ve spent countless hours cracking up over his videos. Fellow Nashville/Memphis/Knoxville/Tennessee/etc. bloggers will probably identify a good bit with Matt, who’s a neighbor just across the state line in North Alabama, and is just insanely hilarious and twisted, but in a really good and fun way. Between his commentary vids & collaborations with his friend and fellow Alabamian and YouTuber ChanceXplosion and Matt’s “Ask Swifty” series, I’ve just laughed until my sides ache. (Following video is most definitely NSFW):
So be sure to check out Matt’s & Shane’s YouTube channels, there’s hours and hours of hilarity there to take up all your spare time. They both also have alternate channels you can find linked from their main channels with a bit more personal vlogging-type stuff, and in Shane’s case, some pretty hilarious outtakes and bloopers.
And honestly, if they’re not your style and don’t make you laugh, both have several links to other friends and colleagues among the YouTube set that are equally funny as well and fun to watch. There’s definitely something for everyone around the YouTube humor set.
One thing that occurred to me recently, after having watched videos from those two and many other popular YouTubers for a while, is how awesome it is that all this stuff’s doable and available nowadays – but on the other hand, I’m kind of sorry this medium wasn’t around 20 or 25 years ago or so – just like I wish I’d had the kind of computer access kids do now for high school and college. We had a computer in my home, which not many did at the time, but we mostly used it to play games (heh) and not much else.
I was particularly thinking of my friend Travis Harmon of The Travis and Jonathan Show and Red State Update, who went to school with my ex and we ran around in the same crew in Middle Tennessee in my early college days. I glance now over at my bookshelf and see a VHS tape made back in 1986 and 1987 that I’ve had nearly as long, a copy of one of the first video ventures Travis filmed back starting when he was still in high school. It’s raw and rough and absolutely, utterly hilarious, and I think wow, what things might have been like had YouTube been around back then. I have another old acquaintance who did a lot of early video humor with his friends from college days and beyond – same thing for them. If YouTube had been around in the ’80s and early ’90s, what a big difference that would have made for many.
Certainly Travis has had some nice success in his career, but it’s been a long time coming and he’s worked hard for it. If he’d been able to start out on YouTube like guys like Matt and Shane are doing nowadays, that probably would have shaved several years off his work towards success. Consequently, Travis and Jonathan have a pretty nice following on YouTube now, of course.
And I hope many of these YouTubers see some great success out of their efforts – many are getting a pretty fair amount of attention just by their YouTube activity, but many of them deserve a lot more attention than they’re getting now. So go give ‘em some, subscribe to their channels, and try not to crack a rib laughing.
And now, on a lighter note – sleeping with cats. Sleeping with Tojo the Psycho Cat, specifically. Somewhat surprisingly, this is usually a more than just pleasant experience.
Lately (for reasons too long and boring to go into), I’ve been sleeping in the guest bedroom – which, as readers know, is Tojo’s room, mainly because all the other cats hate him so much. That’s where he mostly lives, playing with and arranging his Beanie Baby dog and cat army (and the flamingo, who always seems to get tossed on the floor for some unknown reason), rearranging my guest room in ways I don’t quite understand how a relatively small cat manages to do – I’ve long since stopped to go open the door and look when the odd thump or bang emits from that room.
Tojo is great fun to sleep with, though. All his other psychoness aside, he actually is one of the most affectionate cats I’ve ever owned, and is surprisingly snuggly. He will curl up in my arm, or alongside my arm or leg, snoozing away and purring loud and happily and doing what an ex-boyfriend’s mother used to call “making biscuits” (patting with his paws) on my arm or leg.
And sleeps the sleep of the DEAD. That cat does NOT wake up unless I actually am getting up and getting out of bed and moving. I have rarely seen a cat that is THAT unconscious while asleep, other than my brother-in-law and sister’s cat, Mouse, who is missing a few important brain cells anyway.
I’m so used to sharing a bed with various pets that when I’m spending the night away from home, sometimes it takes a little getting used to having a bed to myself and falling asleep.
And sleeping with cats is not always so pleasant. When Schuyler, who passed away this summer, was healthy and big, he was great to have cuddled up with you in the winter and some nice extra warmth – not so much in the summer, and even more so with his habits of sleeping on your head (our family research over the last 40+ years shows this to be a definite black cat thing) or biting you sometimes – not hard, but not very comfortable, and another black cat thing – in places you would rather not be bitten. He also had really bad breath as he got older and more sickly, so that was even worse.
But Tojo is just a delight to snooze away a rainy morning with. I woke up several times yesterday and just got a kick out of him, purring and snoozing away, unconscious like the dead, occasionally stretching and so obviously happy and comfy and snuggly, just so peaceful. And you think, how on earth can this relatively small and – right now – very, extremely peaceful little being be such a psychotic chaotic maniac tearing through the house like the Tasmanian Devil most of the time, terrorizing the other cats and sometimes a dog or two, and just generally leaving mayhem in his wake everywhere he goes?
In any case, I truly treasure our fun and sweet little naps together. As I should, because those hours before he wakes up again are like the eye of the storm in Hurricane Tojo.
As much as I write (and write and write and write) about The Replacements and Paul Westerberg, I guess one would think I should be writing this on my music blog instead, but I thought I’d write about it over here because it’s not about music and I thought some of you (especially you moms) would dig reading this tale.
Apologies to all my readers who still insist on using Internet Explorer as a web browser. I guess y’all must have thought I’d lost my mind last week. I was alerted to the odd-lookingness of my blogs late last week by my mother, and at the time I blamed it on her web browser, which was technically true because if you use Firefox or most other browsers, you likely didn’t notice anything at all different.
But apparently a very small change in HTML I made last week sent Internet Explorer into the equivalent of a grand mal epileptic seizure. She & I had discussed the problem she was having viewing the blog again on the phone earlier, so I fired up IE myself to see what she was seeing, and yup, it was alllll messed up. After we got off the phone I thought about it for a while and poked around a bit, and then discovered the HTML culprit and promptly removed it.
So it’s all fixed now, and I removed a couple of other tinier things that apparently had an issue with Internet Explorer too, so now all you IE diehards should be seeing the same things on both blogs that everyone else does. This is why…
On another note, I saw something at Aunt B.’s today that made me think once again, as I often have in the past, that it’s probably a good thing that I am so ancient that we didn’t have webcams and other such video equipment so easily at our disposal when I was a teenager and in college, or cell phones with cameras and all those sorts of things, or most especially YouTube. Because I would have never gotten anything else done because I would have been making goofy videos or video blogs all the time, no doubt.
Of course, I might have been rich & famous by now, too, but that’s beside the point.
I should probably put some gas in my car and drive to Nashville tonight, because it’s been like 90-something degrees here for days (my car’s outside temp gauge on Sunday read 101), and some snow and ice might be nice for a change.
Notice there’s no talk of Goosepondery over here. But I’m still putting my money on ‘Coma. If anyone can find the GSM, she can.
(Technically I guess the category should be ‘Coma tales, but seeing as how the category was begat of Squirrelly’s now-confirmed ice cream headache remedy that I impudently laughed at when I first heard it, plus Squirrel Queen Tales just sounds funnier…)
Yeah, so my Mom opened up an e-mail the other night to find that she was the beneficiary of thousands (or millions?) of dollars left to her in the late Luciano Pavarotti’s will.
The persistence of that particular flavor of spam scam really amazes me. How many years has that thing been going around the ‘Net? Do people really still fall for it?
I think my favorite influx ever were the ones in German that were coming to one of my Gmail boxes for a while. I don’t speak nor read German, but I could pick out enough words and deduce from the format that it was the same old same old. Heh.
