COPY THE PENGUIN!

This is my very first YouTube video, taken in 2011! Ryan and Lauren have a hilarious time playing Copy the Penguin  while the grownups have a lively discussion about the tribulations of parenthood. I still have that obnoxious penguin!

It's the end of an era

 

We-e-e-e-ellll, it's the end of an era for me. YouTube is no longer posting videos directly from the site, and since THAT is where I got them, I'm having to take the long way around. A pain, but that's "progress". Blogger is now a very old and kind of outdated app, and even though I DID update the look of it fairly recently - I don't even know if the saved ones will work now. This is a pain mainly because long entries are kind of sparse now - pandemic has changed everything, including how much time I have to actually write something coherent. The thumbnail at least SEEMS to be correct here - YT has been casually taking them off and putting up random screen-grabs, when I generally put more into my thumbnails than into the videos. So I don't even know if THIS will work any more, and if it doesn't, this blog will have to revert back to still photos and text (as it began!). I guess Blogger is no longer considered "hip" enough, and I am DONE with Facebook, and this time I reeeeally mean it! I am surprised to see at least a fragment of the custom thumbnail here, when it's not showing up anywhere else. YT is "adding" features, meaning it is subtracting others. And all on a November Monday. 

UPDATE. As I look at this, it really looks OK - I just have to take the extra step of copying and pasting the address up top. Actually, it looks a hell of a lot better so far, and I can make it any size, and you can also watch it on YouTube easily. But how I wish they'd warn us about changes, rather than just pulling the rug out from under. They "roll out" changes as if it's some kind of bloody red carpet. Anyway, I seem to be able to watch this, so hope you can too.

Salmon arches sparkle

I'm going to post some of my own handmade videos over the next while. I never get a lot of views, but slowly I'm building my subscribers. It's so nice when one of them notices my stuff or enjoys it! So far the comments have been so positive and uplifting.

This short video was taken at Lafarge Lake, a favorite spot for walking and bird-watching. The salmon arches are part of a new amphitheatre, which I loathed at first because they had to dig up the ground to make it. But Lafarge is such a popular spot that they are "developing" it (moannn), hopefully leaving my beloved lake alone.

Braided egg

A gif I made from one of  those cute foodie YouTube videos. I could watch them all day. This one looks like chef stuff to me.

Jaws of death: or, why no one watches my YouTube channel

Has my bizarre experiment with primitive animation come to a close? Apparently not. This is based on my childhood fear that old cars would bite me. They had such. . . teeth. They even had faces. All cars have faces, even the bland modern ones, but in the 1940s the phenomenon reached a peak. I don't have a sound track for this, as I haven't learned how to do sound gifs yet. I may be getting tired of the whole thing, at last. It ain't exactly Disney, is it? - but making a still picture move still fascinates me.

I want to start doing mashups of gifs with still pictures and slide shows. This will take more work and concentration, and I am not sure I am up for it because my blog views are back down to about ten a day. The bizarre thing is, about a year ago I had a huge (for me) surge in views to about 800. Made no sense at all, as I don't think I was posting anything different, just the usual strange and eccentric stuff on a variety of topics. Back in the days when I really wrote - I mean, short stories and essays and stuff like that - I was lucky to get five views. So what happened?

It's capricious, like videos "going viral", when most of them are either offensive or dangerous or sicky-cute, or just damn dumb. I am dismayed to see YouTube views in the millions (and some are now reaching BILLIONS), when more worthy entries are virtually ignored. 

The video above is a case in point. Hey, I love the "double rainbow guy" as much as anybody - but is this stoned ramble really worthy of 44,709,406 views?

Meanwhile, I stumbled upon this jaw-dropping natural phenomenon, a complete rainbow (and yes, it's a double rainbow too) filmed in Ireland back in 2012. In five years it has attracted 60 views. The counter must have frozen, because I have revisited this one many times, and it still says 60 views. I have a feeling YouTube stops counting after a while, or at least decides that you don't count.

So it's pretty meaningless how many views you get, but the internet brings out the fragile heart of the forgotten child in each of us - well, in SOME of us - a few of us? - oh all right, in me. The child who wasn't invited to the party, for reasons that make no sense at all, except that she just wasn't liked.

I still go back and forth between really not giving a rip (which is true most of the time) and feeling bruised. Here all this hard work is going to waste, and nobody cares. You don't write something and then bury it in the garden to make sure no one sees it. But that's kind of what happened. I had three novels published which barely sold. What nobody tells you, when you decide you want to get published, is that your books MUST sell, or you will not really be considered an author. If you opened a restaurant and nobody came, it wouldn't speak well to the quality of the food. People would stay away because people were staying away.

And if you're box office poison, a publisher would have to be a fool to take you on again. 

But I've kept this blog going a long time. I don't want to think how long, but six years comes to mind. There is something entertaining just in the act of putting a post together. It has to amuse me, first. I guess then I just set it out there. I don't look at stats for months at a time. I am not trying to make money with this, not trying to make anything, really. When it's working well, it's fun. No one would expect a concert pianist to play in an empty hall. But if you play for the sheer pleasure of it, because you want to, because it feels good to do something you know you're good at - maybe there's not so much need for paying customers.

But the inequities are baffling. The above short video of my adorable grandson Ryan has so far received 72,810 views, but lots of my stuff is still at zero (including, most unfairly, videos of the other kids' birthdays). Though it's a cute video, I have no idea why it seemed to draw so much attention when the others didn't. I have one blog post that still racks up attention, and I don't know why that is either: 

"I see dead people": Victorian post-mortem photography

I know there is much more interest in this subject now than when I wrote it in 2012, and even whole Facebook pages are devoted to spotting "fakes" (which one quasi-historian claimed most of my photos were). But that still doesn't explain the 118,490 views it has received. So far.

But then, who's counting?

Will it blend? Find out, NOW!

How to wreck a beautiful evening

There are ways you can spoil a beautiful evening.

You know what it's like when you find something on YouTube you haven't heard in about a billion years, and not only that, it's the WHOLE ALBUM so you'll be able to hear every track, and you put your headset on cuz it's late at night, and you start to listen and -

And at first it's great, and the memories just come flooding back. The living room in Chatham with the big reclining chair, and the old drapes with cherries on them and wall-to-wall carpeting like nobody else had yet (covering beautiful hardwood floor that was deemed ugly and old-fashioned). And we'd all be sitting around stoned while my parents were at choir practice, and I'd be sitting in a half-lotus on my camel saddle which smelled of shit and old leather, and somebody'd put this album on and Bob Webster (this jazz pianist who hung around, I was in love with him) would crawl along the floor and put his arms around the big cylindrical wooden speakers that were bigger than anyone else's and stay that way until the whole album was over.

And the album was MOOG. And we all mispronounced it because we were too ignorant to know it was pronounced "moag". And we man, really got off on this album which was really only good when you were stoned, because it was sort of all over the place - some of it brilliant - keyboard stuff in sweeps and drones, clever like commercials for Polaroid Swinger, or suddenly really inspired and beautiful. It was called The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman, who my brother described as hermaphroditic because of his name.

So about a billion years goes by and once in a while I look on YouTube and just find tiny fragments of Moog, mostly from scratchy records. I doubt it has ever been re-released. Then TONIGHT I find a video with the whole album on it, every track - 

(and also this stuff, silly visual stuff like a kaleidoscope, sort of cool so I giffed it, and at the end you  see the edge of the guy's TV screen so you know it's just some TV effect, except that at the start it looks like somebody shining a flashlight through a sock. And it has that VHS fuzzy frizzly part at the bottom, you know what I mean, bad tape or really cheap equipment. Reminds me of my first Beta recorder.)

And then all of a sudden on the right side of your headset, you're either having a flashback hallucination or the headset is picking up police signals or SOMEBODY, some asshole, is talking, aimlessly, stonedly, droningly, on and off so you keep hoping it has stopped, and sometimes there is a very dumb girl's voice always kind of going up like a very insecure person whose every statement sounds like a question, and later on you hear that rustling fumbling infuriating noise like when someone is dicking around with a microphone, and you realize this guy, whoever he is, must have sat there holding his 1973 Radio Shack Captain Marvel microphone up to his 1969 "Hear How Powerful My Speakers Are" speakers while the record turned on his dirty old mouse-shit turntable. Or maybe it was a spinning pancake. Whatever. This is someone's idea of a video? Sharing this timeless, stoned, OK-a-little-bit-too-commercial-and-cute-but-memory-laden album, this CLASSIC '60s stoner album - talking all the way through it in a draggy stoned voice, in the voice of someone who has an IQ of maybe 71 and was still voted Top of his Class because that's how they turn them out now, who

It ruined my evening.

POST-BLAHG. There is a God. I was gnerfing around in Dick Hyman videos just to see what else might be there, and by golly, just a couple of days ago somebody posted the whole album in pristine sound quality, no stoner babbling or fumbling 1969-quality mikes like the emcee at your Junior Prom. Until it's taken down for some reason, like piracy, here it is for you to enjoy. But I'm not taking my post down because it's an example of something, of taking something great and just throwing it up there all buggered up, as if it doesn't matter. Worse, most people neither notice nor care. I can't seem to embed the video here because it won't come up no matter what I do, so here's the link, and I'll post the video again so you can see the kind of album cover that has disappeared, along with normal global climate, rational Republicans and an expectation of a future.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIutWZqoK-4

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Gorgeously good

Nervous guy on public access

I promise you, this is the last video! I know I've posted this before, but it bears repeating. It could only be real. Amazing how a man can get through a performance knowing only 10% of the words.

Sign him up, sign him up, sign him up!

Josh Turnbull. Superbaby.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm