Give all moms a raise right now

I’m on my way home from visiting the grandson. A little context here: Baby Knut is 6 months old. His father is in the army, and they just shipped him off for a training exercise in Louisiana for 6 weeks. My wife & I decided to combine two things: 1) Grandma & Grandpa get to visit and see/spoil the new baby, and 2) Grandma will stay for the full 6 weeks to help out. I’m skipping out early because I have job duties to perform back home, so I can’t stay that long.

I was there for only a week. OMG PARENTING IS THE HARDEST JOB IN THE WORLD. I’d completely forgotten — I speculate there is some form of stress/fatigue related amnesia that totally blanks out your memory of at least the first year, otherwise no one would ever have a second child. It’s the combination of being motivated to do a flawless job, and parenting being a 24 hour a day duty that never, ever stops, and interrupts you with a new crisis every few hours. That crisis might be something trivial, but there is no such thing as a trivial discomfort to a baby. Really. To a baby, being a little bit tired means “I must scream as loud as I can into someone’s ear until I’m so exhausted I pass out.”

It seems to work. Next time I begin to nod off mid-afternoon in the office, I’m going to step into the hallway and howl at the top of my lungs until someone consoles me, and then I’ll shriek some more.

Of course, babies also offer a reward system of giggles and bubble-blowing and cooing, and I think I’m well past my cuteness expiration date, so it’s probably not going to work for me. Dang.

Anyway, when there were four of us working around the clock it was a bit tiring; when my son left for Louisiana and we were three, it was exhausting; now that I’ve left and it’s down to my wife and daughter-in-law, I don’t want to think about it. I especially don’t want to imagine being a single parent, which sounds like it ought to be lethal. If any of you readers were single parents, you have my awestruck respect. How did you survive? And if you were single-parenting and trying to work a job…jesus fucking christ, you deserve a medal and Elon Musk’s salary.

It does make me realize that humans had to have absolutely depended on community during their evolution. Pair-bonding is fine, but even working in pairs to care for the young is inadequate — when I was growing up, we had a big extended family to distribute the load. Academia (and the military, or any other occupation that disrupts familial social relationships) is clearly a terrible idea.

But hey, Knut is a lovely 10kg monster of passions — the joy of a 6 month old is even more extreme than their grievances — so I can see why many of us still try. I’m going to have to give my wife a vacation and spoil her for a while when she gets back home in July.

You mean there are limits to how racist you can get on TV?

I guess there are some lines you don’t get to cross. ABC went ahead and gave Roseanne Barr her own show, in spite of a history of terrible Trumpisms and lunatic conspiracy theories — they must have known she was a bomb ticking on the set. But she finally went too far when she made racist comments comparing a former Obama official to an ape, and ABC gave up on dealing with her and cancelled the show. I feel for her co-workers (and especially Wanda Sykes, who quit first), but this is what happens when you agree to work with a terrible human being.

It’s too bad ABC didn’t factor in the repugnance of their star. I think this will mean that Roseanne will be persona non grata almost everywhere…but maybe she can still get a gig at Fox News.

Pewdiepie is up to his old tricks again

He’s just being noticed for his sexism rather than his racism this time.

An ongoing feud between Felix Kjellberg, better known as Pewdiepie—the most popular YouTuber in the world—and popular Twitch streamer Alinity Divine, is a perfect example of how women are still objectified, vilified, and exploited in the gaming community, simply because they are women.

Earlier this month, Kjellberg, who has more than 63 million subscribers…

Stop right there. Have any of you ever watched Pewdiepie? I’ve seen a few of his videos, which I watched incredulously. He plays games with a kind of goofy running commentary, punctuated with squeals and other funny noises. He is talentless. He is uninformed. He isn’t particularly interesting. His only contribution is that he plays video games, just like you do, so he’s kind of the vidya equivalent of the guy you’d drink a beer with, I guess, and he’s famous for being a celebrity, which is about the most worthless kind of fame there is.

His popularity is mystifying. But maybe not: we’re looking at it the wrong way. He is the product of a runaway YouTube algorithm, one of the hidden rules behind the internet, which as we already know, has all kinds of spurious, exploitable side effects.

Little Baby Bum, which made the above video [I will spare you all the link to the video–pzm], is the 7th most popular channel on YouTube. With just 515 videos, they have accrued 11.5 million subscribers and 13 billion views. Again, there are questions as to the accuracy of these numbers, which I’ll get into shortly, but the key point is that this is a huge, huge network and industry.

On-demand video is catnip to both parents and to children, and thus to content creators and advertisers. Small children are mesmerised by these videos, whether it’s familiar characters and songs, or simply bright colours and soothing sounds. The length of many of these videos — one common video tactic is to assemble many nursery rhyme or cartoon episodes into hour+ compilations —and the way that length is marketed as part of the video’s appeal, points to the amount of time some kids are spending with them.

It begins to make sense. Pewdiepie is just another Little Baby Bum who appeals to another, but equally childlike, segment of the market. I don’t give him credit for consciously exploiting the algorithm, though — I think he just stumbled onto the formula and is profiting mightily from it.

Just remember that when someone touts their number of followers on YouTube (or Twitter, or a blog). Those numbers are mostly meaningless and only tell you that someone has hit a sweet spot in the medium’s artificial algorithm, which inflates noise into a mysterious cultural significance.

I forgot how much work babies are

We took the grandson to the zoo this morning, which involved walking a few miles up a hill and around and around winding pathways. His grandparents are now totally wrecked and lying back with aching feet and the general malaise of exhaustion.

I don’t know why we do this. Oh, OK, he’s cute.

And he did seem to have a grand time at the zoo.

We just do the fun parts! I can’t even remember how fatiguing little kids were, but I’m getting reminded.

Open video chat — tonight, 9pm Central

All the cool kids on YouTube do these conversations with their followers, so I thought I’d try it. Except I’m not one of the cool kids. I don’t even have that many subscribers, I don’t think. So this might totally flop, and it’ll just be lonely, boring me staring at a camera and picking my nose, or something similarly embarrassing. You can watch the ‘show’ here:

I guess if you watch it on YouTube you get a text chat window and you can snipe at me with your words. Also, if you email me and tell me what you want to talk about, maybe I’ll send you a link so you can share the screen with me.

9pm tonight, in about two hours from when this is posted.