YouTube experts, explain something to me

I’ve set myself the objective of making one YouTube video per week, for a couple of reasons. One is to add one drop of something positive to the ocean of shitlords and dreck — I’ve complained enough about the toxic nature of YouTube, I figure that if I should be making a nominal effort to correct it. And another is to challenge myself to learn something new, and video skills are difficult for a non-photogenic and at least initially talentless videographer like me. So I’m tinkering. I hope they get better week by week.

Then, as I was exploring various features of the video editor, I learned that some things are not enabled until you switch on monetization. I’m not into making money off this endeavor (although it would be nice), so I turned that on, and then it took 5 or 6 days for the powers-that-be to decide I’m legit, and one video was activated for ads.

Except — and this is what I’m asking about — it was immediately declared “Not suitable for most advertisers”. I was mildly offended! What’s “not suitable” about this video? Is it my lack of style? My laid-back speaking manner? The old-man bags under my eyes? The occasional flash of spiders? Does being boring disqualify one for monetization? That might be it, since it can’t be the content — I see lots of racist/sexist crap on YouTube, which must be acceptable in a way that a geezer talking about genes can’t be.

On the bright side, though, I still get access to all the shiny video editing features, but they aren’t stuffing ads in. I guess that’s good. I’d like to know why — if it’s just a glimpse of my face that repels advertising, I’ll have to make sure to stick a portrait into every one.

While I’m asking, does anyone have a good tutorial to recommend on using various YouTube features?

But Hitler would be 128 years old!

The things that get said on Alex Jones’ demented ‘news’ show — pig-human chimeras, false flags, and now, according to Owen Shroyer, Hitler is still alive, a fact being covered up by The Government.

Welcome in to The Alex Jones Show folks. It’s amazing, here we are, so much news and the news is so big and the news is so frequent that the biggest news every day becomes a back-page story the next day. The Las Vegas massacre cover-up, nothing. The JFK files being declassified, Hitler still alive. All the history textbooks lied to us. I was lied to my entire life about JFK, knowingly, by my government. I was lied to my entire life about Hitler, knowingly, by my government. And that’s just a nonstory now because you’ve got another radical truck running people down in the streets.

Yes. Let us talk about Fake News. Who is subsidizing this lunatic?

Dodgy and getting dodgier

I read that story about two women being rescued after 5 months at sea, and it bugged me. Wasn’t it awfully convenient that they’d packed a year’s worth of supplies before taking off on a short trip? And gosh, but they looked in good shape for people stranded at sea for so long. Even the dog! Wouldn’t they have eaten the dog after the first month of living on ramen?

Anyway, now there’s a detailed breakdown of all the fishy stuff in their story. They had an emergency beacon that they didn’t even bother to turn on!

I’m looking forward to learning the true story behind this phony tale of survival at sea.

The end of Scienceblogs. Long live Scienceblogs!

Let the countdown begin.


(you might not want to click on that — it’s loud)

The self-destruct sequence for Scienceblogs has begun. If you head over there on this last day of existence, you’ll find that the last post on most of the blogs is an announcement that they’ve jumped into their escape pods and are jetting off to new worlds of discovery.

It’s a shame. Scienceblogs really was revolutionary in its time — the idea was to bring in all these people who were writing about science as a hobby, give them a little profit from their work, and harness them to generate lots of continuous online content as part of a larger science communication strategy by Seed Media. It worked! Sorta. Unfortunately, the blog network was about the only part of the media empire that was running in the black, and the big projects — Seed magazine, a popular science glossy, and ideas about data visualization — didn’t last. And then online ad revenue started to get ugly (and still is!) as the ad companies cannibalized their readership with increasingly aggressive and off-putting ads (see freethoughtblogs now for example). Management tried to make it work with a few terrible missteps, like selling a blog to Pepsi, blurring the lines between commercialism and science content. But otherwise, it was a great, fun, contentious, interesting community.

The beginning of the end came when National Geographic bought up the network. It was clear in discussions with the new management that they had no idea what they’d bought — their concerns were all about bottling it up and constraining the beast by imposing conservative standards and practices on a diverse collection of independent bloggers. People started to leave. It didn’t help that one of their first acts was upgrading everyone to new software, botching the process (I lost about a third of my comments) and leaving us with rather drab, vanilla-ish appearances. And then neglecting everything. It was clear that they didn’t care, there were caretakers put in place to just reign over the decay, and there was to be no improvement, no growth, no excitement. So many of us drifted away.

And today is the day they nuke it from orbit.

One last fond look backwards at the main Sb page…

Gosh, I sure hope no hostile alien life forms have smuggled themselves aboard the escape pods.

Ominous hallway

This is the second floor office wing of the science building where I work. You may notice how well kept-up it is, the floors clean and shiny — our custodians do an excellent job. But notice the line of ceiling lights marching off into the distance, with their bright reflections in the shiny floor, one aligned with each office door…except one. One office sits in a pool of relative darkness. One where the lights don’t shine, where the resident lurks in perpetual gloom.

Can you guess who dwells there, in room 2390? Who has crouched there in the room haunted by gloaming murk for years?

The number of posts & comments on Pharyngula has roughly doubled today

It looks like Jason Thibeault has succeeded in bringing all of my old posts and your old comments over from Scienceblogs…just in time before it sinks into the abyss. So we now have 24,205 posts and 1,812,731 comments here on Freethoughtblogs Pharyngula, with archives going all the way back to 2006.

So that’s one bit of good news today.

D&D never went away, but it’s coming back

The last time I played Dungeons & Dragons was around 1979, maybe 1980, with two old friends from high school, Steve and Steve. The network of friends was broken up by my need to travel around the country, chasing an education and a career, and I never got back into it. It’s just not the same without those face-to-face friends. I have great memories of those years in that small gaming group in the Pacific Northwest, though, and it was my primary outlet for social networking at that time. I should just get on a plane to Seattle and surprise the two Steves some Saturday night.

Anyway, I guess there’s been a bit of a renaissance in D&D’s popularity lately, which, as usual, I’m missing out on. It’s an old-new way to escape some of the faceless anomie we sometimes experience in our digital universe.

In 2017, gathering your friends in a room, setting your devices aside, and taking turns to contrive a story that exists largely in your head gives off a radical whiff for a completely different reason than it did in 1987. And the fear that a role-playing game might wound the psychologically fragile seems to have flipped on its head. Therapists use D. & D. to get troubled kids to talk about experiences that might otherwise embarrass them, and children with autism use the game to improve their social skills. Last year, researchers found that a group of a hundred and twenty-seven role players exhibited above-average levels of empathy, and a Brazilian study from 2013 showed that role-playing classes were an extremely effective way to teach cellular biology to medical undergraduates.

Hey, what? Teaching cell biology with role-playing games? That sounds interesting, and I had to look that one up.

In short, an RPG is a game in which a person (in this case, the teacher) tells a story that is enacted by the players who are given roles as the various pieces of background information. Challenges related to the story are then presented and must be addressed by all participants. Each player represents a character in the story and is attributed (quantitatively-defined) skills. These skills are tested during the game to decide if the character succeeds in his or her attempt to perform a task that solves the problem or overcomes the challenge. The skill is usually tested against some kind of quantifiable decision-making system, such as rolling dice. The dice introduce randomness into the game, create suspense and provoke playfulness among the players. This is the main difference between role-play, which refers to the playing of roles in a theatrical play, and RPG, that introduces clear rules according to which the players must decide how to act.

One of the most interesting and significant aspects of the RPG is that the whole team must win together: there are no losers in this kind of cooperative game, ensuring that nobody is excluded or feels excluded.

Unfortunately, all the details of how the game works are in appendices that I can’t find online! I can believe that adding a narrative to the biochemistry of the cell would help with student engagement, I would just wonder if the investment of student time in a game like this is effective enough.