Stupid Google Tricks Part 1

What should I be angry about today?

How Moderate Muslims Should Not Get Angry With Their Extremist Brothers

“Radical Islam has become an off-the-peg label that young Muslims can wear to rebel against their dads and wider British society. Like punks before them, they’ll grow up and grow out of it.”

Why black folks should especially be angry regarding recent terrorist activity

“The series of Live 8 concerts have confirmed what many Africans and people of African decent have known for years: Our motherland is in dire need of help.”

Why I’m angry today

“…most of these nutjobs are conservative or ultraconservative or suprafuckinginsaneconservative … and I want as little “me” time with them as possible.”

Whats made you angry/upset today…

“…that half my course is maths and i didn’t even do it past gcse … that i woke up at 3 and wasted the whole day … that the only food i have left is an onion and some pasta”

MySpace Sued By Angry Parents

“If the parents wish to sue myspace then the local police should arrest the parents for reckless endangerment.”

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I’m not alone!

The real inconvenient truth is that global warming deniers are liars

Here’s one for those with too much time on their hands.  You can use up ten minutes of it watching this video.  As I point out in this video, I recently did a piece going to town on Sheryl Crow for her stupid line about limiting people to using a single square of toilet paper.  It was definitely a stupid thing to say and saying it was a joke doesn’t make it any less stupid. 

But there’s being stupid in the name of getting attention and there’s being an evil, malicious liar in the name of… well, who knows what.  I have seen and heard so many things recently from global warming deniers that have made me so angry, I decided to cut loose on them.

I make a disclaimer in the video but I’ll make it here as well for people who don’t watch the video: having doubts regarding some of the claims made regarding climate change doesn’t make you a liar.  Healthy scepticism is an attitude I recommend people carry with them at all times.  But the campaign against the reality of climate change is not driven by scepticism.  The people behind these orchestrated campaigns are nothing less than self-interested liars.

Coincidentally, Scott Adams has just posted an interesting series of links on his Dilbert blog that cover both the pro and con arguments about climate change.  Follow this link for the first part and check through his follow up posts for more.  Feed your scepticism with a range of conflicting views.  Then you’ll at least have some food for rational thought.

Where’s mine?

I had an interesting chat with my friend Adrian Calear last week.  He’s a director (he directed the shows for the comedians I featured during the recent Melbourne Comedy Festival – you can see the videos under the link at the top of this page) and he knows what he talking about.  He’s been in the performing/directing caper for longer than I’ve been in IT and he’s seen the sorts of things that frustrate performers.

Remember last week when I was having a self-indulgent rant about not being as famous as I deserved to be (particularly on YouTube)?  Adrian has seen this dozens of times and gone through it himself.  essentially, it seems that it’s quite common for a performer to think “hey, I’m better than that loser!  Why is that bastard getting all the attention that is rightfully mine?”

It doesn’t really matter if you’re right – obsessing over other people like that does you no good.  Not only will it eat you up, you’ll probably miss when you actually have achieved something worth celebrating.  Gotta look for the good times not obsess over the bad times. 

So, in short, no more emo behaviour from me.  For now.  For anyone who was actually worried, I knew it was self indulgent crap at the time.  I just felt like having a spray.  I get like that sometimes.

The angry view of Wallstrip

Ever since the news of Wallstrip being bought by CBS came out I’ve been seeing a range of reactions.  The more I saw negative and, frankly, jealous responses the more pissed off I became.  And when I get pissed off I make videos.

Eye poppin’ stuff!

In this uncertain world, there’s on thing we can all agree on: it’s always fun to stare in morbid fascination at someone with physical differences.

MR ANGRY HEALTH WARNING: You may not want to watch this video if you’re eating.  Especially if you’re eating boiled eggs.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Laughter Therapy II – The Revenge

This video serves to purposes: finally getting me out of the crap mood I’ve been in all week and letting my daughter get some revenge she was after.  If Hollywood won’t stop churning out sequels, why shouldn’t I follow suit?

The voice-over for the trailer would go like this:

She was subjected to laughter therapy against her will, now she’s back for revenge.  Laughter Therapy II – this time it’s personal.

Cooking with Mr Angry

I’m thinking of making some cooking videos.  Seriously.  I like to do different things occasionally and it would be good to do something that might surprise people.  I’m actually a pretty good cook and I reckon I could teach people a few simple recipes.  With a Mr Angry twist, of course.

To give you an example of a Mr Angry twist I provide you this illustration of some stupid crap I have to put up with at work.  I’m a big fan of the toasted sandwich (I think I may have mentioned that before.)  I think the simple act of toasting a sandwich makes it taste much better.  I’m one of those type who thinks it isn’t a good toasted sandwich unless there’s butter on the outside. 

I say butter for ease of reference but I also mean that to include margarine and any other weird vegetable oil based spread (what the fuck is a stearate anyway?)

Putting the butter on the outside makes it taste better and it smells good while cooking as well.  I’m always looking for ways to add a little extra taste and one thing I really like to add to the butter on the outside is powdered/grated parmesan cheese.  This smells and tastes great and makes the outside go really crispy.  Awesome.

Now, of course, the “smells and tastes great” is only my opinion and it’s an opinion not shared by everybody.  Using parmesan in the workplace may well generate complaints of a “horrible stink”.  Like I give a shit.  Even stranger than people who don’t like the smell are people who do like the smell but complain anyway because “it’s making me hungry”.  Whatever, freako.  When did I become your mother?  Go eat something if you’re so fucking hungry and leave me the fuck alone.

That’s the sort of attitude I’d bring to a cooking show.  When I’m cooking a meal you’d best be speaking up early if you’re not fond of garlic, mushrooms and/or cheese because I tend to put shitloads of each of these into whatever I’m cooking.  Even if it doesn’t seem appropriate.

On many occasions I’ve brought food that I’ve made at home in to work and people have asked me for the recipe.  So I tell them something like it has mushrooms and garlic… then they ask me what quantities are involved.  How much garlic should I put in?  I dunno, how much do you like?  If I made some videos I could point the questioners in that direction when they ask, so they’d end up getting advice like this:

“OK, so put plenty of garlic in here.  There’s really no such thing as too much garlic.  Some people will disagree and say they can’t handle a lot of garlic.  You know what?  Fuck those people.”

I am so fucking lazy

It may sound strange that a man who’s maintained pretty much daily blog posting for over a year and made nigh on 350 videos in even less time proclaims himself to be lazy, but in many important ways that’s what I am: lazy.  Not least in ways that society finds useful, namely my job.

Sometimes I feel like they barely get 2 productive hours out of me in a day at work.  I’m so easily distracted.  I’m always reading things that are nothing to do with work, aimlessly web surfing or writing in this blog (although I usually limit blogging to my lunch hour).  The bizarre thing is, nobody at my current job seems to share my low opinion of my productivity.

Most days I expect sometime to finally go “Hey, he’s been fooling us!  He doesn’t do anything here, let’s fire his lazy arse!”  And yet each day I get treated with respect and congratulated on the quality of the work I actually manage to produce.  The thing is, to my great surprise, I seem to have landed in almost the perfect role for me. 

Not only do all my strengths work here, but they are strengths and experience that nobody else here has so even when I think I’m a lazy shit I’m actually making contributions that nobody else can.  Far more often I’ve experienced workplaces where I was subjected to enourmous amounts of unwarranted negative behaviour from management so I frequently find it hard to believe I’m not always on the verge of receiving more of the same.

Today, my manager dragged me into a closed door meeting without warning to discuss some “important matters”.  I thought, this is it, I’m fucked.  Somebody’s been tracking my net usage and I’m about to get boned.  Instead, I was asked to help with some important high-level management decisions.  All that fun strategy stuff.

Weird.

I’m lazy in my life outside work too.  I feel like there’s some sort of hump I can’t get over with both this blog and my video making.  I’ve made more headway in terms of readership/ viewership than I ever thought I would but there are plenty of people getting way more attention.  That wouldn’t bother me so much apart from the fact that so many of them are shit.  I mean I am really, really sick of people whose output is utterly fucked getting more attention than me.

Blogs that are pointless, badly written, unintelligent, not funny.  Videos that are uninspired, poorly executed, show no talent or originality whatsoever.  You know, 99.999% of the internet.  It’s all fucked and it’s pissing me off. 

I think my biggest problem is I’m no good at self promotion.  I’ve done some basic self promotion which has gotten me this far but there’s no doubt that the highest profile online personas (even the genuinely talented ones) got where they are because they’re way better at marketing than I am. 

My other problem is that I absolutely suck at time management.  I essentially know they things I should be doing to self-promote but most of the time I can’t be bothered doing them.  I think I reached a low point with motivation on about Sunday when I noticed that I was rapidly approaching my one year anniversary on YouTube.

I’ve always been invigorated by reaching milestones with this blog but this particular milestone depressed me.  The main difference between promoting this blog and promoting videos on YouTube is that promoting the blog is all down to me while the single biggest promotion tool on YouTube, being “featured”, is totally beyond my control.

And when I considered that one year milestone all I could think was what other sucker has put in so much effort for so long without being featured even once?  I like to think while my videos may not be timeless classics of art, they’re pretty fucking good for one person working pretty much alone with zero budget.  If every video featured by YouTube was better than mine I wouldn’t feel bad, I’d simply work at getting better.

But when about 90% of the featured videos are utterly fucked I get a bit down.  Some very, very good work is featured.  Stuff that I don’t reckon I have a hope of competing with comes up every now and then.  But cute fucking animal videos?  Worse still, badly shot, shitty sound, not even vaguely fucking interesting fucking animal videos?  And it isn’t even the swearing (which is what I kept telling myself for a while to make myself feel better).  They featured videos with heaps of swearing – not often, but they’ve done it.

It’s hard at this point to not feel like someone at YouTube has made a conscious decision to exclude me from being featured.  I have no evidence whatsoever for this of course, just my bad mood.  As my angry attitude is what guides me through most of my life decisions, it seems only right to apply it here as well. 

Anyway, fuck YouTube.  Or to be fair, YouTube already does more for me than I have any right to expect (free hosting, a platform with a potential reach that I couldn’t hope to match without them) so I won’t obsess about it too much.  But seriously, fuck them anyway.

I don’t expect anyone to pity me, I vent as self-therapy, not as a cry for help.  Besides which, I’ve been clawing my way out of my bad mood since Sunday.  The first positive came when I received my latest pay notification from The Fizz Newzz.  Oh yeah, I thought, there have been some worthwhile developments in the last year.  During the week I was finding it difficult to make videos because of my general mood, made worse when I noticed the average number of views for my videos had been going down.

I needed some external motivation so I set about doing something.  I am meeting up with my friend who’s a director tonight to talk about things in general and he’s always a good source of motivation.  Then I have to start working with other people more.  I have a few ideas that require involvement from other people (sorry I haven’t advanced our plans Gruntski but the collaboration we were discussing is definitely one I want to do) and I think simply being involved with other people will improve my mood.

And although I might sound rather negative in this post, I didn’t start writing it until I actually started feeling better.  One thing that considerably improved my mood was reading this article.  I’m not sure what it is about the article in general, but it’s certainly funny and well written.  Quite a bit of thought behind it too.  The only downside is what seems like an excessive amount of ads to me but, hey, they guy’s gotta make a living.  It might brighten your day up too.

Somebody’s watching you

Here’s a couple of pieces I originally did for The Fizz Newzz.  They’re thematically linked in that they both deal with surveillance – one at the personal level and one at the governmental/societal level.

This first one is my reaction to a news story on the “Hollywood Spy Shop”.  The range of surveillance equipment you can buy here astonishes me.  I’m going to have to stop picking my nose  – you never know when someone’s videoing you.

This second one highlights just how creepy things have gotten in the UK.  Apparently there are now over four million CCTV cameras in the UK and the rate of growth is increasing.  Now the cops are even using radio controlled flying drones to spy on people.  I know that people often respond by saying “if you’re not doing anything wrong you don’t have anything to fear,” but how about if I haven’t done anything wrong I deserve some privacy?  Whatever happened to that idea?

A good news story – You CAN make money blogging

Someone who’s given me quite a bit of support since not long after I started this blog has just made a huge score.  Howard Lindzon and his team have just sold their video blog Wallstrip to CBS. 

To me, this is the story of people who believed in the power of the video blogging medium, saw a niche and went for it.  Of course, it helps to have the experience, contacts and wherewithal to get a project like this launched but none of that counts if you don’t have the vision and the will to follow it through.

I’ve honestly been getting a little disheartened lately by things like the amount of attention paid to talentless fucks on YouTube.  This is the sort of news that gives me heart.  And the fact that some big name dickheads seem pissed off by Wallstrip’s success makes it even better (read the comments in the post I linked to above on Howard’s blog if you want to see what I mean.)

Oh and I got my latest payment from The Fizz Newzz too, so that cheered me up.  Wallstrip got their millions but I got my $250.  The gap is closing!

Just to round things out, here’s the Wallstrip video where they celebrate the deal. 

I have to admit, I found the setup where nobody at CBS knew who or what Wallstrip was really funny (and yes, presenter Lindsay really is on The Sopranos).