The Youtube Subscriptions

I've been watching more Youtube videos lately.

Not randomly (much), but I have, after a few months of inactivity, started rummaging through my subscriptions and deciding to watch some stuff again. Most of it's science, cooking and philosophising about the 'now' in the life of two brothers. It sounds sophisticated until you realise it's things like why your mother could be carrying DNA of several other people inside her, how to cook an omelette from food scavenged from a forest where dogs are walked frequently and, at some point, playing hungry hungry hippos in honor of the Hunger Games movie. And there's a channel with hairstyles that make me itch to get long hair again. Maybe in six more months or so, but it's not happening right now. In the mean while, I salivate.

Some of what I watch is serious, but there's very few channels in my subscription list that are purely business. Even TEDtalks occasionally have titles like 'Why chickens are dinosaurs' (spoiler alert: because scientist say so).

I haven't started watching TEDtalks again, mostly because I got very tired of being reminded every other day that the planet was dying, politics are horribly inefficient and people get tortured. I know all that without someone demanding I watch ten to twenty minutes of someone drilling the point home. Again. Maybe I'll go over it one of these days, but so far, I can't be bothered unless the title is really catchy.

I also haven't started watching the channel offering sexual advice. Before you run screaming, I subscribed before they went totally off the rails and started insisting they had revolutionary ideas twice a week about what I should do in the bedroom and how I could seduce truckloads of women by parting my hair a certain way. Right now, if what they say wasn't obvious to non-psychopaths, it's downright creepy advice. The only reason I don't unsubscribe is because I like the earlier videos, dealing with the problems of actual people, finding the right kind of condom and things like not using butter as a lubricant. Mistakes you can see actual people make. I want to review those videos once in a while. The ones about how anal sex should be loved by all and will improve my relationship because their new sponsor asked them to do so are less interesting.

Epic Meal Time, while excellent in its own right, is another channel I only sporadically watch. Most of the time when it updates, I don't want to be yelled at with the curse words bleeped out by bird cries. I'll watch little packets of updates as the mood strikes, but apart from that, I let it be.

What I do watch is British comedy. There's a few shows out there which are updating weekly and which are easiest hunted down and watched on Youtube. For some reason, Germany doesn't block me from watching them (and Germany loves it some Youtube video blocking, oh yes), so I watch shamelessly. Then there's David Mitchell's Soap Box, tiny little blurbs of life made amusing for the promotion of a product. Books, soap, a computer... So far, I haven't bought any of them, but it doesn't stop me from enjoying a five minute exposition on marmite.