This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for peer-to-peer file sharing, and to celebrate, I’ve made another batch of my videos available as Torrents, including the Thanksgiving Dinner series I made last year (torrent|YouTube). If it’s not Thanksgiving where you are, maybe it is snowing and you’d like to revisit last year’s series on folding paper snowflakes, also space-time! You can find all the new torrents on my Torrents page.

This year I have been reminded repeatedly, in multiple ways, how important free peer-to-peer file sharing is. Yesterday my website went down without explanation because the hosting service I am paying for had technical difficulties, but the torrents of my videos still worked. YouTube changes the conditions surrounding their hosting service on a whim, for both those using it for free and those paying for it with ads, but torrents have no unique host or platform that can control how you see them. YouTube can decide to suddenly start showing advertisements before my videos, without notification (this happened earlier this year), but when you download one of my torrents I know you will get exactly my video and nothing else. No signing up for other services. No “featured video” thumbnails promising to teach you how to get girls’ numbers. No extra compression, degradation of quality, unexplained age restrictions, bogus copyright claims, “This video is not available right now,” etc. Just my video, on your computer, the way it was meant to be seen.

In a world where anyone reading this is probably already paying for internet access, paying for hardware, and probably also paying for other hardware that gets that internet access to your hardware, it concerns me how prevalent the idea is that it is good and right for people to accept an internet full of advertisements and alternate agendas in exchange for services as basic as hosting or transferring information.

I do not accept that.

I bought a computer and pay a monthly cable bill. I should not need to use an ad-covered site to communicate with my friends.

I bought a computer and pay a monthly cable bill. I should not need to use an ad-covered site to let people see content that I myself create and own.

And I don’t! So, thank you BitTorrent. Thank you for letting people who like my stuff download my stuff from each other using things they’ve already paid for. Also, thank you RSS for letting people get my posts without having to expose themselves to my frighteningly-yellow website and its faulty hosting.

And now, a note on the Thanksgiving videos, since I get a lot of questions about them.

I did not, in fact, eat any of the math food I created for the videos. Filming the series took over a week, and items went in and out of the fridge, sat out for hours, etc. The potatoes mostly dried out, and so did the bread spheres, so they were easy to deal with. The gelatinous cranberry cylinder got moldy pretty quickly. Throughout the series I replaced blackberries, covered up mold spots with mint leaves, etc.

The turkduckenen-duckenen was the saddest part. I had little expectation that I would be able to pull off a seven-bird binary-stuffed extravaganza, but I managed to debone and assemble all the birds and after sitting in the oven for ten hours it came out perfectly cooked and smelling delicious. Unfortunately filming the creation of it involved many hours of setting up shots and deboning on the counter under warm lights, and leaving uncooked poultry sitting out for hours is a great way to get sick, so I had to trash the whole thing. Still, I think helping teach hundreds of thousands of people about binary tree traversal is a more worthy end to a bird’s life than being eaten.

I made a video, again. After that three-part not-logarithms series I thought it only fair to set the record straight as to my true inner feelings about logarithms, and decided I might as well explain all of elementary algebra while I was at it.

Download via torrent or watch on YouTube.

The choice between having to use Google+ and never commenting on YouTube again is laughably easy for me. I invested so much into my YouTube channel, and they’re taking that investment and threatening to throw it away if I don’t also start investing in Google+. No thank you Google, but you’ve already made me regret investing so much into you the first time. Do you really think I’m going to do it again?

Google was so good at being Google! Why did they decide they want to become FacebookTV? I don’t know, but here’s some problems with the G+/YouTube integration, assuming you know the basics already:

+ Google is trying to re-animate a failed platform by leeching off of a successful one, despite that the failed platform failed because it is bad, and more users are not going to make it less bad

+ Google’s publicized selling point was “comments just got better” while in actuality they managed to take what we all thought was the lowest of the low and actually make it worse (this is a significant accomplishment that leaves me in awe)

+ YouTube has long known their comment section is awful, and out of many possible improvements, the easiest solution is NOT integrating an entire social network. Using comments as an excuse for the integration is dishonest, and would still be dishonest even if the new system wasn’t a failure

+ The integration system is designed for the common casual new user, with integration causing horrible problems for people with multiple channels and preexisting personal G+ accounts/pages, who, being people who have already invested in these products, you’d think Google would at least pretend to care about

+ Making huge forced changes to a platform is problematic for people whose livelihood depends on certain things being a certain way. I would not recommend making YouTube or Google+ a large part of your business, and these changes should be scaring away anyone who was considering investing in the platform. Google’s recent untrustworthiness is certainly what got me getting this old website back up and running, and why I decided blogging is better than vlogging right now

+ This is part of an ongoing trend of Google exerting more control over what information their users see, so that they can optimize for having the user see things that make Google money.

Google’s products used to augment humanity with beautiful tools that helped us get the information we wanted to see. That was the superiority of Google search, Google reader, gmail with its excellent spam filter, and YouTube, which allowed you to subscribe to any individual who might want to post videos. Empowering humanity to efficiently search for and find information, and then to choose what information they consume, is not just a noble goal, but turned out to be a wildly successful thing that people want.

Making things people want is good business. Tricking people into using things they don’t want with a bait-and-switch is not good business.

Now a Google search shows me a full page of promoted, local, and social results–I have to scroll down to see actual search results. Google decided to drop Reader altogether. YouTube inflates subscriber numbers during signups while choosing which videos will actually show up, with a malicious algorithm that includes both total time a user spends on the site (promoting videos that suck you into watching things you don’t really like but are easily distracted by) and revenue gained (this means that by not having ads on your videos you miss out on both the ad money and on having your stuff displayed to many of your own subscribers). You can still “subscribe,” but YouTube changed the definition of the word in the same way Facebook changed the definition of “friend.”

YouTube used to be designed to help you find what you were looking for. Now, it’s designed to keep you looking.

Google used to be about being in control of what you see. Now, “you’re in control of how you’re seen”

Now even discussion is curated by Google, rewarding those who talk often, and promoting hateful inflammatory comments because they provoke responses. Taking all the collected data and computational power of Google and using it to optimally encourage people to watch advertisements and argue with each other is, in this author’s opinion, brazenly unethical. We can only hope that everything that’s happened in the last year has been unintentional and that Larry Page will have some sort of epiphany, pull out before the transformation is complete, and start putting the company’s energy into doing good things again, as in a heartwarming vampire holiday tale.

As for me, I’ll continue posting on my own RSS-enabled site and making my videos available as torrents, and maybe I’ll follow in the footsteps of the many other prominent YouTubers who are moving discussion of their videos off YouTube.

There’s a lot more to say about how this is part of a bigger picture involving various related companies and industries, but I think I’ll stick to the comments integration thing this time.

I don’t feel visuals, the way I do words and music, and while I’m used to what people pay attention to in my more standard forms, I’m still surprised by the way people seem to be skilled at ignoring sound as background noise. Especially in my last video it is the sound and words that are important, the sound created with perfect intention, but apparently the visuals are distracting so I’ll point out some of the details to you and then you can try listening for them, if that’s your kind of thing.

I knew I wanted music for the last section, to say the dark things there are no words for, which means I needed music for the first section for consistency. The fast melody is inspired by the rhythm of teethbrushing. I wanted a cheap background-musicky feel, the kind of happy little thing often stuck on to videos, that being both the right thing to introduce the PSA and also very easy for me to improvise melodies and harmonies for. I sang along while listening to the narration, intentionally doing things like slow happy rising chords during “I extend my hand and invite you to join me in the civilized world,” holding on a major chord during “You do not have to worry about any thing and life is beautiful.” Back to the fast toothpaste melody when back to the old way of squeezing toothpaste, and when we recall “Life is Beautiful,” and add “also Meaningless,” we recall the held major chord and move to a minor one.

Coming back to toothpaste after the first false ending, the melody returns, with a more muted closed vowel sound. During “My thought are pure, my thoughts are minty fresh” the two voices hold a perfect fifth, vibratoless and clean, the vowel relaxing from an “ooh” into a neutral “ah”, a mouth going zombie-slack.

Moving into the last section, it begins with a single note, then a perfect fifth added above. This should be very consonant, but even with the first note there is a dissonance: not the note itself, but in that the key has shifted up a quarter tone. This section is incompatible with the last. The fifth establishes the new key, and from there we can add its own dissonances.

This is the sort of music that makes sense to me, every note exactly where it should be, unlike the arbitrary niceness of the intro toothpaste melody. It is not an accident that that high pure note comes radiating down from the heavens just as I say the word “shining,” held, this fragile note itself both a comfort and weakness, the only higher note coming in a half-step above it, the high screaming dissonance on the word “voiceless,” a dissonance that cannot be resolved, we can only let it fade away, replaced by the howling of wolves.

I’m actually surprised no one’s mentioned the wolf-howl-inspired vocals; I thought it was maybe a bit too heavy handed. A low tentative howl transitions us in, then more voices join, one after another, free independent creatures that care not for fitting into consonant triads, and yet together create a perfect pack. “Oooh” is the vowel of the howl. Then there’s the choice of how to say the words: “howl” could have been performed loud and howling, but that would be too much release too soon. How much more effective to say a word like “howl” softly, between clenched teeth! How much more contrast between that dark closed howl and the loud open vowels of the word “wide”! There’s an arc to that paragraph, starting shut and opening wide and landing in a bitter heap. The music does the same: the howling “ooh” opens up into “aah” during “open ourselves wide,” slides into a recognizable triad for the duration of “escaping,” then collapses with a 7th in the base, and a darker more dissonant note below that, too quiet to hear unless you know it is down there, waiting.

A non-math video, via torrent or on my second secret channel on YouTube

I’ve been surprised to find that many people do not know this simple trick, and it is a useful enough part of my life that I’ve thought before of making a quick second-channel video about it. But as always, I’d rather be working on unique Vi-ish works of art than doing pure instructional/informational videos, so I didn’t consider it strongly.

My thoughts strayed back to it occasionally as they do to all my potential video ideas, adding details: like, since I’m going to have to demonstrate squeezing toothpaste until tubes are almost finished anyway, I could have fun with it, squeeze it all out over the counter. Still not interesting enough, though. Another time I thought back to it, well, maybe I could squeeze it out into patterns or art or something. Meh, maybe, if I’m bored some weekend with nothing else to work on.

And then I woke up in the middle of the night last weekend and realized: of course! Just add existentialism to it!

By sunrise I’d written a draft and ordered supplies, and then I fell back asleep. It ended up being a solid two-weekend project, extra time because I am not a very strong painter. Part of me wanted to practice more, do more takes, to get the art how I envision it, but the video—however flawed—serves its purpose: one more step along my path to creating weirder things.

Oh, also, before you start squeezing toothpaste all over your tile, the part about toothpaste being good for cleaning grout is a total lie made for pacing reasons.

Once upon a time I made most of my living speaking. I got tired of the travel, repetition, egocentric way every event thinks it is special and expects me to feel the same. TED has made this medium mediumer than ever (as in ultra average) with pseudo-fame glamorization: many venues expect that as long as they shove a camera in your face they can expect you to deliver feel-good inspiration where the only action required of the audience is agreement and applause, without compensation, and that you should be glad of the opportunity to do free work at their very prestigious and very special event, because their exclusive copyrighted recording of your unpaid work could lead to even more unpaid work.

I’m super jaded to the utmost maximum level. I don’t accept speaking invitations anymore. Yet somehow, I ended up at XOXO a couple weeks ago scheduled to give a talk. This is what happened:

http://youtu.be/U9NhhnnWoTQ

Look! I’m on camera! I am so permanent, captured.

It’s weird to see it all fancily filmed and edited, because it makes it seem almost professional and prepared, rather than the quickly-thrown-together unrehearsed improvisation that it was. This is in contrast to my videos, which I spend huge amounts of time scripting, producing, and editing, yet sometimes people still get the impression that I’m actually rambling in real time.

The talk could have gone horribly wrong, which would still have been more fun for me than giving a stellar performance of some static well-rehearsed speech that would be better off as a video anyway. If I ever find myself accidentally giving a talk in the future, I will make sure it DOES in fact go horribly wrong, just for the novelty, because the XOXO talk may have been slightly non-standard, but I could do better.

Ok, back to the conference. It was a pretty good event as far as events go, and though I did not feel the specialness of it as keenly as other attendees seemed to, I had a good time overall, and the audience was more than up to the challenge of following along with me as I entertained myself. Mostly, though, I want to report on one of the novelties of this conference in Portland: the sheer number, variety, and availability of photo booths.

You know what? I like photo booths. Photo booths legitimize vanity in a way “selfies” can’t. When expensive machinery and valuable real estate are dedicated to serving my need to document my own face in its various states of inebriation, it broadcasts clearly to me that taking pictures of myself pretending to have friends is, if not OK, at least normal. I am willing to pay $4 to support this fantasy.

To be fair, $4 gets you the vanity-is-OK fantasy PLUS a single hard-copy of the photos themselves, immediately to be replaced by digitized versions sent via email and twitter, replicated innumerable times via blog post.
  
Those are just your every-day Portland photo booth, not the sort of cutting-edge innovations in photo booth technology I trust you are anticipating at the edge of your seats– or on your toes, if you are at a standing desk, as I’m sure many of you in-the-know health-conscious individuals have chosen to be! No, all that was but a warm-up to my vanity.

One photo booth featured at the conference was a Lensley Automatic, complete with touch-screen options for receiving your event-branded photo via email, twitter, or facebook, at a party where in each section of the balcony everything from seating to hors d’oeuvres was some particular color, though that’s unrelated to the photo booth thing.

But the result was just a regular semi-flattering photo! The boundaries have not been pushed, and boundary-pushing has not been encouraged, perhaps because traditional photo booths already have cultural expectations as to how one behaves in them. At that point, I was not yet convinced that having machines take pictures of me was a good use of my time.

And then the Smilebooth auto-GIF-erizer-with-branding-options thingy, complete with two iPad-equipped attendants, came into my life, and I welcomed it with open arms.

This thing not only encouraged me to look-at-my-own-face-under-the-guise-of-pretending-to-have-friends in all new animated ways…

…but in addition, the booth attendants showered me with real-life human validation. I felt encouraged to push the boundaries of my new-found art form, especially as the boundary was covered in floppies!!!!

But if you don’t like the results, blame the machine. The photo booth, that selfie-by-proxy, allows me as much control as I want, without having to take responsibility for the results, good or bad. Ah, technology, scapegoat for all occasions! Don’t you hate when you’re on a customer service call or something and they’re all like “Sorry, the system did a thing as if it were its own independent entity, I can’t do anything about fixing the problem we wouldn’t've had if we’d had competent programmers, and there’s no way to fix it because it is on a computer, so you’re out of luck and our company is definitely not to blame”? That happens all the time to me!

Gaaah!

THE

END

The final installment of the Dragon series is done.

You can download it via torrent or watch on YouTube.

Here’s part 1 via torrent or YouTube, and part 2 via torrent or YouTube.

I am glad to be done with this series. I wrote the first draft of what had been a video on L-systems sometime around February, and when after finishing the monster project Twelve Tones I decided a quick easy doodle video from a script I had a draft of would be a fun thing to do before moving on to another more ambitious project. Instead, it’s October and I’m finally posting the last in a three part series on fractals, with another independent video on mathy-logarithm stuff in the pipeline.

I’ve been making Doodling in Math Class videos for three years now, long enough that I get tired of repeating the old form, but not so long that I don’t keep coming up with new ideas for them, thinking “oh but this would make such a good doodling video! It would be so quick and easy.” Work never goes as quick as anticipated. I think that’s the the technical definition of work.

When I find myself not wanting to work on a thing, usually because unexpected delays make it drag on, I ask: “What can I do to make this fun for myself?”

Sometimes the answer is simple as adding snakes, puns, and existentialism. The weirder a thing gets the more motivated I am to finish it, because I no longer know just what the finished effect will be. When I’ve had enough experience with a thing that I truly know how it will turn out, and the finished form looks just as it did in my head, I feel no motivation to actually do the thing. When it could all go wrong, life is fun!

Other times the answer is in how I do it, things that don’t noticeably affect the finished video: challenging myself to keep really good posture while I film and to grab sharpies super gracefully, or to edit my script in an unusual setting, or as I did today, to order my favourite takeout and see how much video I can edit before it arrives. Part of the creative challenge of my work is to keep coming up with things like this, because “see how fast I can edit this video” doesn’t work very many times before I need to start adding new layers. Being your own boss is great! My boss is nuts.

I’ve promised myself that the next thing I do will be different enough to keep my attention without any trickery. In the mean time, I hope you like the new video! I worked hard on it, and ate all the food!

Yeah, I guess it is!

The old broken webpage is archived on ye olde internet archive, so don’t worry about stuff being lost forever or anything: http://web.archive.org/web/20130912060754/http://vihart.com/

And of course there’s always youtube (vihart) and twitter (@vihartvihart) if you want to find me.

The plan is to move most of that stuff back over here, and also actually post stuff on here regularly again. Maybe you want to subscribe to this rss feed rather than spend one more moment staring into the yellowy void, and then you’ll know when stuff happens.

Vi

Do you like yellow things? I DOOOO!