It’s not quite right to say I’m an insomniac. I’m a different order of thing: I’m nocturnal. I’m not trying to get to sleep. I’m not fussing as the hours go by and I’m still not stacking Zs. I’m having a ball. Sure, I’m generally wasting my time gorging on vapid entertainment, but what’s a retirement for, if you can’t stay up until six in the morning scrolling through YouTube videos? And look, don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. YouTube isn’t what it used to be, with nothing but cat videos and people singing off key in their bedrooms waiting to get discovered. You can find almost anything there now; as Star Trek’s Q once said of the vast swaths of galaxy where no human had gone before, it’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. It’s also weirdly addictive.
There are, I’ve discovered, several surprisingly offbeat and unexpected genres of video that I can’t be the only one watching, else they wouldn’t be grinding ’em out by the hundred. Some of them are really quite oddball, and you can’t understand why you’re watching them, but you are, boy are you ever, and some of them are so compelling that you can’t imagine why you’d ever stop watching them. They really run the gamut. Here’s a smattering of what I’ve been soaking up like a sponge as I sit rapt on my couch into the wee hours, frittering away what little remains of my time among the living:
Dogfight Videos
If you’re a superannuated fossil-in-waiting like me, you’ll never have immersed yourself in the world of on-line video-gaming, and it may come as a shock just how far the technology has been pushed. There’s a guy who calls himself “Growling Sidewinder”, which is actually very clever, because, as all aviation aficionados know, the most ubiquitous air-air missile in the Western inventory, the heat-seeking AIM-9 Sidewinder, is rigged to send a growling sort of noise to the pilot’s headset when it can sense the infrared energy of opposing aircraft. The louder the growl, the better the lock. Anyway, G.S., often teaming up with and opposing real live human beings who’re themselves sitting at computers that could be anywhere from Boston to Brussels, records his missions, and provides a lively play-by-play as he goes. You can’t believe how photo-realistic the imagery has become, or how meticulous is the attention to the details of how aircraft look, move, and work, inside and out. I can now identify on sight the different interior cockpits of numerous advanced fighter jets, and understand the basics of what all the displays do and how the “switchology” works. For a guy like me, it’s absolutely gripping. Look:
It’s just so slick. He’s got soundtrack music, for rice cakes. I know a lot about aircraft, and as near as I can tell, these games are reflecting the true performance characteristics of real fighter planes – how tight they turn, how fast they climb, how they bleed energy, how well their radars work – with as much accuracy as possible absent access to classified information. I’ve seen episodes in which actual F-16 pilots join the fray, and you never hear them complaining that their mounts aren’t flying right. These aren’t mere games any more; they’re cockpit simulators. Hours of fun.
Lawn Mowing Videos
Yeah, you read that right. There are several different content providers out there who’ll show you hours and hours of their exploits mowing people’s lawns and doing landscaping work. You know what? It’s eminently watchable. A lot of the segments are filmed in fast motion, and when the crew tucks into a really big lawn or a mess of overgrown shrubbery, it’s a lot like watching a Zamboni resurface the ice between periods. There’s something inherently satisfying in watching the mess go under the front end and emerge as perfection out the back. Besides, they’re all kind of sweet, because they all involve teams who cruise their home towns looking for houses that people haven’t been looking after properly, to the point that many of them are about as overgrown as Mayan ruins, and are simultaneously driving neighbours up the wall and adjoining property values down the crapper. Sometimes they work from lists provided by city by-law enforcement bureaucrats. Almost invariably, they’ll find that inside dwells some lonely, infirm senior citizen or disabled person, often without family, who simply can’t do the yard work, doesn’t have the money to hire anybody to do it for them, and feels sad and ashamed about letting down the neighbourhood. No worries! The team will clean up the whole mess for free! They work for nothing, and somehow make it up with the money they get from YouTube views, and that’s an unusually decent and humane way to pay the rent, isn’t it?
Creepy Camping
This is actually a derivative sub-genre. There are tons and tons of folks out there who simply post lengthy videos of themselves taking camping trips, you know, setting up tents, getting a fire started, cooking over the Coleman, that sort of thing. Maybe such stuff isn’t as boring as f%$k if you’re an avid camper, which I’m not, and am never likely to be after watching the shit that people go through out there in the creepy camping videos. These are the product of a whole other set of content providers, who scour the regular YouTube camping channels and compile the ones that feature something weird, spooky, dangerous, or frightening. From the sheer number of these compilations, it looks like something bizarre or downright awful is happening every third time anybody sets foot in the great outdoors. Sometimes, it verges on paranormal – there was one in which a guy, all alone at night in the deep woods, followed the sound of chiming bells until he found a long-abandoned church and a derelict graveyard. Sometimes it’s perfectly explicable, but still likely to freak out most people – for example, there are animals out there whose calls in the middle of the night sound uncannily like a woman being murdered and screaming out her last. If it rains, people will hear the sound of whispering voices, or sometimes eerie music, as the droplets hit the tent and the leaves of trees, a neurological phenomenon known as auditory pareidolia; folks with white noise sleeping devices encounter it too. Sometimes dangerous animals come by to sniff around the camp site, bears mostly. Most often, though, the creepy threat comes from other people who simply shouldn’t be there in the woods at three in the morning. Some camping vlogger will wake up in his tent at some ungodly hour to the sound of a voice, all sing-songy, hollering I seeeeeeeee youuuuuuuu. Often, they’ll hear footsteps as people circle the tent, and then watch the impression on the inside of the fabric as a stranger of unknown intentions runs his fingers along the nylon. Those in camper vans often get knocks on the door – in the dead of night, in the middle of nowhere, miles and miles from the nearest place anybody lives. There’s dozens of videos in which campers out exploring at night with their flashlights – often alone, I can’t understand anybody who wants to wander around untamed woods by himself in the middle of the night – encounter lunatics, maniacs, or strange sites at which people were obviously present within the past few hours, and, given all the blood, pentagrams, and goat skulls, were obviously up to something wicked and terrifying. Sometimes, these solitary explorers will end up being chased through the forest by unknown assailants wielding axes and guns. One time it was a woman in a white dress, screaming and waving a hatchet around. What was she doing out there? Where did she come from? (Amazingly the guy got a cell signal, and the police came and arrested her). Another time, a guy in a camper heard something funny outside, and peered out of his vehicle to discover that somebody had hung a halloween mask on the low branch of nearby tree, apparently just to freak him out.
And sometimes, surprisingly often, it’s “cryptids”, purported weird creatures unknown to science, “rakes”, “skinwalkers”, and of course Bigfoot. These could all be fakes, of course, but let me tell you, many of them don’t seem like fakes, or if they are, then the camper behind the camera doesn’t seem to be in on the hoax.
Maybe it’s all fake, I don’t know, but I really don’t think so, not most of the time, and even if it’s all hooey, hats off to the myriad YouTube content creators who repeatedly manage to make The Blair Witch Project look like The Sound of Music.
Police High Speed Pursuits
Boy howdy, these really are mesmerizing. A lot of them are better than anything out of Hollywood, showcasing high definition dashcam video of cop cars going 140 – 150 MPH in hot pursuit of some souped-up Corvette or Dodge Charger (it’s amazing how often the quarry is driving a Charger) that can easily out-run him at that speed, often filmed at night, the perp weaving in and out of traffic at insanely dangerous velocity, passing other cars, which are themselves going the speed limit, as if they’re frickin’ fenceposts. Hardly anybody gets away of course, and spectacular crashes, often caused by the police on purpose, are frequent. Man, you should see what a car does when it crashes doing 150, the physics are amazing, and you’d also be amazed at what people can walk away from in this age of properly-designed cars with shoulder harnesses, air bags, and crumple zones. You’d also be amazed at how ungodly fast great big American pickup trucks can go.
I could watch this shit for hours. I have.
Reaction Videos
There are two main types: people listen to music while you watch, and then tell you what they think, or they watch a movie and give a review, in both cases providing commentary and reactions along the way. Mostly these people are ordinary rubes with no particular credentials to be talking about the art they’re critiquing, but not always, and sometimes even the ordinary rubes can be surprisingly insightful. It can also be quite moving. I remember watching a young woman with a melodious voice and lovely soft accent, posting from Camaroon, who was listening to the Beatles for the first time. As Hey Jude progressed, she grew increasingly emotional, her eyes welling, utterly immersed in what was clearly, to her, an astonishing experience, and at the end she said “thank you Jude, whoever you were, for inspiring this song. There has to be a back story here”, which of course there was. It’s a wonderful thing to see.
On the cinematic side, one of my favourites is a woman named Coby Connell, who, all right, let’s not pretend I never noticed, is an absolute smoke show, she’s drop dead gorgeous, and blessed with the sort of happy-go-lucky, confidently cheerful demeanour typical of those who never looked bad in anything and probably don’t know it’s even possible to pay for a drink. She can also come off as a bit of a goof, in a benign, appealing sort of way, but sit with her through a film and you’ll realize she isn’t. Look at the movies she picks: 2001; Apocalypse Now; Saving Private Ryan; one classic after another, and she really gets them. She was close to crying like a baby at points during Private Ryan.
If you want expert commentary, you can find that too, all kinds of it. Here’s a military historian with expertise in Napoleonic era naval warfare reacting to Master and Commander (which is, parenthetically, the manliest movie ever made):
Real Estate Porn
Best to avoid these if you’re prone to bitterness, or upset at the grotesque injustice of wealth distribution in our incredibly unfair system of Darwinian capitalism, which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like me, but I can’t resist; I’m just fascinated with these tours of the most expensive properties on earth, especially the penthouse units of New York’s fabled Billionaires’ Row. I suppose you could deride them for being about as foolishly infatuated with the trappings of wealth as Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous used to be, but the difference is that these videos are also documenting landmark achievements in engineering, architecture, and interior design. Look at this one, and imagine what some Pharaoh or Emperor of old would have given to have lorded it over his subjects from such an Olympian perch:
Proving How Stupid Americans Are
Grimly satisfying to those who’ve been cultivating their Trump Era contempt for the American general population, but terrifying and soul-crushing to anyone trying to nurture some faint, fading ember of hope for the future, this robust genre features person-in-the-street interviews contrived to demonstrate, beyond any rational doubt, that the average American is the dumbest dumbass who ever lived. Seriously, there were medieval serfs with more, and more accurate, general knowledge. These people can’t divide 27 by 3, tell you how many moons the Earth has, or find – or even name – a country on a map. By that I mean, no fooling, some of these brainstems draw a blank if asked to simply name one other country on Earth besides the United States. The boob will say “Europe”, or “Africa”, or just stand there, slack-jawed, looking at the guy holding the mic with dead eyes. I’m surprised these dim bulbs can tell you their own names.
There’s Serious Stuff Too
If you want to watch documentaries, listen to expert analysis, keep up with world affairs, get briefed on the latest scientific breakthroughs, it’s all in there, and tons more. You could give yourself a pretty good general education on YouTube, if you wanted.
Or you could sit there on your couch looking about as clever and lively as an oversized link sausage, absorbed in the hot pursuit of some moron in a Dodge Charger who was pulled over for expired tags, and decided it was a good idea to wait ‘til the cop exited his vehicle to tear off down the crowded interstate at 150 MPH.
Either way. Both legit.
the needlefish 