Mega discussion: physical culture, youtube, music, life

 27.10.2021

Hmmm.

Well, I'm off my rocker right now on caffeine and workout endorphins, so I'm wary of writing anything, hehe. Caffeine - funny stuff. Makes me feel expressive. But, truth is, I'm always expressive. Had two batches of coffee today. Felt nice and smooth. And I'm not sure what I've been doing on google. Trying to set something up, but it's not working well. Wrote a script for the next video. Maybe that's the aforementioned splitting of tasks. can't do everything at once. That's lowkey lazy. I wrote short "demos" for two of my songs in my last EP, and two were made faster. I oughta reuse my old "short songs", treat them like demos. Working out right now. I actually upped my supposed max in OHP to 135 kgs. So far it's not going too poorly, my wrist is hurting though.

Overhead press

Warmup

50*6

70*6

90*5

100*5 last warmup set

105*5

107,8 - 2 sets of 5

107,8 for 4, the fifth one I pressed forward and didn't reach the sticking point

107,8 for 1 quickly, to compensate for the volume.

Some of the reps today were ugly - due to disbalance. All of them involved heaving my torso - because that oldschool Olympic press. My legs weren't too straight, admittedly. But don't forget - it is the right way to train overhead press. This is a way to turn OHP into an actual powerful movement, and it can look sufficiently strict.

Pushpress

This time it's actually PP, not pushjerk. I'm revitalizing the old technique of actually straightforward jumping upwards and not using my arms as much. So I imagined I'm gonna press 1 kg on ther first weight (50). It flew up so much it overextended my arms. That's the right way to connect energy!

50*3

70*3

90*2

100*1 or 2 can't remember

110*1

120*1 not that great, to be honest. Easy, but knid of wrong. Leaning back. Well, it is 80% of my supposed max.
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All of this took almost three hours. I was distracted a little bit. Kept going up and down the stairs for some cardio, ha ha.
And we're going to leave all accessory work for tomorrow.
And also I used some high bar squats - just two sets of 50 kgs for 10 reps as a warmup before OHP and PP. I just often feel like when I'm warming up too specifically it's never enough. You need some moderately noticeable stimulant in order to activate endorphin release, hehe.

Well, I have some residual energy. I ended up doing some squat-like stretches cause my back is so stiff. It used to be my lubar region, and it was painful - back when I was sitting in front of my PC. Now it's my middle back, the one that works a lot during DLs, and it's not painful, just tiring.
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Now I have a little snippet regarding Youtube mechanics to share -

Earlier today I was browsing through my feed and I noticed a new video Smosh - https://youtu.be/OkYi-FFrk-g this one. And in the thumbnail there were three actresses girls, but Courtney - the oldest of "new" Smosh members and the most popular so far idk - she was in the back with her face being all funny and attractive in a weird way. And now I'm browsing through feed again and I notice they did change the thumbnail to just her, Courtney Miller! btw, they only had like 34k views over multiple hours, which is low for them. Now they have 70k, which is better.
Such occasion makes me wonder - do I myself have that youtuber mindset? Ain't that weird how I sort of predicted what's gonna happen? Well, not really, I just felt something that someone else felt, probably.

Ah, Smosh. It used to be my favorite youtube channel. Specifically old Smosh. People don't know it, but old Smosh only really started disappearing AFTER Anthony Left. They still "had it", imho. But I am an avid viewer and a fellow wannabe youtuber who is, in fact, quite interested in youtube. Have been for a long time. Pretty sure it's my most visited site on teh internet. I've probably spent multiple dozens of thousands of hours watching it since 2008, when I watched it for the first time. I watched Angry Nintendo Nerd and Mark Lleung's Final Fantasy parodies before I was on youtube. And CollegeHumor too. It sucked way less back then! But they were always a commercially inclined company, which makes them suck naturally (afaik). Yes, back in the day we had gaming DVDs with mods, demos and videos included with gaming magazines. That was my internet back in the day. Still have a large collection in my drawer. Oh, the good old days. Not all of them were good. Why aren't we born smart? Ha ha.

Let's talk about Youtube some more. Specifically about Shorts. I've been binging them for many hours for a while now. I remember when they actually were in "beta" and I couldn't always find them on my phone. Now there's a designated button for them! YT really has caught onto that low attention span audience now, and they're about to beat TikTok. CAuse I don't have it. And it's a cridngy fad site - unless tehy change their name again the Vine fate awaits them. Vina was the same thing back in the day. Possibly even more gimmicky. I remember seeing Logan Paul vines before he became a youtuber. What a time. And all that happened after 2016.
Well, TikTOk doesn't necessarily have to change their name, but they definitely will have to keep up with all sorts of gimmicks as their audience grows up. I'm not on it, but I'm watching stuff from it on youtube shorts! Cause YT is less cringe. And back in the day YT was a gimmick site as well! RWJ and Smosh were basically th same thing - youthful trendy content creators, cracking sharp jokes and lipsyncing to viral songs. The cycle continues!

Anyway, recently I came across a channel in shorts - this guy https://www.youtube.com/c/SatchOnSims/
And I'm surprised. His normal 16:9 videos barely have any views. And they're pretty well made, and there's a lot of them!
But his shorts are quita perfect - all the same concept (revolving around shockingly ugly characters in Sims4), and they're very well edited to those viral TikTok tracks. And he gets a lot of views on them! And I cracked up a lot watching them. So now we basically have two different uh... things... businesses... sites... on one site! On the good old cozy Youtube which I still love so much, even as has been becoming more and more stressful for me. It's literally a hobby at this point, even viewing it.

There are different kinds of youtubers. There are ones who have something IRl and those who only have the internet. Pewdiepie, for example, is the latter. Someone like Glenn Fricker is the first kind. I kinda wish I could've been one of them. He has over a thousand videos but almost 100mil views, which evens out his vids at 100k each - which is pretty great. And he barely puts any specific effort into each video, he just record himself doing his normal job and talking about it, talking about the actual art of music! And he's intentionally being annoying and provocative. You can see it in his face quite often. And he also admitted it. So he's not actually autistic as he'd have you believe from all the raging screaming thumbnails and unsafe opinions.

I mean, I'm the kinda guy who does believe in tonewood. It's not just about metal, Glenn! It's about the actual science. So, since it does make a difference in tone - it does make it! It doesn't matter that nothing changes in metal, it's a scientific fact. I mean, just think about for a second. The strings on the guitar resonate off the actual guitar body! It might not make a difference to the individual, but it is there, an actual scientific difference, and that's what matters. And Paul Reed Smith agrees on tonewood. Why don't you listen to him? HEck, I think I would've bought a PRS guitar if it was cheaper. but I probably woulpdn't have wanted one if it was the case, lol. Don't really wanna buy a cheap guitar now. I already have an intermediate sort of Epiphone SG, why would I wanna downgrade? Perhaps if I lost the guitar and I was out of money, then I could consider buying a cheap alternative. That's one of the reasons I decided to return my offbrand Les Paul, besides the fact that it had crumbly plywood on the inside.

You know, the random title for this post was supposed to be "Deteriorated mail bush (accurate!)" but I decided to change it to a slightly more descriptive one, since I'm letting my graphomania shine. BUT here's what AID pic generator made with these words - quite entertaining, isn't it?

More stuff about music - this time, music theory. I've been using an exercise suggested by Rotem Sivan and playing different chords and naming them. For example, the bottom three strings have all the diatonic chords in a variety of simple shapes. I've figured them out and been playing them in A Major, or E Mixolydian. And earlier I was doing the same with E Minor. And also I've been doing another exercise - figuring out and playing all the different positions for 7th chords in an octave. A lot of them are simple open/barre chords, but that's kinda lazy, innit? Gotta try and move it down the neck.

I just realised I have a "guitar" tag in the list of tags I commonly use. I think I oughta use it more often! I've been overusing the "drums" tag and marking every day that I drummed on with it, even if I didn't write much about it. It's hard to write about drums and percussion without showing. That's why teachers are so important.
And Jimmyhere uploaded his weekly video early today. What a smart tactic, making viewers wait for your video the whole week! And it all started from a silly random meme. That's how it can be quite profitable to be eccentric on camera! That's why some of my videos did attract views - I have a rather weird "public accent", trying to make myself sound more "posh", if you will. On my last two videos - the ones with a cam - it sort of disappeared. I gotta bring it back and surprise everyone and everything. And dont' bring up stuff that might break the "youtube 4th wall", which is a curious concept that I might explore in the future. All youtubers have their very special on-screen personas. Some differ from their real self a lot. Mine doesn't, not very much, as you can see from this blog. Well, it can be depressive, or acting depressed and doomy/gloomy. It's a part of the style, isn't it? Making my often pointless and meaningless suffering feel valuable through stylizing it. A perfect example of it is my second song on my last EP - "Prayer of the Unavenged". Inspired, but not based on real life. But it's as genuine as it can be. I myself was surprised on being able to produce suchy vocals from myself. And it's kind of a groovy song as well. But obviously it's really stressful due to an extremely distorted guitar tone, mostly. And it combines well with any tritone-containing scale, in my case it was C Blues scale with some extra notes. "Extra notes" are often much move valuable, aren't then? The things that you don't expect. The tritone. it's been overused, of course. It's still one of those notes.