I’ve Been Working on a Draft for a Week
And it's still not done, and I don't know if it'll be done by the end of this week either. It's not even that impressive, it's just somewhat long and progress has been slow. I'll explain why when I finish the draft. In the meantime, have a #GarbageDigest.
You call that "tiny"?
This is tiny.
Precious Drops
I was listening to a dubstep mixtape from 2010 and at one point, it has a line from the movie Daybreakers where someone asks "What happens when there isn't a single drop left?" Then the music gets quiet for a moment, then another movie sample1 where someone says "It's gonna be quiet." Then bam, there's the drop. I just thought it was cute.
Youtube's Total Failure W/R/T Social Features
You know how tiktok got big because it allows you to easily clip a segment from another tiktok video for references, responses and collaborations? And you know how every platform tried to copy tiktok's success with their own shortform vertical video imprints?
Well, Youtube lets you clip bits from other people's videos, too. The number of seconds you're allowed to use? Five. You can make a 5-second video. I can't imagine a more useless feature. Even Vine gave you 7.
I know this is because of copyright, but this is true even for videos with no content ID claims, even for videos that the uploader has shared with a creative commons license. Yes, Youtube lets you do this. No, there's no functional reason to do so. From the help docs:
By marking your original video with a Creative Commons license, you're granting the entire YouTube community the right to reuse and edit that video.
Which raises the obvious question: in what way?? Youtube offers no way to download other people's videos2 or edit them on-site. It literally just puts a line in the video description stating that it's CC-BY licensed. The only way to remix it is the same way you can remix every other video, license permission or no: yt-dlp.3 But that's against the TOS and Youtube is constantly breaking it, even for CC-licensed videos we should all have the legal right to download. What a colossal waste of potential. Youtube could be the tiktok of good videos but they have no interest whatsoever in the people who use it. We are the product, advertisers are the customers. As always 🦝
Possibly from the movie District 9, but I couldn't find a clip of it to verify. It came out in
2009though, so the timeline checks out.↩Youtube claims that signing up for a premium account will allow you to download videos, but it's a lie. What it downloads is a blob of data only accessible through the Youtube apps. Tiktok lets you download an actual Mp4 file, and you don't even have to pay! Which would be awesome if there were any videos I wanted to watch on Tiktok.↩
Or use screen-recording software, but unless you have a fairly beefy computer, you're likely going to have frame drops if you record in full quality. Also you can't do anything else with your computer while you're doing it. Also it's incredibly dumb that we have to record our own second-generation copy instead of just using the video file we're already downloading. Capitalism is so stupid↩