YouTube

I have a YouTube account. Occasionally I post video of my trips. Generally my videos are records of my vacations to places as diverse as the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, to hikes in Glacier National Park in Montana. They're there for my own pleasure, and as ways for friends and family to see some of the places I've visited. 

I don't do it for money since my account is too small for YouTube to assign it to monetization. There's a minimum number of subscribers one must have to earn funds on YouTube, and I don't have those subscribers.

However, I do watch a number of YouTube channels that are monetized. Some of them earn out impressive sums for their creators. One guy I used to watch had about a million subscribers by the time I stopped visiting his channel. And that's what I want to write about: the reason I stop viewing some content creators on YouTube.

The reason I stopped viewing the guy whose fan base grew to enormous numbers wasn't because he started making tons of money from it. I generally couldn't care less about that. What did bug me about it was purely selfish. Initially I thought of his show as something of a secret. But as his fan base ballooned to crazy numbers the novelty of it faded and I got bored with it and just stopped watching. It was just too much the same every episode, and I also got the impression that some of it was created content rather than the spontaneous exploration that had originally attracted me. So, I wrote it off and haven't seen it in about three years.

One channel I used to watch featured a working class couple who got into hiking for fitness. Their videos showed them as a couple of fatties who did look as if they had been in good shape once upon a time and had let themselves go. They tracked their weight loss as they tackled long hikes and steep mountains and as the months progressed they were no longer overweight and after about two years were once more in excellent physical condition. And they began to wear skimpier and skimpier (and expensive) hiking clothes, showing off their physiques. For whatever reason I began to suspect that the whole thing was a setup. They'd gone DeNiro Raging Bull and had intentionally gained forty pounds each with the scheme of losing the lard online to promote themselves. Finally, watching the pair of them prance around like a couple of tarts made me nauseous. I can't even recall the title of their channel or even if it still exists.

Another guy I used to watch because he posted the best Rocky Mountain hiking information I have ever seen. I could watch his videos and decide whether our not I wanted to tackle a particular mountain when my wife and I head west for a couple of months when she retires. His videos coughed up the finest trail beta I have ever seen with details about trail difficulty and how not to veer off route on some of the tougher hikes. However, he committed what I consider to be a cardinal sin when it comes to producing how-to videos: he got political. In his case it was just one comment. But it turned his show from something fun to watch and into a screed. I couldn't look at him or hear his voice without thinking of him as an idiot. Normally I don't care what a person's political or philosophical beliefs are; but if you're creating a channel about nature then you need to focus on that and only that. Again, I can't even recall his name or the title of his YouTube channel. His was a rare case wherein I actually blocked his presence.

Some creator content I just grow bored with, or happen upon another channel that does the same thing, but in a superior way.

Then there are the folk who achieve financial success with their show and rub it in their fan's faces. Again, I don't begrudge someone turning a profit. That's fine. One hiker/kayaker I follow has achieved success and thanks his fans for allowing him to earn out enough from YouTube to use the funds to travel more widely to more interesting locations. That's okay. But some of these folk just brag. Some of them end up buying expensive toys with the money the viewers allow them to get and show it off. "Look what you losers allowed me to buy." I've axed several shows over this. One couple accumulated many thousands of fans and then attached a button to their screen that allows suckers...I mean viewers...to send them money. The instant they did that I deleted their channel.

So, essentially, unless you are producing a YouTube channel about politics, then it's best to avoid such in your YouTube channel. Just don't do it. Yes, you can attract people of one particular political inclination or another, but you can also lose a bunch of fans who would otherwise watch your show and earn money for you. Just the facts, ma'am.

Finally, along the same vein, are the channels that reach a level of popularity when they become "influencers" in the eyes of manufacturers. This lot of creators get to a point where companies send them expensive gifts with the idea that they will dedicate an episode to giving a positive review of the gifted items. This is pretty much when I take leave of them. One of the channels I watched regularly until the past couple of weeks fell victim to this. His past few videos have been glowing reviews of merchandise that manufacturers have given him. Since he became a so-called influencer I haven't seen him post any of the local travel videos he was putting up almost weekly. I'll be saying goodbye to his channel, too.

And there you have it.

YouTube.

I use YouTube as a tool and a pastime. A few years ago I began to create videos to promote my novels. Later, I decided to play around with making travelogs of my many hiking, backpacking, kayaking, and camping trips. This eventually expanded to the point where I branched out and started to make some money selling (and leasing) photos of the great outdoors.

And this, of course, got me into browsing through the many thousands of YouTube channels. So many channels. I wonder how many there are, but have never been curious enough to research it. Over the past few years I often stumble upon little independently produced channels that I find interesting or charming or informative and subscribe to them. A few of the channels I subscribed to early on I continue to follow.

But not many of them.

One thing that I find happens with a lot of these little shows is that they eventually become bogged down with soap opera style drama centering on the creators' lives. And, frankly, I don't need that freaking drama. I'm not interested in it. It's not the personal details of their lives that got me following them in the first place, beyond their desire to show how they create things or explore the great world. As soon as they start to whine about their health or their dead dog or how they are being stalked by mean people I lose interest and cancel my subscription.

And other things can happen.

One channel I used to view was created by a married 30-something couple who had once been physically active but who had become lazy and complacent and really, really fat. To help themselves get rid of the vast accumulations of lard on their asses they began to hike. You could tell that at some point the husband had been fit, and that sometime in the last few years the wife had been quite the looker (she still had a pretty face trying to peek out from behind a sheath of pink-skinned blubber). And over the course of their videos they did, indeed, lose the lard. It at first came off slowly, and then more rapidly fell from both. Over the course of a couple of years or so the husband became the muscular athlete he'd once been, and his wife transformed back into what I can only describe as "a ten". She was hot.

But then, the videos slowly became less and less about the adventures of the interesting and beautiful places they discovered where they challenged their rediscovered athletic abilities, and more about posing and preening in front of the camera wearing tank tops and yoga pants. I got sick of it and erased them from my subscription list and haven't been back to look at what they've been creating in about three years. Maybe they stopped with the channel, or came down with terminal cancer and died, or were hit by a Mack truck, perhaps eaten by a pack of rabid raccoons. I wouldn't know.

Because of this tendency to fade into personal subjectivity I end up getting rid of about three-fourths of the channels I follow. They become tedious and maudlin. I suppose it works for them, though, because by the time I end up ignoring these productions I generally find that they have accumulated tens of thousands of subscribers and have become semi-famous and are actually making money from their little videos.

Just without me in their audience.

No, thanks, on the drama. Just give me the views.

The Quiet Hiker Videos

Just some of my more recent video that I'm running on my newly-formed YouTube channel.

Typical scene in Yellowstone National Park.

YouTube Video

Lately I've been experimenting with my YouTube channel. Originally I just got it as a place to post brief videos I'd shot on various trips so that I could embed the images here on my blog. But some of them began to get a lot of hits just from being on YouTube, and some people had encouraged me to do longer, more details videos and video montages.

So, I started to connect some of the short videos I'd made on various camping, hiking, and backpacking trips. In the past I was always constricted by how much video I could shoot by memory cards and primitive cameras. But now I can quite actually shoot three to four hours of video with the cameras and SD cards they use.

Starting on my next couple of trips I'll be able to generate a healthy amount of video footage to fuel and expand my YouTube presence. Currently I'm engaged in collecting all of the video I shot from my 2012 hiking and backpacking adventures in Colorado, mainly in the Weminuche Wilderness Area, the largest wilderness in the lower 48 of the US. I'll embed them here over the next couple of days.

Hiking in the Mount Sneffels Wilderness.

Acclimation hikes in Rocky Mountain National Park after our arrival in Colorado.

Our last acclimation hikes on our way to Durango.

The excellent train ride from Durango to the trail head.

Our first full day and campsite in the Weminuche.

Second day and night in the San Juans.

New Video Type

For a long time I've been meaning to work with the video material that I've been posting on YouTube. Mainly I just post very brief videos of places where I've hiked, preferably with no voice-over and no babbling talk. Mostly videoes from just thirty seconds (sometimes less) to maybe a few minutes in length. But now I have a GoPro which makes shooting POV video very easy; along with audio. So I need to start branching out and creating longer "shows" on YouTube. In fact, I do get requests for longer installments there, so I will begin to comply as I can.

I don't have any trips planned to any of my camping or hiking destinations until later in March. But I decided to try to mess around with creating some off-the-cuff video. One thing that people do ask me from time to time are about my hiking and backpacking equipment. So the first new video I decided to create was a brief bit about the basics that I take with me when I go backpacking. I just winged it. Off the cuff as I went through the stuff with no script. Those of you who didn't know before now will discover that I have a very strong southern accent.

The first one I posted today. If I can find the time I'll add a Part Two in a day or so.

First of two videos featuring my base-line equipment.

In Colorado. Backpack loaded. Taking a break along the trail. My fellow adventurer Bob Johnson conked out alongside me. The creek sang us to sleep.

Old Posts, and Photos, and Videos Gone Dead.

I've been doing something I'd never thought about, not even in science-fiction inspired daydreams.

Lately I've found that I feel compelled to go back to very old blog posts (which people still see and search out) so that I can "fix" them. The main problems that I've seen cropping up over the past few years are vanished images, ruined video footage, and dead links. These are things that have resulted from the changing world of the Internet and the alteration of accompanying technologies.

In the past I've talked about how I tried to hedge my bets when it came to posting videos. This is the most prevalent problem I face in trying to do housekeeping on older posts here at my blog (which, strange though it seems to me, gets anywhere from 14K to 17K+ hits a month). Back in the day I tried to use several video hosting sites just in case one or more of them went under. One huge mistake I made was to situate a lot of my outdoor videos at the late Google Videos. Of course they ended up closing down and I lost many links that way. In fact, I completely lost some video footage because I bet on the wrong horse with that one.

So I go back and check on some of my hiking and backpacking blog essays to find missing images and blank spots where the videos I had listed once ran. In some cases I have completely lost the video that accompanied the essays because I had a couple of hard drive disasters that wiped them completely from the face of the Earth. In those cases I (and my readers) are just out of luck. But because I have two high-capacity external hard drives, I have managed to preserve about 95% of my old videos. The ones that weren't lost forever I have been able to retrieve and re-post, along with modified images that were also missing or skewed.

Last night I edited and repaired an old photo essay I created about hiking down into Linville Gorge and then back up to the lip of the chasm to hike the legendary Rock Jock Trail. I found the missing video and the vanished images and pretty much fixed up the old essay so that people can once again make sense of it.

The weird and ever-changing world of the Internet. I just hope YouTube stays with us, because I have a ton of stuff stashed there for easy access to my blog.

That day in 2009 in Daffodil Flats down in the bottom of Linville Gorge.

On the shore of the Linville River.

And a recovered video. Thank goodness for high capacity external hard drives.

More Southern Dialect

Sometimes within the context of a story or novel I prefer to write a character's dialogue in dialect. In the old days this was often done with lots of hyphens and apostrophes. If you've read much of H.P. Lovecraft's work then you will have encountered this type of dialect written into his fiction. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this method of illustrating dialect kind of sucks. There are generally so many little marks and squiggles in the form of those previously mentioned apostrophes and hyphens that it seems as though what you are trying to read is hieroglyphics rather than English letters.

I try to avoid that method for transferring dialect to the published page.

For years I would work in some apostrophes, avoid hyphens, and then just use phonetics to translate the sounds. The first few editors to whom I submitted did not seem keen on this tactic and they tried to school me on writing dialect. Most of the time their advice was for me to just cut it the heck out and forget about dialect.

Yeah. Well. Fuck them.

Sometimes dialect is really hard to convey. The types of dialect I try to use in my work are the types of dialect I encounter in my life--mainly various southern dialects. One kind that is really hard to show on the page is one that I hear when I'm dealing with people who live in the lower foothills of Appalachia. Yeah, that's right. There are actually variations of the dialects of the mountain-speak one hears in the higher mountains. I suppose these are people who either went no farther than the upper edge of the Piedmont and were influenced by folk from lower elevations, or they are people from the Piedmont whose speech patterns have been altered due to relatively recent contact with those moon-shine makin' butt-fuckers from the mountains. Either way, it's a funny dialect that is so unique that I find myself wanting to use it in my fiction.

But damned if it is very easy to do. These people tend to make two syllables out of one-syllable words. Simple words like "and" become "AY-and". While "pan"turns into "PAY-an". Or "bit" is pronounced "BEE-yit". If you try to write anything like that within a line of dialog you are going to run into a Jupiter-sized world of trouble. So the best way to get the idea across is the all-knowing narrator to mention the facts of life of the speech patterns one or two times so that the reader gets it locked into their mind's ear, or to have one of the other characters think to themselves how the speaker of this dialect enunciates their words.

However, for sheer effectiveness, the best method I see is to write stretches of dialect phonetically with no goddamned apostrophes, hyphens, or commas that muck it all up so that the lines end up looking like something Jackson Pollock dribbled onto the page.

I had almost gotten it right a few times when I combined phonetics with apostrophes. My mistake was in allowing the apostrophes at all. The idea first hit me when an old friend of mine from Atlanta was showing me a batch of Civil War letters he had purchased in a collection. These were genuine Civil War letters written by a Confederate soldier to his family back home. In those days a lot of people were only mildly educated unless they could afford advanced schooling. What you ended up with were men and women who had a rough understanding of the written word but not the finer details. In those cases those people wrote phonetically. I'll give you an example from one of the actual letters I was allowed to read. It concerned the outcome of a horrible battle in which the soldier had been involved, and I will quote him exactly as he wrote the line.

"They was considerbel many killt today."

Now...we all know what he meant. What an educated man would have written was: "There were considerable many killed today."

And his letter went on and on in this way. Words like "Yalls" for "your", etc.

When I read this letter I knew how I'd write dialect from then on. The first story I wrote after that was set in the 1870s and was created using snippets of letters from a man in Colorado written to his parents in Tennessee, along with scenes of action and dialog between his compatriots. All dialog was written just as they would have said it--in phonetics. I did not use hyphens or apostrophes to butcher the written words as the characters were slicing and dicing the English language. The reactions I got from editors were less kind than my other methods--they all seemed to prefer Master Lovecraft's manner of conveying dialect.

Some years later I encountered the work of writers like Cormac McCarthy and Harry Crews who were penning critically acclaimed fiction using just such a technique as I had envisioned. This felt good and I knew I had been right all along, and that the editors I'd encountered who had complained were full of shit.

Or SHE it, if you will.

This here is a house I encountered one day in 2008 when I was hiking to the top of a mountain in western North Carolina. Why is it here? Because the South, goddammit. This is an area where you can hear some really amazing, kick-ass dialects, while at the same time seeing some tremendous scenery where ol' Mother Nature works overtime. (On a side note, I have never wanted to own a house so much as I did when I set eyes upon this one. I stood at the edge of the fence and took photos and didn't approach any closer because southerners know not to encroach on private property--it just ain't done. But I would have bought this house instantly if it had been for sale and I'd had the money to complete the purchase. It remains the most ideal home in the most perfect of spots I have ever seen--at the edge of field and forest, just below the summit of an impressive mountaintop.)

This video has nothing whatsoever to do with my blog. I do listen to this guy's videos on YouTube from time to time because he talks often of camping and woodcraft. Also, I love the guy's dialect and try to think of how to translate it to the written page.

Video Mistakes

A bit of a break in the schedule today. (I'll get back to the Iceberg Lake posts later.)

Years ago when I started posting stuff on the Internet I soon had to make a decision about where to upload and secure my video footage. Back then there were a fair number of such sites and I had to make some choices. What I ended up doing was placing a lot of my videos at several sites to kind of hedge my bets.

I put a lot of my stuff on Webshots. Alas, that site was abruptly sold some time back and before I could retrieve my videos (some had been lost from my hard drive in crashes), those files were forever lost to me. A mistake in that case, but you takes yer chances.

Another site that I placed too much faith in was Google Video. I figured...damn, they're the biggest name on the Internet--I'm sure their site will always be safe.

Wrong!

I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I suspect that they cut a deal with Youtube and shut down in favor of working closely with the Youtube format. As it was, one day I received a notice that I had a certain amount of time to transfer my files from Google Video to Youtube. I dallied and mainly retrieved them all, but not quite. Again, I lost some material that I had also lost on my various hard drives.

Another one that I used was Photobucket. They're still around, but it became more and more difficult to post files from them to the various online venues that I like to utilize for my blogs and thoughts and fiction promotion.

These  days, I stick with Youtube. Mistake? Well, only time will tell. They seem to be in a unique position akin to a monopoly. I don't like monopolies, but you have to live with them sometimes. Amazon is a growing monopoly, and I don't like that, but if I'm going to  send people to buy my work online then I'm pretty much forced to point them to links to my books there. Sometimes you have little or no choice in practical matters. I am forced to take a similar view in relation to Youtube.

Now...one thing that I did have a choice about was whether or not to "monetize"  my venues on the Internet. So a few years ago I made the decision to do just that with my videos on Youtube. Almost the first week I did so I began to see ads that I would term offensive attached to my postings there. I know that some ads are targeted to your viewing habits, but how ads for products that not only don't I use but to which I am morally, philosophically, and politically opposed is a mystery. It was almost as if they were there just to anger me.  So I shut down the monetization option on my videos.

Then, a few months ago, it was suggested to me by a number of people that I monetize my videos again. As with monopolies, offensive ads were just something I would have to deal with to make some money from my works on Youtube. I'm a capitalist at heart, so I figured, okay. I'll do it. So I ended up monetizing every video I have on that site (which are considerable).

Weeks and months passed. I decided to check my stats and total up what I had earned with the many tens of thousands of hits my videos were racking up. Indeed, my moving images there had garnered an impressive array of views. I was eager to see how much I'd earned.

Imagine my surprise when I found that I'd earned exactly: zero dollars and zero cents.

What the heck??!!

Like all shyster organizations, Youtube has a system in place that allows them to make a lot of money from your work, but which also allows them not to have to legally share those profits with you. I compared notes with folk who have been doing this for a much longer time than I and discovered that Youtube had changed the rules arbitrarily. People who had been making a decent amount of money from their videos had now seen their income stream dammed at the source and all of the profits staying with the parent company.

Alas.

People who had been going to my videos to view them were having to sit through the damnable ads and all I got was nothin'. You all have my apology.

I cancelled the monetization option on my Youtube channel. At least I think I have. You never know with giant corporations like Youtube. Greedy men, like Nature, always find a way.

And here are some videos that I shot that I quite like and which are now once again available without stupid ads mucking up the views.

The exact point where I first got altitude sickness.

Probably the most magical moment I ever experienced in the wild.

Another great experience where every step was a note of rocky music.


The view from Mount Craig. Often overlooked online because it's the second highest summit in the eastern USA and not the highest. In fact, though, the views here are far superior than those from nearby Mount Mitchell which is less than fifty feet higher.

Feel free to peruse all of my videos.