Book of the Tube of You

Youtube, the video frontier; this is the voyage of one man completing a Creative Writing assignment.  My mission:  To sort through the endless number of booktubers and determine in my opinion which dos not suck.

So as I begin my voyage, my meandering drive stalls and I procrastinate, with a cold bug nipping at my hind quarters and my mind set on Calculating derivatives, I felt little to no energy to devote to watching youtube for I need all my mental capacities to fend off the sniffles and the Calculus blues.

That was until I was faced with my arch nemesis: TIME!!!! 

Seriously though, I have to admit, this was not something I would normally be a big fan of.  I enjoy hearing others opinions but I usually can gauge from conversations about this that and nothing of what we might have in common.  Such as someone telling me that they like Twilight.  I can tell that we are not going to have too much in common when it comes to what we are going to read.

Call me strange, but for the most part I stopped reading young adult stuff when I was 14.  Guess what?  Booktubers love it.  I imagine that some might even marry their favorites novels.  Let this be a story about a shy young woman and some guy with a faux hawk and an eating disorder and apparently the legs of their imagination spread like some love starve harlot in a Super 8 motel.

Now before you get too terribly offended, let me say this: I am merely posting my opinion on the matter, I am hardly an authority on anything of the sorts and those who are writing these books have vivid imagination, a thought for young love, and a less jaded romance life than me.  I am more of a fan of body counts versus romance (sex) counts.  Yes I am speaking ill of the character Anita Blake (seriously is one of her powers the ability to avoid STD’s whilst engaging in numerous orgies in one night?), she just don’t love herself.

Also if I am to be completely clear and honest I feel this way about many books from different genres, but the first three Booktubers I watched told me about their young adult romance picks of the year.  Now call it the lack of oxygen getting to my brain, or the numbers that ain’t numbers running through my head, but somewhere it flipped the switch of oh dear god.

With a clearer mind now I say, enjoy what you enjoy, and be damned the grumpy guy who reads the art of war because it seems like a reasonable life strategy. Oh yeah whilst I am in a mood of oh dear god why, for those who actually read the Simarillion and enjoyed it, HOW?  Reading the Simarillion to me is like sky diving without a parachute to save a life; a daring and noble cause but ends up being a damn tragedy in the end.

Ah but I digress, onward back to the meander drive, wander factor four.  Fourth Booktuber; Danny “I’m a Smartass” Marks.  The first thing I watched from him was him vandalizing his own young adult novel.  In my mind I said, “Wil, this guy’s got some potential.  He just drilled a hole through his book and is painting it black.”  This man also referred to himself as a whore.  I laughed, I laughed a lot.  I had finally put my imagination out on the corner.

His book shelf tour was a tour of his shelf he labeled adult that he was promising to read for the New Year.  He had a lot horror books in his 24 book promise and some science fiction along with detective stories.  I heard a bell chime in the distance as an angel got its wings, or maybe it was the music I was listening to.

He never really mentioned any of his favorite characters, but he was quite prolific about his favorite book covers and book covers that he just didn’t like at all.  I think he has a thing against the color pink.  As far as wrap-ups went I didn’t come across those but he does do something call his weekly agenda which is basically ever two or three days he announces an agenda and he tells you of what books he plans to read and things he thinks about doing in the week.

 Didn’t note any book clubs he was a part of but then again I didn’t watch all of his videos either, but that seems hardly the point really.  What I enjoy is his ability to tell why he enjoys the books he does and make fun of himself and things that go with it.  I feel like that if you enjoy something then you can find a way to make yourself laugh at your own obsession.

There is not big productions to his videos, he has semi-neat book shelves behind him seems to really enjoy what he is doing.  However I have noticed that with a lot of the booktubers, they do these jumpy edits in their videos, that go on directly to the next topic without a transition or a lead in.  this is only slightly distracting to me, but I can deal.

Most booktubers seem to be about their hauls.  Their weekly book splurges that they intend to read, but as Danny Marks says he buys a lot of books and only reads some of them.  They are also big on waiting for their favorite authors to release books and how they look forward to seeing their favorite books be made into movies.  No harm in that I think.  Hey when they first said there was going to be a Lord of the Rings franchise in live action, I was more than a little happy.

Personally I don’t think I could be a booktuber.  There is that whole thing of time; I just sometimes don’t feel like I have a lot of it.  Then there comes the reviewing of books.  It is easy to tell my friends that I wouldn’t read something and exactly why and give it some choice comparisons with cleaning parts of a bulls anatomy with it, but to tell that to a few hundred or thousands of people that book sucks and why.  That is a level of truth that I feel like should not be served on a global scale.

All and all I think there is a general need for folks who do this sort of thing.  If you find someone who reads a lot of the same books as you then you are going to tend to gravity towards the books they read if they tell you that they are good books to read.  And sometimes a little push towards something you may not have heard of or may not have tried might deliver you to a new level of enjoyment.

Meandering Minds Want to Read

Goodreads.com and Shelfari.com; two websites with pretty much the same function and effect.  I kind of wished I had known about these two sites sooner, as I might have been able to avoid some books that made me toss the damn things across the room in a fit of rage and the burning question as to why did I pick up these intolerable pieces of flaming horse excrement in the first place.

Signing up wasn’t a terrible chore, just that sometimes it felt like it was going to take forever to get information on my friends who use Good Read.  Shelfari on the other hand went really quick, but seeing as how they are supported by Amazon, I am certain their tech staff and servers are a bit larger.

Currently at the pitiful hour in the morning there are 275 people requesting the book “Nellcott My Darling.” by Golda Fried; my current creative writing professor.  I am currently a member of mostly science fiction groups, because hey I am an engineering major and I really science and I enjoy sometimes poking holes in some stories, not always mind you, but there are those days when a mean spirited rant of how a 200 foot tall robot with a fox head man by British space marines just needs a proper jeering.  But mostly I like things that go big badda boom, and planet destroying space ships make a pretty nice size explosion. BOOM heh heh.

When I start naming shelves I might go with something like the Boom Factor, Pointy Things in major organs, because I was told it was good, I enjoy the torture of myself, Elves Must DIE!, And the big green thing eats your face, Too long, or Poetry: a moment of weakness, guilt, and pleasure.

I have to say I would definitely recommend this to friends, family, and the occasional acquaintance.  It is a good way to share what you enjoy reading, get ideas of what to read next and to delve into something you might not otherwise read.

The Measure of a Description

It can be measured but never truly understood, it is an enigma that has plagued humankind and driven some to simply accept it without question.  Its measure is boundless, yet it is appearance seems small.  It is felt but never seen, although we see it work all the time both in spectacular functions and in minor apparitions of itself. 

Many have sought to oppose it and yet it holds all things prisoner, including time.    It allows us to do great things, but always keeps us in its grace.  It is a prison without walls, yet it nurtures us.  Without it we would have no food to eat, no water to drink and no air to breath.  It gives us games to play, ideas to accomplish and many sleepless hours of discomfort.

We all feel it, every year, every month, every week, every day, every hour, every minute and every second, even in our deaths.  It warps our perceptions of all things we encounter.  It is so weak that a leaf can deny it for a time, yet it pulls down mountains and buildings in it grasp.  It is the measure of the severity of situation but its weight can be lifted.  It always works and never takes time off, without it we would surely die, but its efforts will be the undoing of all life as we know it.