Introductions and conclusions: the Youtube community and and its downfalls

Outline:

•  Introduction: What is the Youtube community
• A: Who are the "top" Youtubers (in each category)
• B: The fan/creator relationship (fan and actor/singer relationship compared to fan and Youtube creator relationship)
• C: The beauty of the Youtube community: use of the fan/creator closeness for good (group projects or missions ei the Vlogbrothers or Markiplier)
• D: Problems of the fan/Youtuber relationship: use of the fan/creator closeness for personal gain (creators have access to fans and abuse of power and of the fan's hero worship by said creators can occur ei. Alex Day and similar cases)
• E: Solutions/reactions the rest of the community can offer when a problematic fan/creator relationship comes to light
• Conclusion: Restate

Introduction:

If I really have to introduce Youtube to you, you've been living under a rock since the millenium; on the other hand, the Youtube communtiy is a completly different thing that is maybe a little hard to understand, if you don't spend seventy percent of your time on the internet. The Youtube community is made up of fans (the viewers of Youtube's content) and creators (the ones who make Youtube's content, the world's "newest form of celebrity"); these creators include critics of films or video games, people who talk about their daily lives (or vloggers), people who provide commentary for games as they play them (or lets players), musicians and artists of all kinds, comedians and people who are just trying to educate other people.

Conclusion:
To finish all this up, I would like to say that Youtube's close-knit community should be considered as a good thing, not a problematic system because of a few (admittedly horrible) cases of abuse within the system. Youtubers of all kinds reach out to their fans through their videos, cheering them up and motivating them to do good things or, even, just making them laugh. The Youtuber is a new and intresting celebrity archetype and many people who find themselves fitting it use their influence for good. But, when bad situations occur in the community, we need to pull together to fix them, to protect those around us, so that all of us can continue to enjoy creating and consuming content on such a strange, wonderful website.

Recommended Youtubers:

• Video Game Critics: JonTron and Egoraptor (specifically Egoraptor's Sequelitis series)
• Vloggers: danisnotonfire, amazingphil and jacksgap
• Lets players: Markiplier and gamegrumps
• Musicians/Artists: Ninja Sex Party (a comedy band) and sokolum79 (a makeup artist)
• Comedians: Toboscus and jacksfilms
• Educators: CrashCourse

Thesis statement on: Legal name changing

If someone states that they are against legal name changing because people will give themselves silly names, remind them that are children named after rappers, alcohol and, probably, Hitler; legal name changing is best described as a way for someone to escape the name their parents gave them the minute they shot out the womb, looking kinda like a fat, minature Winston Churchill (with no personality whatsoever) and that, given that legal name changing can only done with either consent of  an adult or of the individual, most changes better reflect differences with parents in such  areas as music, taste in beverage or just what gender their child, anyway.

What even is weather I mean come on

For those of us who love to complain, going on about the weather is a sure fire way to give everyone a gut's full of your crankiness. The weather here, in Southern Spain, is a grumbler's dream. Let me break it down for you real quick.

Spending a summer here is like camping out on Satan's taint. It's the worst (well, second worst); the sun beats down from about seven am until nine pm, if the temperature isn't above thirty-five at noon you should consider yourself lucky, you never want to do anything except drink cool beer and wallow around, restaraunts try to give you frost bite with their air con, you have to get a job and, to top it all off, the tourists come out to play. Or just generally fuck shit up for everyone. There's no parking spaces, no beach, just umbrellas, the supermarkets get ransacked... From an ecological point of view, the amount of water wasted in this sad, dry little province is astounding.

Then again, don't get me started on winter. Winter is the (actual) worst. And, yes, I know some people think winter is cosy and all that. They're wrong. Winter is cold. Winter is wet. Winter is windy. Winter is chapped lips and dry, bleeding hands, washing that's still damp after two days and about seven hours of light a day, long sleeves getting soggy from hand taps and it being the Arctic outside of the covers. Yes, snow is nice. It would be just great if the sky could get it together enough to snow on us for the first time in eleven years. Sure, jumpers are cute and all, but in winter they take three days and a hair dryer to sort out after one quick wash.

And, of course, I'd love to complain about spring and autumn. Too bad we don't have those here.

The wonderful thing about flat sharing

The wonderful thing about flat sharing is that you don't just share an address and a front door. You share a kitchen (and washing up liquid), a bathroom (and toilet paper), a lounge (and floor cleaner) and so on and so forth. This is all just top notch, until you realize that someone is going to have to put their hand into their pockets and go fishing in the sea of lint and the corners of sugar packets for the elusive, deep-pocket creature that is money. And then, of course, you think "And who will that be?".

Well, you could take turns, right? Someone (not you, of course) could go to the shop and buy washing up liquid and toilet roll and floor cleaner and kitchen roll and antibacterial spray and serviettes and tissues and furniture polish and tin foil and cooking oil and fabric softner.

Oh, wait. Hold up a sec, we're *students*. We don't have that kind of money! Why would I spend twenty euros in one sitting for stuff everyone's gonna use, when there's no actual guarantee the next personal will do the right thing? Twenty euros is this week's food monety and cigarette money and condom money and the money I need to pay that guy who... who I saw about a dog. So, that's out the window.

That's fine, ya know, everyone can just buy their own stuff.  Three sets of washing up liquid and three sets of toilet roll and three sets of floor cleaner and three sets of kitchen roll and three sets of antibacterial spray and three sets of serviettes and three sets of tissues and three sets of furniture polish and three sets of tin foil and three sets of cooking oil and three sets of fabric softner. And then we just line them up in neat little rows, all different colours and brands to tell them apart, with little stickers saying things like "KEEP OFF!" and "DON'T TOUCH".

And then, sooner or later, the level on someone's fabric softner will go down a little too fast, suspiciously fats... And that, ladies gents and variations there upon, is how the hair-pulling and the name-calling starts. And now, if you look out the windows to your right, you can see three flat mates up Shit Creak without so much as a fucking canoe until their lease runs out.

So, uh, yeah... why not follow the teachings of our dear friend Karl? We could have conmmunal supplies and a communal kitty (why is that a thing that people say?) to buy them from. Everyone's happy, right?

Right?

Glasses vs contact lenses (the eternal struggle of someone with a stupid fucking astigmatism) (task 4)

Uh, yeah, so, maybe that title isn't warrented. Except my astigmatism makes me SO FUCKING MAD. Sorry, sorry. I'm fine, really. An astigmatism, for you lucky sods that don't have one, is a eye defect that consists in my eye being twisted within my eye socket for some weird bloody reason, which, along with my childhood habit of reading in badly-lit places, makes me short-sighted. This is not fun.

Glasses are very useful because they make it so that I can actually see more than two feet in front of my face. These days glasses are quite stylish and there are even designer glasses, as well as glasses that react to sunlight. Contact lenses, on the other hand, make it so that people don't realise you're blind as all fuck and, well, people tend to notice the glasses before anything else on my face. This would all fine and dandy if my wonderful friend Astigmatism hadn't seen fit to make it so that contact lenses don't really work for me. So, yes, I look nicer, but I can't actually see very far off.

Glasses are inconvenient in certail situations. Swimming, for example. Wearing glasses in the sea tends to lead to rusted frames and, well, lost glasses. Sports are also difficult when something rather fragile and worth about a hundred euros is perched on the bridge of your nose and you happen to be very bad at sports. Contact lenses tend to help in these situations, although getting sea water in your eye with them in is tear inducing.

Contact lenses are inconvenient when I actually, you know, need to see. So, even if I'd like to, I can't wear them to school. I can't see the board as it is (Can someone remind me to get some new glasses soon?).

So, conclusion? Glasses, practical. Contact lenses, not so much, but pretty cool. Modern medicine? It needs to hurry the hell up an make some contact lenses that actually work. 

The pros and cons of ignorance (task 5)

Ignorance is bliss for the ignorant and the powerful; ignorant people don't start revolutions and not having a revolution tends to make powerful people happy. They get to stay powerful. There are obviously, some advantages to being ignorant. It's hard to be in the know about other people's problems, or even your own problems, when you are busy. Ignorance helps people concentrate on making money, putting food on the table or even just unwinding and having a relax after a hard day's work. One of the cons of ignorance is, sometimes, the problems and issues you are ignoring affect you too. Being too busy watching Top Gear to think about the abortion debate could end badly for you if you get your girlfriend pregnant. Being too rushed off your feet to pay rent could stop you from having time to vote for a higher minimum wage. Another problem with ignorance is that, if the problem you're avoiding isn't your own, it's going to be someone else's. Ignoring the issue means ignoring another person's plight. Not addressing racism because you're too busy working a minimum wage job and you're a member of the unaffected majority does fuck all for people of colour, except further their struggle. Most people have no choice but to put their faith in a corrupt, archaic system run by old, white, hetero, cis-males who are the root of the actual problem.

My favourite place... (task 2)

Green leather. Well, maybe fake leather. Different portraits of famous authors from classical literature or illustrations from historical texts. My headphones are firmly jammed in my ears, shuffling through radically different songs as I select and option from the screen. Settling back I let the words take me away; to the Chalk, to Middle Earth, to a desert island, to New York City... My favourtie place? The hundreds of place stored inside my little kindle; all those adventures, worlds, characters, all those places I can visit in my own head. That's my favourite place in the whole wide world.