KD^3C^3 - 20250504 Join the chorus
It's too late for me to do the Justin Timberlake meme, but I am right on time for the Star Wars one. So imagine I put that here.
Sometimes I come across a YouTube video that basically boils down to “here’s a thing.” I think of it a the YouTube video equivalent of the Marge Simpson holding a potato meme. Someone picks up a thing (sometimes a literal thing, other times it’s like a tv show or a movie) and says “look at this. I think it’s neat”
This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, and if you’ve never heard of the thing before, it can be a chance for you to discover a thing you didn’t know about.
But sometimes I get fed one of these videos via my algorithm and It’s about something I know about already. There's an example I was going to show you, but I just looked it up and the video was made private sometime between now and when I watched it. so I'll be a little more vague, as I can't give you the specifics.
The tv show Solitary is something you probably haven’t heard of, but I have because I was a reality tv show obsessed teen and I watched it when it was airing. I watched the whole first season and then occasionally thought about it for the rest of my life. It’s not a great show and I don’t recommend you go looking for it, but I remember significant parts of it.
So I was surprised when a video creator started talking about it. I was even excited to watch the video and see what he thought of it. But by the ends of the video the conclusion was “yup, that’s a thing, pretty messed up huh?” I walked away from it not knowing anything more about it than I started, not even much about what the video creator thought of it.
I came out of the viewing experience feeling a little hollow. "So what?' is the question I am left asking.
Maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s enough to be an empirical historian. It’s enough to show someone something new, that they hadn’t seen before. But if the content of the video doesn’t accomplish more than recapping the Wikipedia page (or equivalent) then why am I watching this video instead of reading the Wikipedia page? Or why am I hearing about this from you? What additional context or perspective or opinion did you, the creator bring to the table?
This is also why I’m generally opposed to the empiricist method of historiography, but I'm not sure this is the place to fall down that rabbit hole. Oh, maybe just a little. Empiricism is the kind of history writing that sticks to things that can be absolutely known and tried to provide no additional information or speculation. It's like the scientific method applied to historiography. Empiricism starts from the assumption that without evidence we cannot know anything. If there is a letter or a book or a shard of pottery, all we can know is what is written in that letter or book or on that shard of pottery. The empiricist says "here's the thing" and the only context provided is other things that also exist. They look at the job of writing history as one of discovery, but let the readers of history draw their own connections and conclusions. I am not inherently opposed to the ideas they present, and the basis for how they think history should be written, but they never seem to find themselves asking why. Why did this book survive, why didn't some hypothetical others. When an empiricist gets to a gap in knowledge their answer is to stop and say "We don't know, and we won't know until some evidence is found" and if no evidence ever shows up, then we'll just never know. But they claim an objectivity that I don't think they earn. Not speculating or asking questions is just as much an editorial decision as asking one is. When you can conveniently skip over gaps in history with no further knowledge, it turns out you tend to write histories about the people and institutions who had the power and ability to leave a record. Everyone else who exists remains un-written about.
Any way, back to the topic at hand. I worry sometimes that I fall into this trap. I say “here’s a thing” in this newsletter and leave it at that. I want to avoid doing that, even as I feel drawn toward it as a technique. “Here’s a thing” is easy. I don't have to think about myself or how I feel. When I dabbled in making youtube videos, I always started with asking myself, why is this a video? Why is it a video that I should be making specifically. What do I bring to the table? And there always needed to be an answer to that before i figured out what the video was going to be. Sometimes it was a personal perspective, sometimes it was a clever approach to presenting the information, sometimes a little of both. But it always had to have a reason to exist in that form.
So, here's a thing I discovered recently: You know how movie theater popcorn always tastes different from what you can make at home? I learned that part of the reason for that is almost every movie theater in the country uses the same butter-flavored popcorn salt. It's a brand called Flavacol and it's made by the same company and has been for decades. and more importantly I learned you can buy some from the internet with almost no effort. Most of their customers are industrial or commercial businesses, so the smallest amount one can buy is still a pretty large 35 ounce carton (think about a quart of milk, and you're close.) I couldn't live with that knowledge and not purchase some. So I did. I"ve only used it once, and unfortunately I burned the popcorn while making it, so it wasn't a great experiment. But I can confirm it improved the flavor and if the popcorn hadn't been burned I probably would have really enjoyed it. Further experiments are required, but I've got plenty of popcorn to work with. I should also note I used the Alton Brown method of popping corn in the microwave, which does involve a paper bag and a stapler. Also worth checking out if you want to save a couple bucks on microwave popcorn.
Hugo Watch:
It wasn't a great week for getting through nominees. I'm still reading The Ministry of Time but I also started reading teh nominees for Best Related Work. Abigail Nussbaum's book of reviews Track Changes is where I started. I'm not reading the whole thing, but I am skipping to the reviews of movies and TV shows and books I've actually read or seen. So far I really appreciate her insights and perspective. I know Nussbaum has been nominated (and won?) for best fan-writer in the past, so it's cool to see here with a book in the best related work category this year. Best related Work has some stiff competition, I've already read 2 of the other finalists, when they were originally announced. Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics” by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones and “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion” by Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford were both published on blogs I read, so I know what was in them. I don't love when things about the hugos get nominated for the hugo awards, mostly because it feels so insular and navel-gazey to me. I do think both are very good works of journalism and managed to outlay some things most hugo voters should know about, but I don't know that they'll be top of my ballot. There's also “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel” by Jenny Nicholson which I watched already because I subscribe to the youtube channel it was from. I even had it on my nominating ballot. It's a really good video (4 hours long, so watch it in parts or set aside some time) and will be hard to knock off from my top spot.
Sometimes I come across a YouTube video that basically boils down to “here’s a thing.” I think of it a the YouTube video equivalent of the Marge Simpson holding a potato meme. Someone picks up a thing (sometimes a literal thing, other times it’s like a tv show or a movie) and says “look at this. I think it’s neat”
This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, and if you’ve never heard of the thing before, it can be a chance for you to discover a thing you didn’t know about.
But sometimes I get fed one of these videos via my algorithm and It’s about something I know about already. There's an example I was going to show you, but I just looked it up and the video was made private sometime between now and when I watched it. so I'll be a little more vague, as I can't give you the specifics.
The tv show Solitary is something you probably haven’t heard of, but I have because I was a reality tv show obsessed teen and I watched it when it was airing. I watched the whole first season and then occasionally thought about it for the rest of my life. It’s not a great show and I don’t recommend you go looking for it, but I remember significant parts of it.
So I was surprised when a video creator started talking about it. I was even excited to watch the video and see what he thought of it. But by the ends of the video the conclusion was “yup, that’s a thing, pretty messed up huh?” I walked away from it not knowing anything more about it than I started, not even much about what the video creator thought of it.
I came out of the viewing experience feeling a little hollow. "So what?' is the question I am left asking.
Maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s enough to be an empirical historian. It’s enough to show someone something new, that they hadn’t seen before. But if the content of the video doesn’t accomplish more than recapping the Wikipedia page (or equivalent) then why am I watching this video instead of reading the Wikipedia page? Or why am I hearing about this from you? What additional context or perspective or opinion did you, the creator bring to the table?
This is also why I’m generally opposed to the empiricist method of historiography, but I'm not sure this is the place to fall down that rabbit hole. Oh, maybe just a little. Empiricism is the kind of history writing that sticks to things that can be absolutely known and tried to provide no additional information or speculation. It's like the scientific method applied to historiography. Empiricism starts from the assumption that without evidence we cannot know anything. If there is a letter or a book or a shard of pottery, all we can know is what is written in that letter or book or on that shard of pottery. The empiricist says "here's the thing" and the only context provided is other things that also exist. They look at the job of writing history as one of discovery, but let the readers of history draw their own connections and conclusions. I am not inherently opposed to the ideas they present, and the basis for how they think history should be written, but they never seem to find themselves asking why. Why did this book survive, why didn't some hypothetical others. When an empiricist gets to a gap in knowledge their answer is to stop and say "We don't know, and we won't know until some evidence is found" and if no evidence ever shows up, then we'll just never know. But they claim an objectivity that I don't think they earn. Not speculating or asking questions is just as much an editorial decision as asking one is. When you can conveniently skip over gaps in history with no further knowledge, it turns out you tend to write histories about the people and institutions who had the power and ability to leave a record. Everyone else who exists remains un-written about.
Any way, back to the topic at hand. I worry sometimes that I fall into this trap. I say “here’s a thing” in this newsletter and leave it at that. I want to avoid doing that, even as I feel drawn toward it as a technique. “Here’s a thing” is easy. I don't have to think about myself or how I feel. When I dabbled in making youtube videos, I always started with asking myself, why is this a video? Why is it a video that I should be making specifically. What do I bring to the table? And there always needed to be an answer to that before i figured out what the video was going to be. Sometimes it was a personal perspective, sometimes it was a clever approach to presenting the information, sometimes a little of both. But it always had to have a reason to exist in that form.
So, here's a thing I discovered recently: You know how movie theater popcorn always tastes different from what you can make at home? I learned that part of the reason for that is almost every movie theater in the country uses the same butter-flavored popcorn salt. It's a brand called Flavacol and it's made by the same company and has been for decades. and more importantly I learned you can buy some from the internet with almost no effort. Most of their customers are industrial or commercial businesses, so the smallest amount one can buy is still a pretty large 35 ounce carton (think about a quart of milk, and you're close.) I couldn't live with that knowledge and not purchase some. So I did. I"ve only used it once, and unfortunately I burned the popcorn while making it, so it wasn't a great experiment. But I can confirm it improved the flavor and if the popcorn hadn't been burned I probably would have really enjoyed it. Further experiments are required, but I've got plenty of popcorn to work with. I should also note I used the Alton Brown method of popping corn in the microwave, which does involve a paper bag and a stapler. Also worth checking out if you want to save a couple bucks on microwave popcorn.
Hugo Watch:
It wasn't a great week for getting through nominees. I'm still reading The Ministry of Time but I also started reading teh nominees for Best Related Work. Abigail Nussbaum's book of reviews Track Changes is where I started. I'm not reading the whole thing, but I am skipping to the reviews of movies and TV shows and books I've actually read or seen. So far I really appreciate her insights and perspective. I know Nussbaum has been nominated (and won?) for best fan-writer in the past, so it's cool to see here with a book in the best related work category this year. Best related Work has some stiff competition, I've already read 2 of the other finalists, when they were originally announced. Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics” by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones and “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion” by Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford were both published on blogs I read, so I know what was in them. I don't love when things about the hugos get nominated for the hugo awards, mostly because it feels so insular and navel-gazey to me. I do think both are very good works of journalism and managed to outlay some things most hugo voters should know about, but I don't know that they'll be top of my ballot. There's also “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel” by Jenny Nicholson which I watched already because I subscribe to the youtube channel it was from. I even had it on my nominating ballot. It's a really good video (4 hours long, so watch it in parts or set aside some time) and will be hard to knock off from my top spot.