Broken Bottle Blog

Well my dog, Sadie, from when I was kid had to be put to sleep. Apparently she had a stroke, I didn’t know dogs had strokes, and the vet couldn’t keep her heart rate under control. None of the drugs worked. She was pretty old anyway, her hips were bad, she couldn’t walk very well. She’ll be missed.

I don’t know about this online gift registry stuff. I mean, yeah it’s convenient for me to see what the happy couple wants, I can even order online if I want. But I don’t think the happy couple should be able to see what has been bought and what hasn’t. I know they picked everything out, but it still should be a little bit of a suprise. Not that Mike and Brennen are doing that, but I’d never know if they did.

Now for some more Youtube stuff. By now you probably heard of the diet coke and mentos trick, put mentos in a bottle of coke and it fizzes up really big. You can even make a rocket, like this:

but this video cracks me up, whenever I have a bad day I watch this, it makes me laugh everytime:

HAHA!!! did you notice the kid had a bandalier (I think that’s what it’s called) over his shoulder, with coke and mentos taped to it. Whoever put their kids up to that is a genius. Sodasoaker.com doesn’t work though, for some reason.

My internet connection has been down for a few days (but if you’re reading this it should be up, along with our home phone, finally!) so this is old news, but you may have heard. Lonelygirl15 is fake.

Well, it’s fun while it lasted, Lonelygirl15 has been exposed. Apparently 3 men from L.A. hired her and Danielbeast to act out the videos in an experiment in a new way of storytelling. It’s even been on T.V., here’s a a video, from Renetto’s youtube channel, taped off NBC. Try to ignore Renetto’s annoying commentary.

It’s also been on MSN news (link)

I saw her on Jay Leno, also.

They are still going to keep the series going, but are posting the new videos to revver.com. If you haven’t heard of revver it’s similar to youtube except every video has an ad at the end. If anyone clicks the ad, the poster of the video gets paid. Now, maybe this was a planned move. I mean LG’s videos have got over 2million views and if that continues, and even a fraction of people click ads, cha-ching. I don’t know how much money you get but it must be worthwhile. Hopefully LG and DB can get some other work out of this, ride their fame for a while. Although LG videos are still getting posted on Youtube.

I don’t know if I’ll keep watching, now that the cats out of the bag. I’m sure there will be a lot of people trying to copy LG now.

In the last week our phone, internet, and electricity were shut off, but everythings back up. Electricity was only for a day, but the phone has been off since before I went to Portland. So if you’ve been trying to call me, you can now. Of course, I still have my cell phone. We are thinking of turning off the phone altogether and just rely on cellphones, which is ok with me I guess. I didn’t know we could get internet without phone, but according to verizon you can. I guess that would save a little money. I could always use Skype at home. The only thing about skype is you can’t call from a landline to a skype user. So it’s would be pretty much used for calling out. But at two cents a minute (to call a landline) it’s cheaper than a cell phone. Of course skype to skype calls are always free, but I don’t know anyone who uses skype.

I have to confess I’ve become addicted to internet soap opera drama called youtube, mainly the video blogs, or vlogs. If you don’t know what youtube is, it’s a website that anyone can upload any video and everyone can view it. You can post comments and rate the videos also. You can even make a video response to a video. Thousands of videos are posted on a daily basis and most of them are stupid. I think many of them are just posted in order for someone to show them to friends, without paying to host them. But if a youtube users post more than one video you can subscribe to their “channel”, which makes it easy to keep up with the actual interesting videos.

Which is where the video bloggers come in, I keep up with a few, and most are actually pretty dumb, I guess it’s like a reality tv thing. Dumb and not really entertaining but you can’t stop watching. FilthyWhore, Rennetto, Geriatric1927, Riffage.com, and Lonelygirl15, and Danielbeast are the ones I watch. I admit my interest if fading in some of them, but check for yourself.

But, I just want to talk about Lonelygirl15, there is a huge amount of controversy and conspiracy theorys about her videos. You may have read about her in magzines like the New York times, she is the most subscibed to and most of her videos have over 200,000 views, with thousands of comments on each.

I’ll give you the basic run down on her story, so you don’t have to watch every video. LG (I’ll refer to her as LG from now on) is 15 and is very cute which maybe why she’s so high in rankings , she’s home-schooled, her parents don’t know she records and posts videos on youtube, she only has one friend who goes by Danielbeast( and has his own videos, and he’s obviously in love with her.) He helps her edit her videos, in fact they are they only two people you ever see, and almost all videos take place in her bedroom. The issue of religion come up in her videos, and DB (Danielbeast) describes it as weird, but they won’t reveal what it is. In one of her videos you catch a glipse of a picture of Alister Crowley with candles around it, a.k.a. a shrine. She says she’s home-schooled because she was ridiculed about being a teachers pet, the kids poked fun at her, claiming her relationship with the teacher was more than friends. She makes her parents out to be very protective, hence the reason to pull her out of school. Basically, she portrays herself as a super smart teenager who doesn’t have much access to the outside world, and talks about her life on youtube to her 26,930 subscribers.

Here’s where the fun comes in. It’s rumored that this is a viral marketing campaign, and a big corporation is behind this, for several reasons.
1.Lonelygirl15.com was registered a few weeks before the first video, although the site wasn’t public until after the first video, and it’s a fan site. How could a fan register a site before the first video
2.Lonelygirl15 was trademarked on the day of her first video.
3.The lighting and editing in her videos are really good, out of the scope of the average 15 year old.
Among other things.

(By the way, everything I read about LG is off the web, and it could all be fake. Could there be fake blogs and newsstories about a real LG, or the other way around, who knows. Although I believe the magazine articles are based on fact, but they mostly write about her popularity and youtube as a new media medium. )

If it is a marketing campaign, it’s definatley cost effective, free to post the videos, over 2 million total views of LG’s videos. Some think it’s a big corporation gearing up for a product launch, some think a religious group could be behind it, some think it could be some people, film students maybe, just experimenting with the youtube medium and the whole thing is scripted. Or it could be real, which at this point would be a let down.
If you want it explained better read this blog post.

Here’s a sample video from LG.

This shit’s better than Lost. One problem is everyone on youtube are making videos claiming to know who LG is (probably to gain subscribers to thier videos), and they are obviously bullshitting, so nobody knows what’s real anymore. What ever it is it’s generating a buzz, and the videos just came out in july. They got me hooked.

On another note there is one guy on youtube that is for real, I think. He goes by Geriatric1927 and he is a widow from england, and possibly the oldest person on youtube. He is telling his life story 10 minutes at a time (youtube limits you to 10 minute videos) and he has 16 videos so far. Very interesting. probably the only thing on youtube with substance.