Can't blame Baldur's Gate this time, even if I did play for a couple of hours this morning. Many demands on my time from much less entertaining sources mean there may be fewer posts - or shorter posts - here for a while. Still, shorter posts have been a dream of mine for years now so it's an ill wind that blows nobody's hat off or whatever the expression is.
In lieu of a proper post, I'm going to take a moment to share a couple of curious time-wasters I discovered yesterday. That could refer to the... shall we call them apps? Not sure. Websites? Could be. Or maybe it's a somewhat uncharitable description of the people who created them.
Very unfair, that would be. Time well spent, I'd say. It's we who watch the results who will be wasting our time. [Oh just get on with it! - The Audience]
Very well then. I shall. Here's the first.
This one came to me by way of the NME and so far they're the only media outlet I follow to have reported on it, which is unusual. Firstly, because NME, Stereogum and Pitchfork reliably cover the same stories, day in, day out, and secondly because if it didn't happen in Britain, NME is almost always a day late telling anyone about it.
They were ahead of the pack on this one, although it may be that no-one else thought it worth mentioning. The story, for the click-averse, is that "someone on Reddit" decided to respond to MTV's decision to stop showing any music videos at all by recreating MTV as it used to be when music videos were all it showed.
The "someone" is in fact a redditor going by ShillyLou. Why NME declined to credit them by name is unclear. ShillyLou's account is currently suspended but only, I believe, because the sudden huge interest it attracted triggered reddit's bot alarm.
The actual website - I'm going with that - is called MTV REWIND and it lets you select any decade from the seventies to when MTV pulled the plug this year. It plays music videos with some period commercials thrown in for flavor. Currently there are over 30,000 videos and ten channels to choose from.
There was some concern shown in the reddit thread for the future of the project. People assumed it would quickly get shut down by MTV's IP owner, Paramount. That seems a lot less likely when you learn that the entire thing is powered via YouTube's API, meaning every song that plays is an embedded YouTube video. I spent some time researching the legalities when I began featuring music videos here. As far as I understand it, if you follow YT's official procedure, they have all the rights nailed down already, so Paramount will most likely have to put up with it.
With that in mind, I look forward to many hours of quality period entertainment, entirely ad and subscription free. ShillyLou isn't taking money for ads and YouTube's own embedding process excludes theirs.
I recommend it even if you never watched MTV. I only ever watched it in the 'eighties. I wish I'd watched it more, now it's gone. It's like radio with pictures!
The other, somewhat similar project I ran across while I was reading the reddit thread is My Retro TVs. This one offers six decades (50s to 2000s.) of (American) television. Everything from news and sport to cartoons and drama.
Again, it's all drawn from YouTube. I'm not sure if there are any full-length shows in the mix. I watched about half an hour of it last night and it was all trailers, commercials and two or three minute clips, although I did sit through a full-length Heckle and Jeckle. They never were very funny, were they?
I'm not a big one for nostalgia for its own sake but for me, not having a great deal of familiarity with a lot of the very specifically US Network TV content, it feels more like some kind of art installation. It's weirdly compelling.
Last and not least but also not quite the same thing, I'm subbed to a very odd YouTube channel, astryuuna, which commenters keep describing as "how YouTube used to be". It's all too easy to forget that YouTube did indeed used to be the playground for mavericks, tricksters and the techno avant garde. Maybe it can be again. These projects prove that it's still possible.
I enjoy all of them, anyway, so I thought I'd pass the pleasure on. If anyone has any similar gems, do feel free to share.
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I was wondering when you were going to mention the MTV music video channel shutdowns. To be honest, I went over the list and didn't recognize any of the channels that went dark. Given that Paramount is trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, I doubt they're paying much attention to a YouTube channel.
ReplyDeleteThe only time I ever watched MTV was in the '80s when I played AD&D at a friend's house every Sunday. He had cable, which no-one else I knew did at the time, and in the breaks he'd put MTV on in the background. I thought it was a great idea, a TV channel that just showed music videos, but not so great I ever bothered to watch it again after the gaming group broke up. Can't say I'll miss it - or would have noticed it was gone if I hadn't been told.
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