Noiseless Chatter Archive

YouTube is fascinating. I’d like to say that it has democratized entertainment — putting programming into the hands of the people — but it’s not quite a democracy. Even unpopular channels can crank along, creating videos for an audience in the single digits with no risk of cancellation and no pressure to evolve or reach more people. It continues as long as the person who owns that channel stays interested. It’s a hobby, but one that just so happens to observable by people almost anywhere on the planet. The vast majority of channels on YouTube are self-funded. We’ll ignore channels that are part of a brand’s marketing arm — their videos are essentially digital advertising — and focus on people who create videos, more or less regularly, about topics that interest them. These creators pay for a camera. They pay for their internet connection. They may — and often do — pay for more than that, but that’s all they need. For a negligible investment and with the approval of no oth...

I’d like to interrupt this period of not watching “Spock’s Brain” to announce this year’s lineup for Rule of Three. If you aren’t familiar with Rule of Three, that’s your own fault; I provided a link to it at the end of the previous sentence and you chose not to click it. In short, every April I take long, meandering, patently unhelpful looks at three related comedy films. The series begins April 1, with the second and third posts following one and two weeks later. It’s extremely complicated. This year, I’m covering something I’ve been considering since the very start of this series: films made by YouTube celebrities. You will probably read that and think it’s a chance for me to pick on some low-budget films and make fun of people I don’t like. And that does sound like a hell of a lot of fun! But in the interests of fairness and basic human decency, I’m choosing to focus only on YouTube celebrities I actually enjoy. These are three films that — for one reason or another — ...

I’m going to open my discussion of Star Trek : The Original series season two with some unexpected disappointment. Why not, eh? My journey through Star Trek has taken place almost entirely offline. You got my summary post of season one , and I’ve exchanged messages with a few friends, but nearly all of my discussion about the show has occurred in reality, with the friends and coworkers I interact with normally. They’ve been very — impressively, even — good at allowing me to come to my own conclusions. Very, very rarely do they tell me ahead of time of a development to come or how an episode is overall received by fans. When it does happen, it’s been stuff that’s pretty obvious. (Chekov joining the cast for the second season, “The City on the Edge of Forever” being rightly beloved, etc.) Beyond that, they’ve volunteered very little that I didn’t bring up — or question — myself in the course of conversation. And yet — and yet! — there is one thing I heard many times over: Se...