Tuesday, March 24, 2009

The Moral Outrage of the Youtube Doubler

The internet's brought us a lot of stupid things we could all do without, like long screeds about how talking during The Watchmen constituted a crime against humanity. But worse than the ill-crafted whining of people who can't put pen to paper coherently is Youtube's ability to enable those people to throw the paper essay away and ad-lib one when they can't do public speaking with any real talent either. Most of these people also seem convinced that the guy talking during The Watchmen should be exterminated.

You can find these people running the attitude gamut from frothing to supercilious about virtually any topic. Just as there are the smug DEAL WITH IT internet atheists who think you haven't heard about the Good Lord croaking from a Nietzschean obituary, there are chin-stroking American citizens who think you've somehow managed to go this many years without hearing The Good News. One such genius is this guy doing a christian youth minister impression, who seems to have filmed his video essay from the Land of Overexposure and Hilariously Inappropriate Youtube Account Names:


There are so many things to love about this guy if you can manage to sit through a minute of his tautological drivel without wanting to drive a fist through your computer. There's the jaunty Myspace angle to the video, the fact that he can't "think" of himself as anything but instead "fancies himself," the luxuriantly self-satisfied extended pronunciation of "mmmModerately," the obvious note cards to the left of the computer. 

Easily the runner-up feature for me is that there's a person on the internet who considers announcing that he's watched "over 10,000 Youtube videos" to constitute the statement of his bona fides — as if somewhere out there lurks his counterpart, the guy who's qualified to talk about evolutionary biology because he spent at least 60 hours per week from 1981-1988 watching The Streets of San Francisco, Star Trek, M*A*S*H, Rat Patrol and Ellery Queen reruns on KICU-TV36.

But my hands-down favorite thing about the guy is the proud announcement that he's about to talk about a video that "many people have been bringing to my attention." 

(No, dude, they haven't. You're some jackass who apparently lives in a place lit like the meet-the-aliens scene in the movie Contact and in a room undecorated by regular visits from repo men. You find shit online. People who have things "brought to their attention" run investment banks or are partners in law firms or read the news into something operated by a dude with a union card and with more power than a webcam. And none of those guys have time during the day to post vlog responses to an audience that probably features at least one person with a playlist of videos where he fists a Yoshi doll over and over and over again.) 

I bring this guy to your attention because my friend Robert stumbled across his video one day last week, eventually latching onto this disgusting sequence in it, which managed to drive him into enough of a rage to bother editing video for something other than fame and fabulous cash money. Then, just days after the last spate of these, the Youtube Doubling started again:



Lo, he is risen.

He is risen indeed.

Ahahaha, just kidding, he doesn't have any fucking legs.