Wednesday, December 1, 2010

My First Official Video!

Ugh, what a process; like slogging through quicksand. But for better or worse, here it is...



I'm working with the notebook's mike, so the sound quality is iffy, as is the source of the sound :). Not sure if contemporaneous speaking is my thing, but since there's another audience out there to be had, I guess I'll keep plugging away at it, as time and motivation permit. Anyhow, there you go.

9 comments:

CM said...

I think you're a great contemporaneous speaker, Jim! All that preaching experience is coming in handy, I see:) This feels a little closer to meeting you in person, which I'm sure all your readers have wanted to do, especially since your book came out. Looking forward to the next installment.

metamorphhh said...

CM: Thanks very kindly. I've already gotten a few new YouTube subscribers today, which hopefully will blossom into a larger base of ears to hear. I'll try to keep it unscripted, although you could drive a fleet of trucks through all my pauses. As you might guess, I use the 'backspace' a lot while I'm writing :)

What I never realized before today, though, is just how droopy my eyes are. Yeesh, I look like I'm baked! Oh well, my hero Joel Robinson from the mighty Satellite of Love had a similar problem, and he did ok (MST3K reference for the uninitiated...shhhhhhh!)

Honestly, the video is kinda fun to do, so I'll probably do some more. Appreciate the thumbs up, CM. Hang in there.

metamorphhh said...

Oh, I knocked off a quick book promo as well, sans glasses. Check it out!

Chip said...

Not bad at all. You have a smooth vocal register that softens the message somehow. Of course, I look forward to clips in which you address specific counter-arguments.

Where's the book promo?

Stan said...

BRAVO for this video !
I really would like to write by e-mail why I liked it so much.

I already wrote you some days ago, do you do not need to write me twice...

stanquin@free.fr

StrawDog said...

For any of you literary buffs, H.L. Mencken (a.k.a. "The Sage of Baltimore), the famed cultural critic from the early twentieth century, had this to say about life:

"Once I ventured the guess that men worked in response to a vague inner urge for self-expression . . . . An hypothesis with rather more plausibility in it now suggests itself. It is that men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life – that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality . . . . Man cannot sit still, contemplating his destiny in this world, without going frantic. So he invents ways to take his mind off the horror. He works. He plays. He accumulates the preposterous nothing called property. He strives for the coy eye-wink called fame. He founds a family and spreads his curse over others. All the while the thing that moves him is simply the yearning to lose himself, to forget himself, to escape the tragic-comedy that is himself. Life, fundamentally, is not worth living."

Some of his works have recently been published in a very nice Library of America anthology, titled, "Prejudices."

metamorphhh said...

Great quotation, StrawDog. I've posted it on my quotes blog.

Sister Y said...

I found it so affecting I just made a "pamphlet" based on it - Jim put it on the pamphlet site. Just a really succinct quotation.

Gromit said...

Wow. That H.L. Mencken quote is remarkably similar to Schopenhauer's view that human beings cannot "just be" and that they need "entertainment" to keep their minds of their suffering. Great minds think alike, I guess.