YouTube Geek: Say the Right Words

If you’ve spent much time on YouTube lately, you’ve probably heard about VidCon, the great big vlogbrothers-organized convention for the amusement and edification of YouTubers that happened in Los Angeles last weekend. By all accounts, it was a smashing success, a rocking good time, and caused jealousy in the hearts of vloggers everywhere who were unable to attend (myself included).

Fortunately, this was a convention by vloggers and for vloggers, so you know every minute of every event at VidCon was captured on video by someone. And thank goodness, or else the rest of us would have missed out on a real treat: A stirring performance by geeky rapper and spoken word artist George Watsky.

(Fair warning: Adult language and high levels of inspiration.)

Also for all the word-lovers out there, we have a video blog from OhItsJustKim, who only recently discovered savethewords.org, a website where all sorts of odd English words retire after they’ve been kicked out of the dictionary. My two favorites from the site are murklins (in the dark) and veprecose (prickly) – what are yours?

Continuing today’s fun education theme, the next video takes gives us a tour of an extraordinary museum exhibit featuring very various versions of the humble periodic table. Watching this gave me several great ideas for how to introduce my son to chemistry without the often intimidating classroom chart.

From there we move on to something relevant to geek culture in general, but especially to geek moms. We love our media and we love our families, but sometimes the former is a poor support for the latter. How often have we found ourselves halfway through an otherwise enjoyable sci-fi television series, only to be disappointed when the writers finally include motherhood in the script? Motherhood itself isn’t the problem. Rather, it’s the way pregnancy and birth and the events that follow tend to be abused for the sake of shock value. I don’t know about you, but at this point in my media-viewing career, I’d actually be more shocked to find a realistic mother character in a sci-fi TV show.

Finally, we arrive back where we started; at a convention. The following video was shot ahead of Otakon – an unrelated, yet simultaneous convention on the opposite side of the continent from VidCon. Not surprisingly, attendees of the anime fan-gathering are every bit as talented and geeky as the vloggers assembled a coast away. There’s probably a lot of overlap between those two sub-cultures, come to think of it…

(Fair warning: The featured song is ‘Raise Your Glass’ by P!nk, which includes a well-timed F-bomb part mid-way.)