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A li'l Lapra

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A gotey goober


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

watching more of the hbomberguy video and just

christ

i'm just sitting here feeling bad by proxy. like, I feel like I should go back and make sure I have thorough credits in my old videos. i think i'm good, I feel like the bylines pretty much as soon as I started using onscreen graphics, partly because it just seemed like the done thing i think the sole exception is a single clip from a 12voltvids video that I used in my indextron video, which I inexplicably did not cite on screen or out loud; I have no idea why, and I still feel bad about it three years later.

i also don't cite any photos i get from ebay because, i mean. ebay sellers have no reason to care about their random product photo getting credited. but like, maybe i should just do that anyway, who's it going to hurt? certainly not me. i actually have a real nice workflow where I just save every single file i get online as the exact byline, which I HIGHLY recommend if you're a video producer; it saves gobs of effort. every ebay photo has to be renamed anyway because they all download as "s-1600.jpg", an incredibly irritating behavior, so... yeah, fuck it.

anyway, stories about plagiarism are always the same: you wonder "why even do this?" i cannot imagine the sheer stabbing pain of trying to make an entire video out of other people's words. it would feel like waterboarding myself. christ, i can't even compel myself to read quotes intact if there's room to paraphrase them. it's not easier to try to chop up someone else's words than to just write your own.

one thing that keeps eating at me: who is watching these plagiarized videos and not noticing that all the narration is literary and not oratory??? it's all so fucking awkward! words that sound good on paper often don't sound good out loud. this happens to me every single time i shoot a video! i always find out that there are things that looked great in the script, but just can't be said out loud, it just doesn't work. you say it, and then you go "oh god that's nothing" and you have to rewrite it, there's no alternative. these people just... say it anyway, and it's unbelievably awkward, and i can't imagine why the audience just keeps listening to the worst oration they've ever heard. these people all sound like fifth graders being forced to read aloud out of the book in class, because they almost literally are. how do people tolerate listening to it

man. all this shit, and here i am going "oh man do i need to feel bad about using 4 seconds of credited footage from this other youtuber who didn't reply to my email asking for permission" like you just wonder sometimes why you even bother


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

Yeah the "these line reads sound like shit" thing really stood out to me too. Like... sorry but how did this have seven-digit-viewcount numbers of fans

I think scale is a part of it, too. These Hbomb targets are targeted not because they're reading a quote, they're targeted for reading quotes from books from authors back to you. Of your stuff, you definitely do a good job of specifying "this is from this guy", and you're not doing it all the time.

one thing that keeps eating at me: who is watching these plagiarized videos and not noticing that all the narration is literary and not oratory?

I suspect if you watch enough videos with people saying "either than" instead of "other than" and putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble because it's a word they didn't know and they didn't look it up you start to convince yourself bad scriptreading and -writing are just Features Of Internet Video and end up glossing over bad attempts to cover up plagiarism by people who actually cannot write and do not have an intuitive grasp of syntax.

I've been prospecting a workflow for doing dictation for script writing for my work-in-progress youtube channel. It seems silly at first, to be recording my voice twice, but it really does help break the reading voice/speaking voice chasm.

Right now I think I have a good ad-hoc field recorder (Audacity on the steam deck) and I think the next thing I'm looking for is transcription software that I can throw a .wav at, preferably doing all the magic locally. If it could be an Audacity plugin that makes labels, that's double plus good but I doubt that exists.

I'm only midway through the video, so maybe some of this is addressed later. In the clips it seems like he affects a vaguely professorial tone so maybe some people just perceive its stiltedness as "academic." Hbomberguy also has already alluded to him potentially having a younger audience, so I wonder if his viewers haven't heard some of the awkwardly pronounced words and hove only read them so it doesn't stick out to them.

One of the things that got me was when he was recounting the horror movie video James did, wherein he used 15 different authors' words, each of those authors had their own individual literary voice and style. They sounded so different from each other and James just read them aloud and never stopped to think "huh my voice sounds so disjointed from topic to topic, maybe I should write my own material"

this would infuriate me as the VO on a video with my name on it. Like, I'm fine reading others' content when it's others' content. But if I'm the one reading it in my own name and voice, it has to be my writing or I'm just gonna robot it out in a monotone. (I got in trouble for this in elementary school, the speech therapist couldn't do anything about it because it wasn't a speech issue even)