When Hitler Goes Viral – A Report

How do I put this? I’ve been putting crap online for entertainment purposes for almost a decade, and I’ve never had something happen like what took place today. Hitler Makes a YouTube Video, a short that I posted almost a year ago, picked today to go viral. As of this writing, YouTube shows the video as having almost 70,000 views within the last 24 hours.

From what I can put together, here is the sequence of events that led to where we are now:

• February 26, 2009 – I scramble (and succeed) in finding a caption-less version of the iconic scene from Der Undertang. Edit and render video in a couple hours. Upload. Await my internet dollars and supermodels.
• February 27, 2009 – Plaster the video link on Facebook, Twitter, company email, and on forums that I frequent, because clearly this will generate enough word of mouth to set the world ablaze. Confirm that my personal info on my YouTube account is correct so that they know where to deliver my internet dollars and supermodels.
• February Through November – Forget about the video for the most part. Convince myself that internet dollars work like Google Adsense, and they won’t send me a check until I reach a certain threshhold.
• December 1st, 2009 – Inexplicably, a Polish website posts the video in a collection of Hitler parodies. The video’s hit count doubles, a modest success. I begin bragging to friends that I’m “huge in Poland”. Take solace in the fact that of all places, Poland is probably one that deserves to take the most satisfaction from such a meme. Start looking online for the exchange rate on Polish internet dollars.
• February 2010 – Start using Reddit.com to help promote The Daily Blink, and I feel guilty that my account’s history is a list of every comic strip we’ve done and little else. So, I start trying to create other content and give upvotes to other articles I like. Somehow, I turn this in my head to finding other content to submit. I decide to throw the Hitler video on and see what happens.
• February 15th, 8AM – I post the Hitler video and it immediately gets two downvotes, thus almost assuring nobody will see it. I pout, realize that everyone’s probably sick of Hitler parodies by now, shrug, and go on with my day.
• 6:30 PM – Check back and notice that the reddit submission somehow survived and stuck around on the funny section the entire day. A few hundred hits on the video and a couple comments. I deem this awesome.

Now, SOMEWHERE in this time frame, as far as I can tell, a reddit reader bothered to share the video outside the website. I’m making some assumptions, but the chain that I find is that the first blog to link to it was Grrl Scientist on her blog, Living the Scientific Life. If I’m wrong about that and am skipping a step in the chain, I apologize, but right now that’s where the footprints start, because…

• February 16th, 3:26AM – Cory Doctorow links to the video on BoingBoing, and we’re off to the races.
• 9:20 AM - Kotaku gets in on the action. Despite the video getting a lot more comments than normal, I am oblivious to any of this happening.
• 11:00 AM – A Co-worker says, “Hey, your video is on Kotaku!” I check out the site and squee. I then realize that Kotaku got the link from BoingBoing and become incredibly annoying to any and all who interact with me for the rest of the day, because they MUST BE TOLD HOW I JUST WON THE INTERNETS.

I spent the rest of the day attempting to concentrate on work and mostly succeeding, though when I found out the video was on The Huffington Post, my head finally exploded. I don’t know why The Huffington Post would qualify more as a head-combustible than BoingBoing. Most likely it was the rule of threes working its magic.

Once I got home and was able to earnestly sit down, read tweets, catch up on email, and do a bit of digging, I wrapped my head around several observations that I would now like to share.

1. I now have personal experience in the fact that the success and failure of a “viral video” is completely unpredictable. As I said up top, I’ve been putting media online in different forms since 2001, and some of it hasn’t been half bad. I worked on Return of Pink Five, and I once had George Takei dancing around with a balloon hat on his head while he asked about the color of my co-hosts pubic hair. This was on YouTube for all to see, and instead, it’s the extremely derivative Hitler parody that screams across the internet at the speed of light.

The director of Pink Five, Trey Stokes, has thought long and hard about the concept of viral videos, mostly because people have tried to hire him with the hopes that he will make one for them. Trey realized from the start that the idea was silly, and that no amount of money or resources can guarantee or manufacture word-of-mouth success. If there’s anything we learned on Return of Pink Five, it was that our goal was clearly to make the film we wanted to, and not to make a viral hit, otherwise we would have spent 10% of the energy and money on it since it would have just as good of a chance of exploding. Case in point: While we were trying to wrap up the last volume, The Guild came onto the scene, and we all nodded with silent appreciation for Felicia Day and her ability to show everyone how it should be done.

2. Cory Doctorow is much more considerate than the rest of the internet. I say this because only he and one other blog that I saw bothered to give credit to the author of the video that they were plastering on their site. I ended up embedding an annotation at the end when I realized that 95% of people seeing the video were doing so at websites other than youtube.com. Add the fact that I didn’t use my own personal YT account to upload the video, and it could be slightly more difficult for someone to get a hold of me if they were interested in the work. If you went to the YT site and looked, you’d see my name right in the description, but most people wrote their blogs describing “some guy” or not bothering at all. I think in the end I don’t care that much, but Cory obviously gets extra brownie points for taking the extra 10 seconds to do so. I sent him an email just to thank him for this.

3. The John Williams Barbershop Kid apparently has a sense of humor. He added the video to his favorites. I still wanna sit the guy down and just talk for an hour about being a “YouTube personality”. It mystifies me on every level. I’m probably not justified in calling him “kid”, but I’ll stick with it because it’s my petty version of sticking it to the man. (Yes, Corey: 100k suscribers makes you “the man”. Or, in your case, “the kid.”)

4. This will probably go on for a couple more days. I am incredibly curious to see what that looks like, and how far it goes, from a purely analytical perspective.

5. Final Thought: I have no idea what to do next. Seriously. Am I supposed to do something now? Is this like some kind of platform for the next few days from which to step up to something slightly larger? You’d think that after multiple attempts at sharing online media, I would be ready for just such an occasion when people find something that I did to be of value. Nope! I am definitely one that’s not afraid to introduce myself and network, but there’s something about exploiting something like this that comes off as whorish. It’s a Hitler parody. I don’t know if that serves as a basis to form a community around, or drive traffic to a website that has absolutely nothing to do with Hitler parodies. I’m pretty sure what I can expect to result from this is slightly more Twitter followers (check) and the chance to be on one or two podcasts (in progress). Nobody is suddenly going to ask me to write a book, start an online webseries, or co-host a legitimate podcast.

Maybe I should be nicer to the John Williams Barbershop Kid so he’ll give me advice. Did I say kid? I meant digital media genius.

My Birthday and My New Project

I like to complain a lot about non-milestone birthdays. I’ve gone on the record a lot about how after a string of milestones (License, Rated-R movies, Adulthood, Decade #3, Alcohol), that there wasn’t much left to celebrate save a blip at Year 25 when your car insurance goes down. Well, as of Friday, I will have made it to 29 — which many like to refer to as the “final birthday”. There’s something in me that likes that, and I might have to go with calling next year the “2nd Annual 29th birthday” or some such idea.

The Daily Blink!

In any case, the year so far has been fairly calm save for one major initiative on my part to try out a project that I’ve had on the backburner for a couple years, and that would be the comic known as The Daily Blink. This was an idea I started back in 2007 and it quickly got put aside for other things, but my recent WoW adventures have caused too many ideas to be cast aside again. I’ve teamed up with my friend CP to put out three strips a week, and now the site is up and purring like a kitten.

We’re both pretty excited about this, and it’s our hope that WoW players of all stripes get a kick out of what we’re up to. If I could make one request of everyone for my birthday, it’s that you tell at least one person about the comic strip. Even if you’re not into WoW yourself, statistics would seem to dictate that there’s a good chance that you know someone that is. That would make my day far more than any gift card.

A Single New Year’s Resolution

Photo by Optical Illusions

I have a bad track record with New Year’s resolutions. My problem is that I like to make broad, sweeping statements that affect a solid portion of my daily life. I never fail to touch the big ones: Be a better husband, get in better shape, become a better poker player, be more organized, achieve more at work. I have done some of those things, and I have not done others. These are never resolutions that are done in a day, they are constant battles that start the second I get up in the morning and continue the entire day. They require hard work and determination, something that I like to think I posses in most of the tasks I take on, but become easy to shrug off when other priorities demand attention and I take the easy out of pretending that it’s an either/or situation. ”No gym tonight, work was exhausting.” That’s a statement I like to toss off.

So this year I’ve researched – trying to find a different spin on my New Year’s resolutions. Not to avoid picking the hard ones, but trying to find a better way to wrap my head around them. I’ve poked my head around the internet to see how others would set their goals, and not been satisfied to mirror their methods.

I found my answer while I was doing my daily browse of The Huffington Post today and stumbled across the story of Joey Graziano – the son of a NYC Firefighter who went from being the first in his family to attend college to playing baseball through multiple injuries, tutoring fellow students, being responsible to his family, and winning the prestigious Mitchell Scholarship while attending Georgetown Law. Throughout the entire article, Joey’s peers and mentors laud his time management and work effort, and questioning how it was possible for him to take on his daily life and still earn a 3.9 GPA. Upon concluding the article, I was forced to sit back and ask myself the question, “Do I really know what true hard work is like?”

There are countless anecdotes from business leaders and politicians alike which beat into our brains that it isn’t always the most privileged or cerebral that achieve the most, rather those that see the road ahead of themselves and take it on head first. Being a person that always desires to be something resembling a junior polymath (and holding a job title that requires it to survive), it can be difficult to find that extra focus to go the additional step in the goals I hope to get closer to and eventually attain.

And so, knowing the multiple goals I already have for myself for 2010, I will not recite them here, or bore you with numbers related to weight gain, bankroll growth, life savings, or salaried income. Instead, I will encompass them into one driving hope-

This year, in all things I will try harder.

At the end of the year, I won’t have to make a recap post explaining the results. No matter whether I succeed or fail, it will be evident to both you and I just how well I did.

Same As it Ever Was

More changes here and there. I continue to screw with my website design in kind of bi-polar fugue of indecisiveness, hopefully this one will stick around for awhile. I have been keeping a personal blog elsewhere that has been extremely niche and I want to get back to stretching my writing skills past “So last night I such-and-such for dinner”. The resulting efforts on my behalf will probably be very wide ranging in subject and will be sure to alienate many readers as I jump between Game Theory, poker hand discussion, World of Warcraft, Live Action Role Playing, and random political diatribes. If you can make it through all of that and stay interested, then you will have earned an e-hug from me. If you’re into that sort of thing. Which I’m totally not, I just thought you might– never mind. Enjoy the website.

People Watch this? Shit, *I’m* Watching This!

Somewhere last night between doing laundry, World of Warcraft, and playing in a few SNG’s online, I caught the sound in the air of seals humping.

Oh, wait. No, American Idol is back on TV.

Now, normally I wouldn’t waste my time making commentary on a show that makes me weep for the future of the human race. But something happened that made me stand up on a note that even had me, the degenerate gambler, interested.

If you didn’t happen to watch, at one point before going to commercial, Ryan I’m-Everything-Wrong-with-America Seacrest announced, “One of these three contestants is going to Hollywood, really!”

On the TV was a girl so tanned she got it on Earth re-entry, a guy dressed like Henry VIII, and a barefoot moron jumping around like a monkey.

The Geekette, who watches this TV show as a guilty pleasure, shared my gaze that was obviously turning the same gears in her head as I.

“Has to be Funny Hat dude,” I said. “He must have pipes.”

I hate blond bimbos. Repulsed to the point of nausea. There’s no way they make a setup like this and Little Miss Likeohmygod gets to come to Hollywood.

Now I was stuck, because I had to watch and see what would happen. Dammit, Fox, I was enjoying my evening and you had to go and ruin it with a fun little romp of Schadenfreude. Oh well, bring on the losers.

(NOTE: You’ll notice I have no sympathy for the people who go on this show and then cry their eyes out when lambasted. If you go to this show to try out, you better be damn sure that you are in the top one-thousandth of one percent of singing talent, because if you’re not, then you’re either wasting our time or making for great TV when you call Simon Cowell a cocksucker. Either you’re too egotistical to see past your own horrible voice, or too dumb. Please go away and stop trying to earn your dreams through self-pity.

On the other hand, William Hung? Deserves every moment of fame he managed to squeeze out of his AI experience. Thumbs up.)

Anyways, I digress.

*puts down firearms*

The show continues and the blond bonehead opens her mouth for the first time, and where I hope for a pittance, I am rewarded with riches. The girl is so lost she’d ask how many cans there are in a six-pack. She prides herself on being “immersed in the entertainment industry” and says it in such a perky Valleygirl dialect that I almost do a double take. “Did she just say Edu-tainment? Are we really allowing her near our nation’s kids?” I cackle with glee the more and more she talks, ready for the axe to fall when she walks in for her audition.

“Hi, i’m going to sing the Jackson 5 song, A-B-….. uh…. what comes after B?”

She walks in and is such a vapid twerp that Simon starts to go on the same investigative track I was on: That her brain is actually a tape recorder.

“Can I ask about your suntan?”
“Yeah, my name is Crystal and-”
“No, your suntan!”
“OH! I’m sorry. I’m going to sing-”
“YOUR SUNTAN!”
“My what? Oh, my suntan.”

I’m laughing but my evening is almost ruined when I’ve totally underestimated her singing ability. She belts it. Not the best performance of the day, but she’s definitely not the worst. I frown when she ends, praying the same Gods of Karma who gave Matusow the nuts against the Sheik would bestow a big fat “NO” on the lips of Simon, Paula, and Randy.

Thankfully, they go along with my evil plan and even call her mother in to ask her where Crystal gets her inspiration. She walks in and they decided they don’t need to ask anymore.

Ah, satisfaction. The show continues. One loser down, two to go. Funny hat dude is a lock.

We get to Funny hate dude, and he’s intelligent and speaks well, which has been a lock so far on this show. If they interview you and you’re able to use words bigger than, say, “glove”, you’re going to Hollywood.

I’m looking past the outfit and giving him the thumbs up. Go in and sing, man. Show ‘em how it’s done.

Aw man, he’s signing in a cryptic foreign language. Faaaaaaack. Simon tees it up and waits for the appropriate comedic beat.

“Catchy.”

Geekette laughs and starts getting excited. “That means the hyper guy is going to Hollywood!”
“What? No way. No effing way.”
“They said–”
“‘They?’ ‘They’ are the same people that gave Wanda Sykes a show.”

Oh shit, maybe I just ruined my own argument.

Mr. Hyper, whose name is David Hoover, is introduced to us before his introduction and we find out that not only is he barefoot and on some kind of amphetamine, but that animals talk to him in ‘cartoony voices’.

I brace myself for the audition in a way that resembles being excited for a multi-car pileup on the freeway.

David comes in and does something resembling an interpretive dance of the third act of In the Mouth of Madness.

Simon, immediately, says no. Actually, he says Never. Good call. Cover all the bases. Don’t let him show up for a second audition.

Randy says yes, mostly because it takes two judges to get to Hollywood and there’s no way that Paula says yes.

Paula can’t stop giggling though, and… “For reasons I can’t explain,” she squeaks, says YES. David bounds around screaming, grabs his Golden Wonka Ticket to Hollywood, and is still audible in the audition room after the door is shut.

Simon Cowell looks like he just found out Courtney Love is having his baby.

Somewhere, right now, some bookie is trying to work out odds on David Hoover to get past the next round, and I’m putting money down. It’s the Jesse effect.

Do you remember MTV’s “I wanna be a VJ?” It was the first ever reality show voted on American Idol-style. MTV execs sat horrified as the incredibly qualified and knowledgable Dave Holmes lost to Jesse Camp, a moron who didn’t answer a single musical trivia question during the entire contest. His usual answer? “Couch!” MTV’s core audience and its combined IQ of 12 decided that they wanted him to win, the way that the assholes in high school start voting drives for the biggest nerd in school to win Prom King.

Now, Look for David Hoover to be the Jesse Camp of our generation, and for Simon Cowell to kill himself in grand fashion. I’m putting money on it. And now, like any sporting event with money on the line, I’m forced to watch.

Goddammit.

-Chris

“What, I won? Whoa, I guess I’m not the only person on crack!”