I sure do love watching videos on YouTube! Who doesn’t? I don’t do TikTok, but I sure do use YouTube.
I try not let the boys use YouTube unattended and we have removed access to it from our TV. However, we do like using it as a music player in the bathtub. This is where this story starts.
About 5 years ago we started showing our sons YouTube videos while they are getting ready for bed. It seemed to chill them out and help them calm down while they were in the bath or shower. Yes, even the shower! Our blue tooth speaker lives in the bathroom.
Usually, they like to see music videos of specific Weird Al songs or Truck Tunes Videos and this is what they request. When it is my turn to oversee bath time, I try to sneak in videos of my own interests too after we have listened to a few of their songs. I choose songs from bands that I like. My sons know some of my music because we listen to it in the car. They like “Missing Piece” by Vance Joy and “Pompeii” by Bastille.
Those things I just listed get radio play.
What I really like to do is to play songs from 20+ years ago. I like songs that never get airplay anymore. Music from days when I understood what young people listened to. I hate to admit this but I don’t know who most of the musical guests are on Saturday Day Night Live are anymore. I barely know who Chappell Roan is and definitely do not know who Charli XCX is, I had to look up the spelling of her name to write this blog post (her name ends in an -i not an -ie).
Sometimes when it is my turn to pick the songs, I like to read the comment’s section for songs on Youtube. I really like it when people say things in the comments section like “Anyone here in 2024?” It is nice because it lets you know that there are other people out there who are interested in the same things as you and maybe have recently sought out the same things as you.
During the pandemic days, my family got really into listening to the song “Odds Are” by Barenaked Ladies. The top comment on this video was then and still is today today is, “We’ve never needed this song more than we do in 2020…”. That comment has over 1.5K likes (which seems more impressive than writing 1,500 likes). When I would see that comment during pandemic times, it made me feel less alone, like we weren’t the only people out there listening to this song every day.
I also felt that way during pandemic days when I would watch the video for The Mountain Goats song “This Year . When I listen to this song, it gives me validation or something else that I need and I know that other people are moved by it too because I have read the top of the comment section.
The comment’s section can sometimes be community in itself. People share person stories about how the songs or videos have affected them. It can be moving to read these comments sometimes. I like the song “Hold On” by Alabama Shakes and while the song is very powerful, the comments section underneath the video might be even more powerful as it has seemed to help people dealing with the hard realities of life like addiction and depression.
So yes, I enjoy reading the genuine and comments, but I also like it when some throws out a random curve ball comment. Those kinds of things make me laugh. Call me a pot stirer, because I am, but sometimes like to do slightly annoying things for my enjoyment. When I received political text messages this past fall, sometimes I liked to respond with a message that said something like “New phone, who dis?”
Game recognizes game and I like it when other people do it too.
While I am not super-duper looking forward to January 2025, I think it might be great fun to try to get on YouTube early on January 1st and write “Anyone Here 2025?” in the comment section of like a ton of videos. I don’t know why thinking about that makes me laugh, but it does.
At first, I thought it would be funnier to this on videos for things that were super random. To me, those seemed like the perfect places to post a “anyone here in 2025?” I thought the perfect candidates would be the videos of old commercials and snippets of cartoons and movies that take up space in my brain. These snips are permanently etched in my brain from rewatching VHS tapes for movies and shows that my sisters and I taped off of TV in the later 80’s and 90’s. Here are some of my ideas:
- Here’s a random chestnut, this Folder’s Crystals Commercial from late 80’s: Setting: Fancy restaurant, “we’ve replaced your regular coffee with Folger’s Crystals”.
- Maybe you fellow Xennials will remember the theme song to the cartoon Denver the Last Dinosaur (1988) like I do. It’s a real ear worm!
- I also loved the children’s show called Space Cats (1991) which if you are doing the math, made me a 7th grader when I would get up at 7:00 am on Saturday mornings to watch it on NBC.
- Cheer detergent had number of commercials that were on all the time in the 80’s and 90’s and many of those are still on Youtube, this would be fertile ground for a quick “Anyone there in 2025” on January 1 of next year. I could have sworn the man in the commercial starred a clown but I guess he is just a bald man.
Then I thought about more recent video that still had kind of random touch. For example:
- The video for the one hit wonder and brief cultural flash in the pan “Friday” by Rebecca Black or
- Steven Colbert and Jimmy Fallon singing Rebecca Black’s “Friday” together on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon in 2011 (thought they took down the original video because both Colbert and Fallon have been promoted to the main late night shows since they performed together and Colbert is on a rival network)
So these were my main ideas about the perfect places to place a “whose here in 2025 comment).
The thing is though, is that sometimes a joke falls apart if you really look too closely at it. It also seems to fall fat if you find yourself explaining your “great idea” to someone else, which is what I discovered when I tried to tell one of my sisters about it on Monday.
It doesn’t seem nearly as amusing any more to me to post “anyone here in 2025” in the comments section for videos that 99.9999% of the population doesn’t care about.
So then I thought it might be funnier maybe is if I posted “any one here 2025” on videos that are “cool” right now. The things is though, I have no idea what might pass as “cool” these days.
Luckily, there is a way to see what is Trending on Youtube right now. Though in all I honesty, I did have to do a Google search for “how to find what is trending on YouTube”. But I did it, that is what is important, right? I learned how to find out what is trending, that’s something. Maybe I am not a foogie after all.
So I learned that there is a tab on YouTube that isn’t super obvious and you can see what videos are trending right now. But this is when I feel like a foogie again, the thing is that there are so many new videos available to viewer constantly that what is trending is always changing. Also I have no idea what some of the video are even about or who they would appeal to. The joke kind of falls apart, which is disappointing.
I did it once this morning, at 7:47 am to one of the top videos. It was kind of funny to me, maybe not side splittingly funny, but it gave me a little chuckle.
I just don’t know if it is going to be some great prank with a great payoff if I waited till the early hours of January 1st, 2025 to do it.
Wahhh, I wanna be amazing. But I guess if it gives me some chuckles it is still something. I will probably still do it.
Perhaps, I will post “Anyone here in 2025” on videos for popular Youtubers that I have heard of like: Mr. Beast, Mark Rober, and Dude Perfect to try to stop the feelings of irrelevancy that I get when I see popular videos for things and I have no concept of even what they are.
I am not sure if this joke is funny anymore or even what I am talking about anymore. What is funny?
I know that this post isn’t going to cure cancer, but maybe curing cancer isn’t my great gift in life. Maybe my gift is dissecting things that don’t need to be dissected like the comment section of YouTube or if a silly, throw-away comment is funny.
