Today the last two shows of the semester were produced by the entertainment division of IUSTV. This afternoon the Not Too Late crew wrapped their season in Studio 5. This morning it was The Bloomington Breakfast Club, which always ends their year talking to former hosts, for whatever reason. It’s great to see old friends, though. And three of them were on Zoom to join the current hosts.
So it’s Old Home Week! Gabrielle, who is in the top left square, helped start the show with Lydia, who is in the bottom right. Julianna came along after Lydia moved on. And they’ve all moved on to great things. Gabby is a producer at Vox Media in Los Angeles, Lydia is in marketing at Adidas in Oregon and Julianna is doing social media marketing for Dick’s Sporting Goods corporate offices in Pennsylvania.
That show started in 2016-2017, one of two new shows we launched in that year, my first year here. This year we rolled out three new shows, and at least two of them are going to stick. We’re also building out something really unprecedented for next year, as well.
Other interesting stats on this year … IUSTV has produced:
161 episodes of TV
Over 10 series
Three live streams
All told, earning well more than 205K views
And podcasts all over the place
Most importantly, the students are developing skills, and the graduating group are getting jobs. IUSTV is young this year, among the entire group — some 120 or so strong. We’re graduating four or five this term. Almost all of them had jobs by spring break this year.
The last shows of the production year will be online Monday, and I’ll share them with you here.
I changed a visual element of my website today. This is the first time it has been changed in 15 years, which is an unreasonable amount of time. It’s a front-end thing, and you’ll never notice it. No one will even be aware that this particular thing has changed. But, if you look at the top of the page, or the tab you’re reading here, you might figure it out.
Tomorrow I have to start looking at viewership data at the office, so this evening I examined some of my own YouTube metrics. There’s a wealth of information in the analytics dashboard these days. You could go blind and silly trying to put all of it into some sort of coherent explanation. None of it makes sense.
All of it makes sense. How it is reflective of user habits makes very little sense. Let us, for example, consider a few videos and a key metric, the average percent viewed. The scope covers the month of April.
(And, before we dive in, I must say: If you press play on any of these videos, watch them to the end, or you might throw off the whole analysis, or at least the space-time continuum.
This video is from 2017. It is Dunnet Head, the most northerly point of the mainland of Great Britain. (The most northern Scottish isle is still some 170 miles farther on.)
Scapa Flow – a prime naval base region for the British and the final resting place of much of Germany’s WW1 high seas fleet – is out there in the distance. Today petroleum, tourism and diving are big. Here, you are asked to imagine standing watch, like the British boys of the 1930s and 1940s did.
The people that have watched that this month have watched an average of 92.1 percent of the video.
This is a video last fall from The Yankee recovering from her first popliteal artery entrapment surgery.
It’s a seemingly rare problem, involving compression of one of the arteries in the leg because of muscle development. A week before that video she limped back into the house after the procedure at the Cleveland Clinic. Every day was a bit more walking. She started rehab on that leg a week later. (Last month she had surgery on the other leg. Today she went out for her second post-op run. We had our first bike ride last weekend.)
The people that have watched that this month have watched an average of 94.9 percent of the video.
This video is from May of 2018. I’d gone on a walk and saw these geese flying toward me from some ways off. I had just enough time to fumble for my phone.
This one has an average percentage viewed rate of 96.8.
Ahh, our old friend, the Short Film of No Consequence series makes an appearance. This is from a candy store in Savannah. I shot, and edited this, in the store, in January 2016, and I hope all of those delicious treats found happy homes.
Viewers here have watched an average of 97.5 percent of the video this month.
In the summer of 2017 we visited Scotland. Ceannabeinne Beach, in Durness, is known as the beach of the burn of bereavement and death. The story goes that an elderly women fell and drowned in the burn here and her body was later washed down to the shore. There are ruins of a small fire here, but like all of the other locals, the tenants were forced out in 1842 for sheep farming. Just off the coast there’s a small island, Eilean Hoan, or the burial island. It once was prime grazing land and home to four families, until the Clearances. Now the island is a national nature reserve.
That beautiful scenery has earned a 99.1 percent video view.
Let’s goo to another beautiful part of Scotland. These are a few extra bits from an afternoon walking around Torridon.
I can brag about this one having a 99.7 percent viewed rate this month.
(You can see why on these. All of Scotland is stunning.)
This one feels like a cheat. It’s an eight-second clip. But it got a perfect 100 percent on the ol’ view-o-meter.
We’d just returned from a red-eye flight across two-thirds of the country. And I thought that would mean a nap. For most people it would mean a nap. For me, it meant going on a really hard bike ride. It was great.
Which brings us to this video, which I shot late last summer in Alabama.
It is presently enjoying 179.1 percent, meaning people are watching it almost twice.
Which means you have to watch it almost twice, to keep the numbers consistent.
The most viewed video this month? This 2017 flooding footage.
One other analytical note which, also doesn’t matter, but my site, for reasons that escape me, this month hit 4.6 million views.
Thanks for clicking the refresh button so often, everyone!
There is great virtue in this capacity we have to remember things. It is probably a byproduct of the ability to learn things. And communication, verbal and otherwise, easily comes from there. It’s not enough to have the experience of a predator scaring you or harming you or getting in the thick of things. You have to learn he’s a predator, and remember that for the next time, and so on. There’s a lot of learning required in that phrase, and so on. So you keep accumulating knowledge. Then, it seems wise to pass it along to the family clutch and beyond.
We just keep accumulating and sharing knowledge and, over time, that’s how institutions are made. You can’t have habits and cultural institutions without memories, after all. That, and reasoning, is how we got smarter: Don’t eat that, because Grog did, and then he doubled over and died. Then Jork did, too. After Arussa got sick, we noticed a pattern. So don’t eat that.
Memories are like that, but they have limitations. You simply can’t live in them. Life is for moving forward.
He said, while inviting you to briefly rehash the day, revisit last month, and consider books written about events in previous centuries.
One of those days where I had to leave one studio to go to another studio, to go back to the first studio.
Then I did that thing where one meeting ran long and into another meeting and so on, for a while. And then back to the studio for this or that, and more meetings.
The only thing missing was a high volume of email.
I’ve gotten four-weeks of blog content out of our Cozumel vacation, let’s wrap this up with one more miniature photo-dump. This is not a food blog, of course, because food photography is harder than it looks. But eating in Cozumel was amazing. I’ve been thinking about the tacos and sopas every day since we left.
Those both came from this place, which we sadly only visited once.
Just down from our condo rental there was a roadside shack that more or may not have been a gimmick for the gringos, but it was delicious. We ate lunch there three times. None of that is pictured, since it was a bit of a quick hit-and-run thing between dives. The sopas were incredible. We also visited a few other small holes in the wall, and one nice tourist restaurant that was good, until it wasn’t.
I have a “friend” who was at a baseball game on a beautiful spring day and, thinking he’d rub it in that he was somewhere I’d rather be, and that I was in Bloomington, he sent me a photo. But I just happened to be standing right here at the time …
… and, for once, I won the point. And all I had to go was visit a tropical destination.
One more view, a little closer to the beach.
Let’s catch up on some books, before I forget to remember once again. I wrapped this book up sometime last week. It’s a collection of essays, written by academic historians, discussing lesser known people involved with varying aspects of the American Revolution. Most of the subjects I’ve never read about, so this was an insightful read all the way through. And it answers the question “What would I have been in that period of history?”
I’m reasonably well-read and educated, here, but there? I’d probably have been stuck in a life as a farmer or leatherworker, without a lot of opportunity for upward mobility. It’s a classist society after all, the 18th century. You’ll revisit that a lot here.
Alas, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
That’s a good book. Deeper than a Wikipedia entry, not as intense as a monograph, and it covers a lot of different types of people in several places in one important period.
This is a curated collection of recollections of the Allied liberation of western France. You normally see this from the American or, perhaps, the Canadian or British perspective. This is about the locals. Roberts, herself an esteemed historian at the University of Wisconsin weaves it all together, but the meat of the book is the collection of interviews she’s assembled. Most of these memories are compiled from people who were children, or young adults, in the 1940s, and many of them have the softened glaze of time. So they’re precious and valuable. And, like any memory, they are distinct right up to the point where they aren’t. Plus, I don’t know if you knew this, there was a war going on around them. So there’s that, too. As always, you want more, until you get enough. And when you’ve had enough you might realize this was too much of that one thing. But what about this other? Memories are like that, too.
I washed my car this evening, because winter is over — I hath proclaimed it, he proclaimed — and because there was still daylight left after my work day.
And by “I washed my car” I mean I took it to one of those middle-of-the-road drive through car wash companies and spent $11 to get dust and salt and grime off the car.
This one doesn’t have the dryer jets with the big wheel that descends onto the car as you drive out. Those always concerned me as a child. The wheel landed right there on the windshield, and then rolled over the car. Why is this not a problem for anyone else? Instead, this one has two vertically mounted dryers on either side of the exit. There’s a helpful clock in blue lights, telling you how long until these things stop blowing hot air which, as I type this, seems like a feature we should all be required to carry.
You try to time it just right, the whole of the car deserves the same amount of time in the drying phase. Except you’ve no real idea when the front of your car begins to really feel the warm air, so it’s just a guess. The experience will likely be uneven. And then you try to rationalize it. Why shouldn’t this part of the car get more drying time? Then you wonder if you’re somehow distributing the air flow unevenly, as you creep through the blow zone, because of driver bias, or a misperception of the precise size of the passenger compartment, or something. Finally, you’re thinking, I paid for it, you should use the whole of the 60 seconds. Don’t give any of the air back for free!
Anyway, my car is clean. And, for the moment, the exterior smells nice. I was going to vacuum the inside, but this place charges for that air, too, and I have vacuums I can use at home on some future nice day. And I will! I like a clean carpet.
When I got to the house a spontaneous bike ride occurred. Why not do 20 miles! It’s a lovely way to spend a few minutes.
I wasn’t intending to ride today, but riding is fun, plus it was a bonus after the 25-miler I had yesterday morning!
And these are the ways we fill our days.
Here are some sports shows that the IUSTV crew produced last night. All the local stuff from IU is in this highlight show.
And on the talk show they discussed the upcoming NFL draft.
By now, if you’ve been here every day over the last two weeks and change, you’ve seen 130 photos from our recent dive trip to Cozumel. (My next chore is building a proper photo gallery for them. Perhaps that’ll get done in the next day or so.) Maybe, perhaps, you missed the larger videos. I’ve got you covered. Day-by-day, the best footage from 13 dives on the beautiful reefs of the Caribbean Sea. Check these out.
This is our second day, when we got in five days. Four of them are represented here.
And this video was shot on a Thursday, not that the day of the week matters to the fish in the sea, or the turtle, which appears right at the beginning of this dive experience.
And everything you haven’t seen so far, you’ll see in this great video.
I edited a podcast today, and spent time in two different television studios for three different shows. At the end of the day I set up a Disney movie for students. In between, I watched these shows. And, now, you can too!
This is the news show from last night I mentioned. The interview with the new provost is there. It’s an interesting moment to have the provost in-studio.
They talked a lot about bike racing on What’s Up Weekly, because the Little 500 races are coming up next week. Very exciting stuff for campus.
I gotta tell ya, IU Fanshop, now in just its third episode, is growing on me. It’s a show about fans, and as they start to really lean into this, they’re going to find some great stuff going forward. This is fun.
You know what else is fun, photos of people at varying depths below sea level!
Yes, we’re wrapping up the photos today. But I’ll round out the week with more diving stuff, somehow. (We’ve already planned our next two trips, and I’m only a bit sad that neither of them involve diving. Yet.)
Anyway, on to the photos!
Gymnasts, man.
Sometimes I float to one side, sometimes I float behind people. Occasionally I float above them.
That is, of course and without fail, the moment they decide to look for you.
Everything is a-OK on the bottom of the sea.
And sometimes people float above you, too.
Selfie time at a safety stop.
This is probably another safety stop, a designed part of the dive, during the ascent, where you’re allowing your body the opportunity to expand a bit more of the nitrogen that builds up under pressure. This is a planned and good feature. And, clearly, carefully done.
I wonder what she’s looking at here.
Best fish in the sea!
And, also, me.
Yes, I all but blinked during my own selfie. I was on vacation.
