so, why am i doing this? what are my motives? what are my goals?

the cynical assumption is no doubt that i'm looking to cash a check,  but in fact i live very happily on disability and have no real incentives to generate income. i mean, i'm not going to turn it down if it comes. and, sure, i'll pay a little bit back. but i'm simply not desperately trying to charm myself out of wage slavery, because i'm actually not in it. i made a decision several years ago that i would not live under the goal of profit maximization; i've held to it fairly well to this point and i don't plan on reversing myself on it.

that's maybe something to grasp about me, overall: i need real motives, not just monetary ones. it's the dour existentialist in me that sees the society around me as disparagingly absurd. i just don't find capitalism motivational; this is the real reason that i have not been able to survive without state aid - i become hopelessly depressed and unable to function when forced to work to exist. i mean, look at how much writing i do for free. i'm rambling with an aim. i need that. methods to madness and whatnot. i don't even mirror with an ad space; and while i do plan to mirror, i don't plan to put ads up. call me a fool if you'd like, but understand that the feeling is mutual.

that said, i do plan to monetize these videos and that is a definite difference. i have not and will not monetize any of my music videos. i'm comfortable with monetizing this, so why not? but it's not a motive, so much as it's just possible gravy. i'm happy as i am, but could think of plenty of activist things to do with a larger stream of income.

the primary reason i'm doing this is to act as a gateway to the music. when i first put up my other youtube channel, i had no real expectations for it. but, i learned quickly that the commenting system could act as an effective means of promotion so long as i was consistently being interesting or provocative - which are things that i'm naturally good at. i found my hits growing relatively quickly, and on a fairly steep curve, as a consequence of posting insightful, witty and/or challenging comments on other people's videos - or, from time to time, just being a good troll.

over the last few months, youtube has taken steps to hurt "spammers". was i spammer? well, it depends. i was certainly advertising, but it was through the stealth approach of posing interesting questions rather than the obvious approach of pushing links in your face. i might suggest we're all better off for that and it's a kind of fair game type of spamming. but, purposefully or collaterally, i was caught up in the anti-spam shifts and have seen hits come down dramatically. as i understand that this is systemic, i realize i need to take further steps.

now, a vlog can only act as a frontend for something else if it is actually interesting, and can actually hold an audience, and the fact that i think i can do this is a big part of the point. on the one hand: merely look at my comments. look at the arguments, debates, discussions. i'm obviously able to generate interest. it's more than that.

i think the primary reason i'm of interest is that i can offer a worldview into a "real life" transgendered person. by that, what i mean is a lower class transgendered person that neither lives a celebrity lifestyle nor has had any plastic surgery. the media is complicit in this perpetual, brutal stereotyping of transwomen as these passive little barbified bimbos that spend their whole lives fantasizing about becoming porn stars. i don't wear fishnets. i don't have a boob job. i don't talk like rupaul. i'm really rather shockingly normal. i think that this kind of realness is what is missing from the conversation, because so many of us are so shy and so unwilling to draw attention to it. i can walk into this space fairly freely; i openly identify as specifically trans and will actually correct you if you suggest or imply otherwise. i have no social aspirations in either gender for this kind of open discussion to interfere with. hopefully, by presenting the perspective of a "normal" trans person, i can help break down stereotypes of the shallow, materialistic porn star or model wannabe transfemale. did you know that transgendered people are actually statistically of greater likelihood to be of above average intelligence? it's a condition that is actually correlated very strongly with bookishness, aloof intellectualism and sometimes crippling levels of introversion. very few of us want to be porn stars. most of us would prefer to spend a saturday night in the library than at the club.

the second reason is that i often find myself walking over long distances and mentally putting aside thoughts to write down somewhere later. as i spend a lot of time walking, i spend a lot of time thinking. i think some of these thoughts are worth sharing. this goes back to the same political motives i have in ranting everywhere. i suppose this is more of the traditional vlog, right: the webcam in the bedroom. but, i won't do that. if i'm at home, i'd actually prefer to write it down - i think more fluidly when i'm typing. rather, a substantial part of this blog is going to be me talking into the camera as i'm walking around in the wee hours of the morning, ejecting scattered thoughts and various insights.

that brings up another point: i'm a single person. this is by choice, by desire and without any reservations. i couldn't imagine not being single. but, what that means is that this is an exercise in introversion, rather than a display of social behaviour. as an outlet, that might be healthy, for me.

i also think it will be good for me to need to have a greater incentive to focus on how i present myself. as i'm single, and live on disability, i can go through rather long periods of personal neglect. if i need to be on screen every day, or every other day, that is going to make a big difference in how i treat myself, which will have consequences in terms of self-esteem. i think this will be good for me.

so, these are the social and personal goals i have in running a vlog. they may not always be obvious, as you're following me to a concert or watching me make lunch. but, i hope that i'm able to use this vlog both to build awareness and to help myself deal with various issues - as well as to draw attention to myself as a working artist.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/108929126523080872678/108929126523080872678/posts/fHiPrp3Rwd8

well, i was by far the closest of any of the predictions i've seen. what i got wrong was that the split in quebec helped the liberals in places nobody would have expected them to win. but, the bloc vote is still coming in, and it could still get a bit closer.

but i figured it would be a seat or two short of a majority, and it does seem like they managed one, even if it does get a little closer to where i was predicting.

i'll need to look at specific data more specifically in the morning, but it's actually aligned almost exactly to my predictions, except that swing in quebec.

nobody got quebec right. everybody else suggested the ndp holding 35-40 seats. give me credit for realizing that that didn't make sense, but i seem to have jumped on a last-minute bloc bump that was really just statistical noise [although it was present in the data, it's always a coin flip whether you're picking up a bump or not over the last 36 hours - it's equally likely to be noise, and appears to have been this time].

the liberals seem to have picked up around 35% of the vote in quebec. nobody had them that high.

so, i can make a tentative guess as to what went wrong. i suggested that an ndp--->liberal swing would not be enough for the liberals to win rural quebec, and that the bloc would come up the middle. this would have been a decent guess if the numbers would have stabilized at libs 30, ndp 25, bloc 25.

what happened, instead, was that the swing to the liberals was larger than any pollster picked up. we ended up with libs 35, ndp 25, bloc 20. that meant the swing was actually enough for the liberals to win, after all.

i got everything else dead on, almost.

i suggested the conservatives would be around 100.

i suggested the ndp would be around 45.

but, i suggested the bloc would be around 35 (they got 10) and that the liberals would be around 160 (they got 185).

i did far better than the official pollsters, and by citing precedent and using logic rather than using modelling (which i was certainly right in suggesting was inapplicable to this election). but, you have to understand that quebec was impossible to predict. it wasn't even sure what order the parties were in. and, with margins of error over 5%, you couldn't really peg them better than an unordered 10 point spread - which meant you were literally left making a guess.

that said: if there were some numbers putting the liberals higher than 30, consistently, i think i would have seen this coming. and, i suspect we'll find out that turnout in quebec was low, which propped the numbers up a bit. i did see that coming at some point, but i didn't factor it in. and, even so, i would have had a hard time suggesting liberals could win in a lot of the seats they did.

so, i got most of it dead on. quebec was completely unpredictable; i broke with the conventional wisdom, but what actually happened was even more unlikely than my break with the conventional thinking. although, i think we'll find out in the end that turnout was very low, and it's really what caused these unexpectedly high liberal numbers there.

TheDragonCat99
So Harper is like the Trump of Canada?

deathtokoalas
+TheDragonCat99
a new york republican is the right idea, and i've said things like "a less absurd trump" before. but, you really want to think more along the lines of somebody like giuliani.

i've posted this a few places. here's my prediction.

liberals: 160+, but a minority. the major movement is ontario, where they get 90+ seats. i'm basing this on the feeling that the results will be similar to the 2004 federal election, and then giving the liberals basically every seat created by redistribution.

conservatives: -100. just under - 97, 98, somewhere around there. -25 in ontario. losses in calgary. reduced almost entirely to rural seats.

ndp: ~45. i think they only win around ~15 seats in quebec. traditional seats in bc & ontario. a few new seats in saskatchewan and edmonton.

bloc: ~35. the way i see this working is that as the ndp support swings to the liberals, it opens up the bloc in many, many seats. there is evidence of some last minute movement towards them. i should point out that i'm ballparking them around 25% in quebec and the ndp at just about that, as well. there may be some last minute strategic movement to the bloc around quebec city, too.

greens: 1.

www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/10/18/election-2015-seat-projections-liberals-trudeau_n_8325024.html