(0204) Various difficult things to address first. (0325) Going to try for sleep again, which will mean another latish start I’m afraid. (0327)

 

3. Finally, in the middle of the night

There’s this thing called “minor added inconvenience” which one can put down to just scriptkiddy incompetence if feeling charitable … or else one can call it death by a thousand cuts, whereby little moves made by a hostile cabal slowly do the boiling frog on us … until something previously good now becomes unworkable.

Last evening, my YT recommended suddenly took a radical turn when about a dozen and a half old films, plus newish BBC and other radio plays filled my “recommended” page … all my birthdays, yes?

Well, I thought so but as I started sampling, two things became apparent:

a. The radio plays are poor and that in itself is a complex “discussion”. There’s some sort of “luvvy” thing going on, almost a Dunning-Kruger, where a feted writer (at the Beeb, say) is not as well received by listeners to the same extent.

For example, in The Missing Wife, key inconsistencies in the writing permeate, e.g. thinking that police would proceed in a certain way (this is more Dixon of Dock Green than today’s rainbow and thug plod) when they just would not, in listener’s minds and memories … but that’s just part of it.

The acting. There’s this kind of “between jobs” actor/actress who, suddenly employed on this radio play, acts the hell out of the part to within an inch of its life. And all of them are part of the same school of overacting … the villain melodramatically bad to the bone, no relenting … where the poor, put upon victim is oh so victim the entire way through …

… plus the whole thing’s so … “modern” … where there’s no niceness any more, no gracefulness, just irritated, short shrift. And that’s from the 70s/80s, before the sicko Wokery started to come into it, a bit like with Doctor Who. Christopher Ecclestone departed for a reason … he was no London or Cardiff luvvy.

b. A technical flaw. I did test this out against a control group of YTs. YT seem to have zoomed every one of these films or episodes on offer in this way … on a pad, presumably on a phone too, we can two finger zoom and reduce the image size within the frame. There’s a range, a limit to the zoom out, the reduction in image size.

That zoom-out lower limit has now seemingly been reduced to the point where the characters’ acting half fills the screen and nothing either side appears, no one seated, no one reacting … just the central acting enlarged full frame. Of course you can make it even more exaggerated … but one cannot zoom out enough.

Now if this is so, then it ruins film showing, embedding, in blog posts … you do see the implications. So I checked against, for example, a National Gallery vlogcast, also a Jago and the new man … they were fine, correct size and proportion. It’s only films where it’s an issue.

It might be that the YT techie PTB decided to go to a different width and height proportion, which would then fill the frame and result in that zoom effect.

And again … is it Dunning Kruger incompetence, a la Rachel from Accounts … or is it something more sinister … on someone’s say-so, increasing petty annoyances to the point where it’s no pleasure any more? Another analogy is reducing the dog’s chain one link at a time … ratcheting, never back and forth. It’s a bit like banning smoking in beer gardens.

2. There are issues both in Congress and Parliament right now

In Congress, it is what Elon calls a pork barrel budget, plus Ron Johnson:

After Elon's tweet heard around the world yesterday, I invited Sen. Ron Johnson on the show. He is currently a NO on the One Big Beautiful Bill. He walks through what would need to change in the OBBB for him to get to a YES.

Our FULL discussion⬇️https://t.co/YaGD2n9t8k pic.twitter.com/j0kMBkUcIv

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) June 4, 2025

Whilst the rest of MAGA says pass the bloody thing. Meanwhile, this is going on:

Meanwhile, over here:

1. Toodles and IYE both bring an item

… which is difficult to watch … not for what it says but because of the obstacle in saying it.

First Toodles, from May 31st … the 1 minute version

Now IYE with the 18 minute version:

“Once You Know This, Every PSYOP Becomes Obvious”

And that obstacle? Whether it’s my age and decreased hearing or the tinnitus … whether I’m the only one on planet earth who notices this or not … but the moment a vlogger starts with the atmospheric noise (maybe he’d call it mood music), which drowns out and distracts from the message … far from enhancing it … then there’s a clear issue.

And this is just such a vlog. There is a quotation I ran a few times at N.O., which said that the moment a scientist tries to influence us by his manner => it is suspect science. Ditto with anything else on youtube.

18 minutes lost … maybe not to all, esp. the younger set, but shirley I cannot be the only one where drowning out a speech with mood noise is counterproductive? And I have seen many comments to this effect on various YTs and other vlogs.

Looking at Jago and trains or this new chap with road junctions … even Steve Bannon … it is spoken vouce after the noisy intro.