ASMR-A Journey into Weirdness Pt. 1

Today I’d like to talk about a phenomenon that I have been seeing on the internet, specifically YouTube for quite a long time. ASMR or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Per Google, ASMR is: a feeling of well-being combined with a tingling sensation in the scalp and down the back of the neck, as experienced by some people in response to a specific gentle stimulus, often a particular sound. The term was first coined back in 2010 by Jennifer Allen. Jennifer is listed, per an interview on www.asmruniversity.com, as a large ASMR contributor and works for a cyber security company. ASMR has grown into a multi-million dollar industry for the ASMR artists who provide the content on You Tube.

My introduction to this world was quite random. I couldn’t sleep one night, as happens occasionally, and I was trying to find something to help me unwind. Reading wasn’t working, listening to music wasn’t working (at that time) and I was desperate to find something. I typed in sleeping in to the YouTube Search Engine and most of it was relaxing music and such. One thing that caught my eye was a video for “ASMR Triggers to Help You Sleep” by ASMR DARLING. I clicked on it and you see this young woman who is whispering and looking direct into a camera focused on her face. The whole time she is whispering to her audience. This particular video is 4 hours long and involves “triggers” as they are called in the ASMR community to help you sleep. This involves her tapping various objects, whispering into the camera and brushing the microphone with a giant powder brush and other various items. All the time she is whispering. I will admit is very relaxing. It didn’t help me sleep, but it did peak my curiosity. I went back to that same video as I was writing this article and I saw that the video itself had been view over 23 million times. She also has 2.3 million subscribers. Now this of course lead me to the question, how much money can be made by doing these videos? Well, per www.youtubers.me, she is worth an estimated $79.8K-$1.03 million. Now that is a very wide spectrum. I would tend to think with advertisers and such, she might be closer to the $1 million mark. That’s not bad scratch for whispering in front of a camera.

Now, the real question, does it work? Well that is totally up to the individual viewing the videos. Me personally, find everything very distracting. the hand motions, the tapping, and the whispering do not do it for me. If it works for you, that is great. I find that some relaxing music usually does the trick these days. I will diving deeper into different aspects of ASMR in the future. It is really interesting when you dive down into it. It is a big money business that has a surprising variety of people with different techniques.

Well that is all for now. I will be back soon with some new content.

Thanks! Sleep well!

Worthwhile Endeavours

Earlier today I tweeted that phrase in reference to how my job is the total opposite of a worthwhile endeavour. It got me thinking. What exactly would be an endeavour that would give me some sort of purpose and some sense of well being. Is there any one pursuit that can give a person the happiness and peace of mind we all crave? Personally, for me, I know that this feeling cannot come from a 9 to 5 job. There is no passion, no fulfillment from staring at a computer screen 8 hours a day doing some mindless repetitive job. Life is too short. Our minds and hearts should be filled with the wonder of the world. Learning, feeling, touching, tasting everything our world has to offer. I know this is a very idealistic view of life, but ideals is what it is all about. Living life, making things better than you left them. Helping each other get through life. We need to pull together and not push apart. I understand the realities of the world. You need food, shelter, money, security and all the trappings that come from modern life. We can’t all just quit our jobs and pursue our dreams. That is the real shame of it all. We can’t. We all have our own lives and with that life comes responsibility. That word responsibility is a heavy one. It comes in all forms: Spouses, children, mortgage, rent, your job. If you have any or a combination of these, you know that there is a toll that has to be paid to make these things work.

I’ve come the long way around to say I have no clue for me what a worthwhile endeavour would be. I know it has to be something that fills my heart and provides a passion to make me keep pushing forward. I am hoping it will come eventually. Life can’t always just be work and paying bills. There has to be something pushing and driving you to do something good and positive. You have to feel like it’s worth getting up in the morning. I guess that’s part of the reason I started this blog back up. Maybe by typing all this stuff out, something will click inside. I hope if you haven’t found it yet, you will very soon.

Take care

Horror Movie Review: Crucible of Horror

Good afternoon all! I hope everyone if doing great on this Saturday. As promised, I am going to start my review of the horror movies on the DVD set I mentioned in a previous post. I have a feeling this is going to be painful, very painful, but I shall push on. I do want to mention, I will be relying a lot on IMDB.com for the film information. Actors, director, ECT. I want to give credit where it is due. I have a lot of useless information in my brain, but all of these specifics for these movies are not part of it.

I started this slide into Oblivion with a 1971 British horror movie, Crucible of Horror. It was directed by Viktors Ritelis. He directed several TV series for Australian television and a few other movies. It was written by Olaf Pooley, who is a character actor and someone with a name that is hilariously fun to say. It stars Michael Gough. Most of you will know him as Alfred from the Batman movie of 1989. It also stars Yvonne Mitchell and Sharon Gurney. The cast is good and work decently with the script they have. The basic story is that Gough plays the cruel patriarch of this typical middle-class family in England. Gough’s character has total control of this family and keeps the women of the family in fear of his next move. There is a son, played by Rupert Eastwood, who also shares in his father’s joy of controlling the family. The women of the family grow tired of his strictness and abuse and decide that something must be done. He must die.

Now, I want to go into a little detail on how I watch these movies and what I look for. I have a great love of bad films. There is nothing better than watching a movie and seeing no craft, no competence and bad acting. Now having said that, all of these things have to be unintentional. It quits being funny when all these things are on purpose. (For example The Sharknado series). There has to be a true attempt on all parts and when that attempt fails, that is where the humor is. This can come from the director not knowing what he or she is doing, having no budget, having c-rate actors and even worse writers. Their vision of their film is way bigger than their means to produce it. Those are the gems.

Now another kind of bad movie, is the boring bad movie. We have all seen those. There is nothing noteworthy or fun about it. Too much exposition with nothing ever happening. Crucible of Horror walks this line throughout its hour and thirty one minute run time. It is a slow paced movie. It is typical of the British Horror movies that I have seen before. No gore, no real disturbing scenes. There is an intensity though that you can see through the low budget. Gough is really great and the evil patriarch. He has a quiet evil that you can see in his eyes, not just his actions. There are a lot of time killers in this film. Scenes of driving, slow camera pans and atmosphere shots. Some work as far as building the tension, but some are just there to fill out the movie to a feature length. Overall, the story is good and the acting is fine. I won’t give away the ending, but I will say it is a bit confusing. If you are looking for any time of gore or jump scares, you will not find those here. It just methodically tells a story with some odd camera work near the end. Lighting effects and some quick cuts to make you wonder what the hell is going on. If I were to rate it and I suppose I need to have a rating system for these reviews, I would give it 5 stars out of 10? I will come up with something more creative than stars. That is just boring really.

Well this is my first review! there will be more shortly. I will dive into music and video games as well. Let me know what you think! Take care!

Things to Come

Good morning all! Hope everyone is doing well. I just wanted to do a quick update on things here with me and what’s going on with the blog. My output has not been what I wanted it to be when I started this thing back up. I still don’t really have a focus as to what I want to say. It will come, it is just taking longer than I planned.

I do intend to do movie reviews. I posted on Twitter a set of horror movies I bought. Pic right below. I will be doing reviews and trying to put a spin of the traditional review. We will see. Also I will still be talking about issue in the world that concern me. There is so much out there. Also, I want to have fun. It’s not all gloom and doom. I ask you to please have some patience with me as I find my way. Thanks!!

Godzilla: King of the Blah

Good morning all. Hope everyone had a nice weekend! Now it’s Monday and all the fun is gone, just like Godzilla: King of the Monsters! I went to see that Sunday. I was trying to really put my finger on why I didn’t enjoy it. There are a lot of technical things: bad casting, horrible dialog, insane plot. My biggest complaint, however, was that the movie just wasn’t fun. It was over the top, but it was played very straight and serious, up to the point where there is just unintentional moments of comedy. The actual moments when jokes are used, they fall flat. Very flat. Maybe I’m just too big of a fan of the Japanese movies and the guy running around in a rubber suit. There is a campiness to that and the material is not taken too seriously and they are fun. This one is taken WAY too seriously. Every scene is just over the top. For me, it was just a bland movie with good CGI. Nothing new to offer.

Take care!

I’m glad it’s Friday, but..

Hello there! I hope everyone is doing well today! It’s been awhile since I posted. Been kind of a crazy week. Thankfully we made it to Friday. I’m not looking to spoil anyone’s day, but I gave been reading the news and there is so much bad out there. I’d thought I’d make a short list of things. This is by no means all of it, just some highlights.

Knucklehead is still president.

Global warming continues to be taken seriously by everyone but the US.

Certain states are still trying to tell women what to do with their bodies.

Ocasio-Cortez, one of the few people in government that are trying to do good, gets death threats daily.

Nationalism is creeping over the country.

Hate for minorities is just at a ridiculous stage.

The world is a shit storm of violence, religious zealous, greed, hate and all sort of nasty evil things.

My point with this post is not to bring anyone down, but to highlight what’s out there. Next time you want to talk to someone about the next Marvel movie or Game of Thrones ending, bring up these items. Start this discussion. The more people in the know and the more people that talk about this, the better chance we have of surviving all of this. It’s our world, we have to save it from ourselves.

Take care

My Weekend in Review

Hello there all. Hope everyone is doing well and I hope everyone is safe in Dayton Ohio. They were hit with tornadoes this weekend and they had a lot of storm damage. I know a handful of people there and thankfully everyone is doing well.

So this weekend was a testament to me doing absolutely nothing productive. After watching John Wick III Saturday, the rest of my weekend was spent between watching movies and playing Tomb Raider. I didn’t watch anything remarkable movie wise, but I have to say I had a lot of fun with Tomb Raider. To be specific I played Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I think by now most people have played Tomb Raider in some form, so I won’t go into details, but needless to say it was very addicting to me. The funny thing is, it’s not even the best game I’ve ever played, but I was compelled to keep moving forward to see what happens next.

Other than that, didn’t do a lot. Had a bad night Sunday where I could not sleep. Not sure what happened there. Watched YouTube and putzed around all night.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Quick Review: John Wick 3

Good morning all! Saw John Wick 3 today. I have to say it’s fun. I enjoyed it a lot! Not a lot of plot to get in way of the action. That’s the best way to describe it. It’s fun, violent and a tad gory. I do think it was a little too long. A couple of the action scenes dragged a little too much, but overall it works. This is not a high brow movie at all. If you want to see a lot of action, this is definitely the movie for you!

Take care!

Almost Friday Ramblings

Good evening all. I hope everyone is doing fine. If you’re in the USA, I hope you are able to enjoy a three day weekend for Memorial Day. Nothing really planned here, just going to relax and probably clean up a little clutter.

Its been a slow week here. Not a lot going on or to write about. I knew this would happen eventually. I’m still trying to really find my voice and see what I want from this blog. Right now I’m happy rambling on. I’m debating about posting my poetry up here. I’m sure I will eventually. I do have a stack of bad horror movies I can review and talk about. I do want to do that. I love to share bad movies with the world. That will be coming soon.

I have been finding the more I write, the more I enjoy it. The issue as I said before, is trying to come up with something interesting to write about. I have been having fun on twitter thanks to @comiccontex! It’s been fun reacting and writing smart comments to the panels.

This one will be short. Not a lot to say tonight. I’ll be back soon with more content, I promise!

Take care

Clutter…It’s Everywhere

Good morning all! I hope everyone is doing OK today out there in Internetland. I wanted to hat today about the amount of clutter that is in our lives. This past weekend, my wife and I finally decided to start cleaning out the junk in our house and our lives. We had been putting this off because it is such a daunting task. We have 20 years of crap that has been collecting dust in our house. Why do we have so much stuff? No clue. Well that is not entirely true. I do know why we have certain things. I have too many CDs because I have this compulsion to buy them. Maybe it is filling some sort of void in me. I suppose that why a lot of people end up with collections. The real question is, does this bring any joy into my life? In some cases, yes. Over the past several years however, it seems like I have been collecting for the sake of collecting. Movies never get watched, CDs never listened to. It is frustrating because it is not like I don’t have the time, I do. It really is a combination of depression and not enjoying things as I used to when I was younger. It is a frustrating feeling wanting to do something as simple as listen to music or watch a movie and there is something inside that just will not let you. I could go down this rabbit hold all day, but I will save it for another post.

Back to the subject at hand: clutter. look around you and I bet there are 10 things you could throw away within your eyesight and you would not miss. In my case it would be twice that. There are things I do not need, but for some reason I have not let them go over the years. Maybe it is a sentimental attachment or just laziness. I am sure it is a combination of both. We equate our “stuff” with who we are. It’s a measure of the lengths we will go to just to have and covet some toy, cd, book, whatever your weakness may be. We are all guilty of this to some degree. I am worse than some as far as music goes. I love cds and my collection does give me a certain amount of happiness, but not as much as it probably should. It is hard when there is no one local that shares your love of something. That is part of it too, wanting to share the thing you love with someone else, to be validated. We need to know there are others that feel the way we do about our passions. It drives us. To have that connection and be able to talk about any thing you love with someone is a great feeling. I think for my part, I have been buying and not sharing in the hopes I would someday have that person locally. The internet is great for that, but there is something about hanging out, sipping some nice bourbon and discussing music, movies or whatever it is you enjoy with another person that is actually there beside you. That is something that the internet just cannot give you. I guess in a way, your clutter can bring about good things.

This was definitely a meandering post today, but it felt good to talk about it. I am still working on posting more, so please be patient.

Take care!