This Should Be A Happy Day

You're probably too young to remember, but I can recall the day when the launch of a new YouTube channel and its videos was a glorious thing, greeted with tumultuous applause, a veritable orgasm of emotional outpouring. Officials from the towns and cities would break a bottle of special reserve Champagne over the channel title - drips and drops of the drink dribbling down onto the sidebars and the videos themselves - and they'd have, oh, at least three cheers, but sometimes more. Maybe that was more a regional thing... My point is that they used to love it. Oh, yes, telegrams were sent, guns fired into the air, bunting put up, flags waved, you get the picture.

As the years passed, though, there were warning signs. Some of the officials that came to cut the tape and Champerschristen the budding vlog saplings started turning up late to the launches. Some of them yawned. Some of them, in remarkable displays of disrespect, drank the Champagne and smashed the empty bottle over the channel. All of a sudden, the police were "too overstretched" to clamp down on such breaches, and, little by little, our fine, upstanding traditions were whittled down to the attendance of a few die-hard fans, who might still bring a party-popper or two along, just to try and hark back to the grandeur of those halcyon days. Which brings us to

TODAY. You are now more likely to be punched in the nose, shot, or blacklisted from your local Screwfix for daring to impugn the sovereign nature of the internet with a new, upstart channel. Such besmirchments are clamped down on with a kind of 'negative vigour' that is the direct opposite of the joyous exulatations we used to see in support. 'Those were days', says this writer in a grim and ultimately pointless muttering into the void.

This writer is also launching his own channel. There's a video, anyway. Come what may, here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54IJdgWlM8A

Just cherry poppin'

Hi all!
My name is Martin and I'm studying English and Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. I've flirted with the idea of starting a blog for some time now, but not til a few minutes ago did I decided to take the plunge. I'm not a particularly technology-minded kinda guy; I stopped using MySpace and Bebo ages ago (mainly due to the fact that replying to all my comments etc started taking hours each time) and I haven't signed up to the infamous institution known as Facebook. That being said, writing daily is part of my course, and indeed part of the vocation of being a writer if you want to be more precise, so I decided to start this blog. It's not a social networking site in the traditional sense, although you do get to talk to people on the vast network that is the internet. It's more of an information-based thing, which is going to suit me better!
I realised, as well as the benefits to my course, that I look at loads of blogs regularly for fun. I'm sure we've all been there when we're bored at the computer and decide to go on a 'Google rampage,' desperately trying to find something fun and avoid the work we've got to do! It's often here that the keyword I'm searching for is found in someone's blog, and reading what they've written about the thing I'm interested in is great. There's a lot of criticism of blogging due to the fact there's no regulation on opinion or verification of facts necessary, but I say the entertainment is in looking at a multitude of opinions, assessing their biases and reaching a balanced opinion for myself. So yeah, the point of this paragraph is: however poor my blog is, I hope that there are some people out there who stumble across it and find something that they liked in it, pure and simple. I am a simple person (yes, in the intelligence department especially) and I'm simply going to give something back to the blogging community.
I've got a lot more to say, but this is my first foray into the blogging world so I'll restrict myself until later.
Peace out!