` I talk about the challenges I've been facing all my life, as well as what my podcast is all about, and what's been going on with it all this time! Plus, there's many fun/important annotations! (And, if your device does not display this text, they are included in the transcript below!)
` Finally, I show the underwater "UFOs" glowing beneath the surface of Puget Sound! Don't believe me? Well... HERE'S UNDENIABLE VIDEO PROOF!!!!1!
Shame and Disabilities, Skeptophany blog/podcast, and Underwater "UFO" video!
In this post, I've included a transcript of the whole video, meant to be helpful to people whose vision/hearing is impaired. Or aren't seeing the annotations. In any case, there's a little bit of 'bonus material' embedded in there for anyone who wants to peek a bit farther into the depths.
` In a blurb below this video on YouTube (in what they call the "doobly-doo"), I mention just how long it took me to master its basic, web-based editing software.
Though I had uploaded this video on September 26 and made a rough edit by the 28th, it took several days to figure out the limitations of YouTube Video Editor, and then completely re-edit the entire video three times (yes, even the annotations).Without further ado, here's the transcript (just below the page break, a.k.a. the "thingy-thing"):
Also in that duration, I've spent a lot of time attuning my mind for pain control, and it's working better than I thought it would! Hooray for pain/mind control! Yeees, mind control!
And the better I can control YouTube, the more minds I can control, mua ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaaaaa!
(Video opens with Blair Witch-style motion sickness-inducing video showing night-time Seattle skyline across Puget Sound.)
Me: "This is the best footage ever!"
Title (to help steady your visual centers):
[Spoony Quine
Presents...]
Matt: "Yeah."
[A Video With Editing!]
Me: "Matt, wait! It's not footage, though, because..."
Matt: (chuckles) "That's right!"
(Camera turns around, toward sodium lamp-lit street.)
Me: "...This is digital."
(Cut to shot of me on bed, apparently restraining a white down pillow after a victory in slaying the other pillows and blankets and shoving them against the wall.)
"Greetings, fellow human beings! 'Tis allegedly I, the one they call Spoony Quine! Partly because... (picks up bent spoon tied to a tag with photos of) Randi."
Speech bubble above spoon: [Spoon Bent By Ordinary Means, Certified by James "The Amazing" Randi.]
"Again, I was sure to tell everyone that this video would feature me writing on the whiteboard with both hands at once, but here's a secret, (leans forward) a lot of my videos will."
(Shot of me earlier at the white board, wearing welder's cap, seemingly on the edge of falling over after having an interesting time writing 'Spoony Quine'.) "Yes!"
(Back to the bed.) "But, I tried it earlier and found that I'm not into standing right now, or even sitting, and my health and lack of sleep has been keeping me, ya know, from being, like, presentable for the camera for the past few weeks,"
[Although, there's no excuse for the hat hair!]
"but I decided not to let that stop me. Because I realized, it's really just shame and self-consciousness at being disabled my whole life, physically, mentally, neurologically."
[I'm almost better now!]
"And I had a lot of chronic pain and health problems, too, and every day I was being attacked for these 'horrible' offenses by all the closest people in my life."
[Things difficult to admit publicly:]
"I still feel like I have to perform and not appear sick or weak, which I always felt like a complete failure for since childhood because it wasn't possible to hide or pretend like it wasn't happening."
(I'm having trouble keeping myself stabilized and almost look like I'm wrestling with the pillow!)
"It was easy for my parents to pretend, all they had to do was not take me to a doctor, so that they could not be told that all this stuff that I was begging for medical help with was real. So they constantly put me under pressure to deny my own experience of the reality of what was really happening to my own body, and I could have easily died many times."
[The heaviness made me fall over!]
"And over the years, the people around me have continued to do the same thing, until a couple years ago. But I still deal with it from time to time, and I want it to stop. I don't know if this video will help it stop, but I just wanna tell you what I'm dealing with.
"So, anyways, how's this for a performance?"
[How many barriers can I break in one video? Let's find out...]
"I'm not going to pretend like I'm completely healthy and completely able-bodied,"
[I'm really getting there, though!]
"not even with an audience."
[Don't you feel special now?]
"It's because I have to get over this. I've spent decades feeling ashamed for all those times I just can't get out of bed because I'm in so much pain. 'Cause all I want to do is get up and live life and do all this stuff, but even now, sometimes I'm so weak that I don't have much energy for more than some amount of physical therapy, and I'm done.
"And yes, I have recently found that CBD tincture combined with marijuana is the only thing that has made the pain completely go away after 21 years of solid, constant pain all over my body."
[...This on top of Ibuprofen, which you can only take so much of.]
"And even though I spent years studying hypnosis and learning how you can control pain with suggestion, I didn't even realize at the time that I needed to learn that because I was so used to the pain that I was in,"
[That is, chronic pain, versus acute pain.]
"I didn't realize that it was utterly debilitating every second. I was just used to it. But, now I'm finally starting to learn that, although I've found it's really difficult to hypnotize yourself when you're out of chemical pain control, which I am,"
[...I bought more two days later! Felt better than before!]
"so I guess it's all uphill from here."
[Uphill?
Downhill?
Upwards?]
"Anyway, I hope so far that you can tell there's a lot of really interesting stuff that I could go into from here. But I don't really want to do that until I can get back to the whiteboard."
[...And away from the sinister-looking blanket that lies in wait!]
"So, in my first video I said I'd talk a little more about my podcast, and I really think I owe a lot of people an explanation, as they've been asking about it for years now. Well, it hasn't really been lost, it's more like in suspended animation.
"Right now I'm just having technical difficulties, my computer has been out of commission since the end of April, right when I was physically able to get myself positioned standing on a rubber mat in front of my computer, and then, my computer is physically unable to function. Irony!
"So, I blogged about that. And, basically, right now I'm $250 in the hole with no physical replacement parts in my hand, so I'm doing videos and comics and things I don't normally do artistically."
[...And if I go any longer without recording my own unique content for the internet, something in my brain will break!]
"But, you know, why not? (chuckles) So, I could also mention that the main, first reason I haven't been producing podcasts for years is because my life was a living hell for most of this time, I almost died, it's no joke."
[Definitely not bragging -->]
"In fact, one of the reasons I've been resisting not just podcasting, but especially doing videos is because of the nerve damage in my face, which is actually from that period of time, which I've blogged about a little, and which I will talk about on my videos.
"But, my face has actually recovered a lot since then, most of the function has returned,"
[*And sensation, etc.]
"and you can actually hear the changes that have occurred over time in the podcasts I've recorded by the way that I speak. And I've even mentioned on my podcast a few times the progress I've been making on that. So, if the way I'm speaking or moving my face seems weird to you, it's that. It's not you, it's not really me, it's my face."
[I was so self-conscious that I didn't want to present myself on video until this year!]
"So... (giggles) It's just my face! So, By the way, this podcast, I've decided, after much deliberation, is called Skeptophany."
(Clip of writing "Skeptophany" on whiteboard with both hands, just barely, as it is difficult. By the way, the black and white still life is the first oil painting I've ever done. I'm planning to add color to it as my videos go on.)
"As is my new blog, at Blogspot."
[Skeptophany: Previously "Skeptophony"
for Skeptic + Cacophony]
"Skeptophany at blogspot, right now, maybe I'll actually get my own domain name at some point. So, for Skeptophany, I've done a lot of recordings at conferences for science and skepticism, like The Amazing Meeting, actually, that's where I got this from, the last one."
(Picks up tagged bent spoon.)
"And I've got interviews with well-known and lesser-known people about that sort of thing,"
[Eugenie Scott
Dan Loxton
Ray Hyman
Dr. Dean Edell
Jonny Zavant
Dozens More!]
"and more. And, I've got sketches, like comedy sketches, and just sort of mind-altering, hypnotic sequences, because this podcast is not so much about science and skepticism in itself, but how it relates to developing the level of your actual conscious awareness.
(Shifting to a more present state of awareness.)
"You are not your thoughts and feelings and models running through your mind, you are the present awareness, and I hope to be able to help people see that fact for themselves, like really perceive it.
"Instead of just thinking more clearly about reality, it's about being directly aware of yourself, of the world, as well as the... vast dimensions of inner space which are just barely starting to be mapped scientifically."
[...Dimensions more staggering than outer space, within your skull!]
"No doubt I will have much to say about that on this channel as well. But for this video, I mainly wanted to test out the editing capabilities of YouTube just to get a feel for it,"
(Night scene of a building and a street with sodium street lamps -- which were soon after replaced by LED street lamps, incidentally! The barking of sea lions is audible, and the silhouette of a pheasant-sized bird can be seen scurrying against the yellow-lit street.)
Me: "Ah yes, there's the killdeer!"
Matt: (Kissing sound at the killdeer.)
(Zooming in on the bird as it scurries from right to left and calls back and forth with another killdeer.)
"I don't see the UFO."
(Camera starts to zoom out.)
(Back to me on the bed.) "...You know, before editing something that involves me speaking for like, half an hour or something. And, several nights ago... the night after we saw the baby harbor seal,"
[(No video of cute seal available.)]
"I brought my camera to the beach and got a video of something that appears to be even more unusual than in, you know... (looks around suspiciously) This was not an ordinary furry sea creature, oh no, no, no, or scaly, no. No? No."
(Shot of Seattle skyline, sea lions barking, camera suddenly pans to the left.)
Me: "Oh, there it is!"
(Camera fixes on a sea foam green-colored glow coming from under the water some hundred feet away. You can hear our running footsteps as I take the camera closer.)
Me: "Maybe it's Diver Laura?"
Matt: "There's two of them! ...no, no. There's only one."
(Camera zooms in. Then, the light fades, sea lions barking continuously.)
Me: "Oh no, it disappeared!"
(Shot of two underwater lights with Seattle skyline in the background, and a bolt of lightning flashes in the clouds.)
Matt: "Oh, I saw a big flash."
Me: "Yeah, another one! It's the mothership!"
(Vertical stripes wipe back to shot of me on the bed with the pillow.)
"Clearly, the alien takeover is imminent!"
(Back to the skyline over the water, moving shot, left to right, following the two underwater lights, seen through foliage, as another flash lights up the clouds. Sea lions are still barking.)
Me: "The mothership again! The sea lions know what's up."
(Barking and zooming in on the underwater lights, with the Space Needle and the Great Wheel visible just behind.)
Me: "Underwater UFO in Seattle, yep, that about says it all."
[Unidentified = Alien
Flying (Underwater!)
Object (Organism?)]
Me: "You know, every time I've said 'Mulder, where's your little camera, and your little flashlight? Well, here is my answer to that. Bring a camera with you at all times"
Matt: "Yep."
Me: "because you never know...)
(Cut to me on the bed, holding up a rectangular piece of a PSA from PSE (power company), which portrays a cartoon sasquatch packing some emergency supplies, including a turkey drumstick.)
(Looking alarmed.) "Even Safesquatch is getting prepared!"
Speech Bubble: [Safesquatch, Mascot of Puget Sound Energy.]
"I know, it says, oh, the big earthquake that's going to kill everyone and destroy the entire city, but that's actually code for the aliens hiding in Puget Sound! See, Puget Sound Energy, obviously they know something!"
[Evidently, the aliens have had a powerful effect on my mind!]
"That's my blog, Skeptophany, the Skeptical Cacophony, The Skeptic's Guide to The Inner Universe, and I have a lot of really interesting stuff for the next couple of videos, even if it doesn't involve further signs of alien takeover. So, until then..."
(Stable shot of Seattle Skyline at night, water crashing into the rocks in the foreground.)
Audio from my first video: "Here goes." (Plays theme song on piano.)
[In my next episode, I'll explain more about the mind, the ego, and awareness. ...]
[...I'll also have a little to say about the time in 2003 when my old ego was violently and traumatically destroyed, and I was forced to build a new one.]
[(It's not every day something like that happens.)]
[The mind is a strange place,
and mine is no exception!]
[How strange is yours?]
[Thanks for watching!
And I'm feeling much better now!]
I hope this transcript was more than sufficient! Next time, I'll have some even more interesting stuff, if you can believe it!
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