YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9LmxDUzI-DY
Previous: VED #5 - The stuff on my Shelf
Next: VEDA #7 - Scared of China

Categories

Statistics

View count:12,472
Likes:372
Comments:118
Duration:04:27
Uploaded:2010-04-06
Last sync:2024-12-25 15:15
In which Hank talks about the ideas he's had that haven't gone anywhere. You've got to throw a lot of stuff at the wall for some of it to stick...
Hello, this is the sixth day of April. I am wearing the same sweatshirt I was wearing yesterday. I'm about to get a haircut, so that will go away. So much hair. I always look a little bit more unkempt in my vlogs on hankschannel. I don't know what that is. Maybe it's because I'm looking down on the camera, instead of looking like level at it. I think that's probably the whole difference. Anyway, so yesterday Alan fallofautumndistro did his Vlog Every Day in April on brain crack URL's that he owns. Alan owns 55 URL's, which sounds like a lot. It's definitely a lot of URL's. I own 57. This is a good sort of parallel between the way that Alan and I's brains work. And I think it's actually a lot of the reason that we've been successful in the stuff that we do because we have ideas and then we want to get them out there as fast as possible, and the first thing you gotta do is buy the domain name. And then, you know, you run into some problems: the idea maybe wasn't as good as you thought it was, or it's too hard to implement, or you just don't have the time. And then the domain sits there and you think, 'Man, I sure should've done that. That would have been a really good idea.' So among these 57 domains, there are a lot of domains you know: vidcon2010.com, dftba.com, ecogeek.org, ecogeek.com, brotherhood2.com, brotherhood20.com. So these aren't all brain crack URL's; some of them are in use, but many of them are not. So here are my five favorites. I might do six. I might have to do six. So my first favorite is ihatefreedom.com, which I reserved after September 11, 2001, because of all the hysteria that was going on. And it was sort of, started to be kinda witch hunty, where they were saying that liberals hated freedom, and so I figured I would just run with it. And I created a liberal blog called ihatefreedom, but turns out I really don't like political blogging or I don't think that was actually a good idea for a domain name anyway, but I still own that one. If anyone out there hates freedom, I'll give it to you for like ten bucks. I also own both stuffonbabies and stuffonheads.com. 'Cause I like to put stuff on things. I'm a big fan of this one, personally. pullitsurprise.com. So instead of the Pulitzer Prize, it's the Pull It Surprise. So I thought I would create an award called it the Pull It Surprise, and you would be surprised for winning the Pull It Surprise. But then you could say, 'I won the Pulitzer Prize.' I don't know why. I just thought that was clever enough that I should own the domain name, which I do. movetheribbon.com was a website that I actually developed. This was also in my more activist days. There were all these ribbons on cars and the ribbons said, 'Support our Troops' or 'God Bless America' or whatever. My thought was that you could take that ribbon and not steal it or anything, but take it and put it over the gas, so that, in order to put gas in their car, they would have to like recognize the existence of the ribbon and be like, 'Oh wow. I have to take off my, my ribbon because I have to put gas in my car, and I'm not really supporting our troops if I'm buying lots of gasoline.' And I thought that that was a hilarious idea. Uh, never got any legs. Definitely not going to be able to limit myself to five. Okay, number five is buttfires.com. Always loved the idea of buttfires. I think I've talked about buttfires before. But instead of sending an e-card, you would send a "buttfire," which is like lighting a fire under someone's butt. Because in the age of the internet, you always need to motivate people, and it's hard to do tele-motivation. If I have somebody who's working for me, but they live in Ohio, I can't just walk into their office and be like, 'Hey, I need you to get this work done.' Number six is foulmartha.com. Katherine and I had this idea that she would be a really great sort of Martha Stewart type person. Except instead of being like Martha Stewart, she would be a badass. The last brain crack domain I'm going to talk about, number seven, is sleepin.org. Probably four years ago, I had this idea that if we all changed our sleep schedules, or like half of America changed their sleep schedules, that this would help to offset peak loads for power plants. See, the way power plants - coal-fire power plants anyway, is that they can only produce like one amount of power, so they have to produce it day and night. So the coal power plants do this all the time [Hank indicates a horizontal line with his left hand], and a lot of the time, demand is down here [Uses his right hand to indicate a squiggly line below the horizontal line] , but then, in the day time, demand goes way up here [Moves his right hand above the horizontal line]. And then they have to turn on other power plants, much more expensive power plants to meet that peak demand. So my idea was people would just sleep 'till like noon or like two o' clock in the afternoon, and then they'd go do their normal day. But their peak would be at a different time from everyone else's peak, so the peaks would get lower and the troughs would get higher. So the idea was to have a non-profit organization that encouraged people to sleep in because [laughs] because who's gonna argue with that? Oh, I'm a member of Sleep In. I can't go to work early. Those are my domains. I'm Hank Green. I'll see you tomorrow.