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So in that spirit and the spirit of Noel, I have decided to do an AMA/ASK ME ANYTHING/Q&A VIDEO! (Thanks to a lovely reader for suggesting the idea in the first place 🙂 ) It will be just like a Reddit AMA… except it won’t be on Reddit… and it won’t be an AMA per se and it won’t be live. The ANYTHING part is true, though! My answers will also all be in video format! That is, like, so much better than most Reddit AMAs. Sort of.
To reward your patience, we got… a four-year late impression of Bane. SUCK IT, TOM HARDY:
“WHY AM I DOING THIS?”
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YOU SEE, I never had aspirations for myself or Li’l Gripes to be the next PewDiePie or Jenna Marbles. Making it on YouTube, given the mounds of talent (and clutter) amongst which one can easily get lost, seems as much of a pipe dream as making it in Hollywood. At multiple friends’ and associates’ suggestions, however, my initial reservations about making my brand vulnerable to the indiscriminate scrutiny of a platform like YouTube mutated from “never gonna happen” to… “screw it, let’s give it the ol’ college try!” Li’l Gripes prides itself on its devotion to both geek culture and the power of aesthetics… It is difficult to make the case that it should not have a visual streaming component, as well.
WHY YOUTUBE IS HARD
So here we are, 1.1K-and-some-change views later, and YouTube has been… stressful… hella stressful.
There is a good reason why only a select few percolate to the top of the class on the ‘Tube. The recipe for YouTube success is a complicated, layered mixture of hard work, talent and luck…Just as it is in La La Land. That hard work entails a lot (like, buttloads of “a lot”) of time spent on writing, storyboarding, and editing your material outside of the time you simply spend shooting. Every channel attracts its viewers for unique reasons but one common denominator in retaining audiences is the craftsmanship behind each video. Originality and creativity can’t be faked or copied but it also requires dogged devotion and dedication for anyone to use natural-born talents to create cohesive storytelling in a single YouTube. I.e. that translates into hours of preparation (and perspiration insert sweat emoji) and post-production for minutes of finished footage.
“Making it on YouTube seems as much of a pipe dream as making it in Hollywood.”
MOMENTS OF DOUBT AND PANIC
Welp, this is all to say nothing of the internal struggles I’ve had over the past few weeks about the content I choose to release. Turning a camera lens on oneself and having the confidence-slash-hubris (is there a difference, really?) to post it with the expectation of an audience is… bold on anyone’s part.
In a way, one would have to be narcissistic and/or egomaniacal to have his or her own YouTube channel. Who am I to demand someone else’s time and attention span in such a way? What do I have to offer? How far do I have to go to make it worth everyone’s while? -WHY DOES MY HEAD HURT- Ain’t I a disappointment enough to my parents as it is? Ok, relaaaax… Wait, should I be twerking? Why am I not twerking in a bikini? Wouldn’t that only be fair? I’M HUNGRY AND I NEED INTERNS!!!
…On the plus side, I learned I do have a great/maniacal smile:
If you enjoy Lil and/or LilGripes.com, please subscribe and give us some calming encouragement! Our episodes will be more and more tightly edited as we continue doing what we do best: bringing sexy geekiness to your phone/tablet/computer screen.
And with that, we have assembled an updated (as of April 10, 2016) analytics presentation of our website for all viewing interests: Li’l Gripes by the numbers!
Not bad for a brand that blossomed from a bored Millennial’s casual hobby of writing…
Now, onto equally, if not more, important things, LET’S TALK HAIR! Lil herself recently joined a special breed of heroines from comic books- the shorthaired:
With your Wonder Woman‘s and Supergirl‘s, one of the phrases associated with the most popular heroines in comic books isn’t “cropped hair.” Yet, there is a surprising number who do rock it. Five recent examples as portrayed on live-action television or in film are as follows, in no particular order:
1. STORM, X-MEN
Halle Berry (Left) and Alexandra Shipp (Right) as Storm
Also known by her birth name, Ororo Munroe, Storm is the famously mohawked flying member of the X-Men who can control the weather. Portrayed by Halle Berry in 20th Century Fox’s live-action X-Men films (and her younger self in X-Men: Apocalypse by newcomer Alexandra Shipp), Storm is consistently a fan-favorite and the first prominent black female character in either DC or Marvel comics.
2. MAGGIE GREENE, THE WALKING DEAD
As a farm-raised, zombie apocalypse-hardened fighter, Maggie (played by Lauren Cohan on TV) has always sported her hair at various lengths of barely-there. In the comics, she has always worn a pixie cut and on the adapted AMC series, she recently cut it from a bob to such. Her character’s defense for the snip was to not have anything distract her from the big battle coming.
3. DAISY JOHNSON, AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.
Daisy Johnson (Chloe Bennet on TV)’s look was directly modeled after that of Angelina Jolie’s character in the film Hackers. This is befitting her live-action interpretation, which paints her a Computer Science genius. Her superheroine name is Quake, on account of her ability to generate powerful waves of vibrations that produce effects resembling those of earthquakes.
4. BLACK WIDOW, THE AVENGERS
The most prominent female Avenger, along with the long-locked Scarlet Witch, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson in film) famously has a pragmatic chop that allows her to execute her signature acrobatically butt-kicking moves without worrying about wispy strays. While not superpowered like most of her compadres in the Avengers, her lethality comes from a lifetime of training (she was raised from childhood to be an assassin) and an extraordinary set of hand-to-hand combat skills.
5. AEON FLUX, AEON FLUX
Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron in film) wins the award for the most stylish bob this side of the dystopic future. With choppy layers as fierce and as edgy as her warrior tactics, Aeon, a character borne out of a MTV animated series, translated into a graphic novel and video game, and then adapted into a live-action film, fully embodies the radical superheroine aesthetic.
