December 28, 2015

Hilbert and Hopper Have Gone Viral!

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We can file this post under “personal indulgences,” but something funny happened to me over the weekend: my YouTube video of Hilbert and Hopper play-fighting went viral. Not Kardashian viral, mind you, but it’s had over 100,000 views.1

Why? Beats me. Apparently it somehow landed on Google’s trending list and took off from there. That’s what I gather from comments, anyway, which have been flooding my inbox because I can’t figure out how to get YouTube to stop sending me email every time someone leaves a comment on the video.2 Still, it’s been…educational. As bad as comments can get here, even the trolls are basically literate. They write in complete sentences and sometimes their insults are entertaining. But YouTube comments are crazy. A big portion were indecipherable (example: “that ending got me XD (slap!) did u.. oh…oh hell naw!”); some were concerned that this was a real fight and wanted to report me to the ASPCA; others were calling the former idiots and explaining that it was just mock fighting; others were outraged that this stupid video had somehow gone viral; and yet others were outraged by the clunky titles at the beginning. At least two people have outright stolen the video and reposted it on their own accounts.3

On the other hand, the guy who left the comment #CatLivesMatter was pretty clever.

Anyway, there you go: my first viral video. I’m so proud.

1This compares to about 20 or 30 for the average cat video I put up—though I notice that all of my videos are in the thousands after the breakout success of Ultimate Cat Fighting.

2I turned off the setting that sends email every time someone leaves a comment, but the emails keep on coming anyway.

3I would pretend to be outraged, but…you know.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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