Well, since I really couldn’t think of a better idea for an article, I thought that I’d talk about five of the ideas I discarded whilst trying to prepare today’s article back on the 20th June 2025. This seemed better than nothing, and I suppose it makes a point that – as I’ve mentioned in at least one previous article – having “no ideas” is rarely a true statement. Even if more than half of these ideas seemed to emerge from thinking about stuff I watched on Youtube.
One idea that didn’t go anywhere was when I saw two Youtube videos which seemed like they might lead to a greater truth in combination. One was a thirty-six minute “Ashley Embers” video about why fewer people these days have hobbies (eg: cost, social media, fear of failure etc...) and the other was a five-minute “Theory Of One” video about how companies make their customers loyal by, paradoxically, requiring them to put in a small amount of effort.
And I was going to discuss this in the context of shorter creative projects, how they are low-budget, relatively quick and require enough effort to keep you invested. But, perhaps due to tiredness and hot weather, I couldn’t think of a way to turn this into a full article. And it also sounded like the sort of article I’ve already written at least ten times within the past twelve years or so…
Then, I thought about talking about the then-new album – “The Thunderfist Chronicles” (2025) – by the long-running Scottish pirate-themed metal band Alestorm and why I didn’t end up buying it. Basically, the first two singles from it were amazing and I was really hyped for this album. But, listening to the rest of it on Youtube, literally the only other song that I really liked was the absolutely perfect 17-minute closing track “Mega-Supreme Treasure of the Eternal Thunderfist” [Edit: At the time of writing, I didn’t realise that a MP3 the song could be bought separately from the rest of the album, but – seemingly – only on Bandcamp. Which, if you’re buying from the UK, will probably incur currency conversion fees from your bank because the song is sold using US dollars for some weird reason…].
Anyway, I didn’t really feel like I could review the album if I didn’t buy the whole thing – and, since I’d already bought the two singles weeks earlier, I didn’t feel like spending eight quid for just one song [Edit: Again, I didn’t realise that it could be bought separately – albeit on Bandcamp]. Not to mention that writing a whole article moaning about the five other songs on this album seemed a bit too mean and cynical as well.
Sticking with Youtube, during the past couple of weeks, I noticed no less than two videos talking about an old 17th century drink called “Switchel” made out of ginger, vinegar, honey and water. Both videos tried to present it as an old-worlde “energy drink”. But I’ve never actually drank it, I couldn’t be bothered to try making it, I spent a while trying to imagine what it would taste like, and I wasn’t sure whether I could get an entire article out of the weirdness of something from the 17th century being referred to as an “energy drink” – especially given that I hadn’t even drank any of it.
Then, noticing that – on this day – I’d maybe only read two chapters of the thriller novel I’m reading at the moment – Lee & Andrew Child’s 2020 novel “The Sentinel” – I was going to write about how I shouldn’t judge myself for this. That “binge-reading” in 2018-20 left me totally “burnt-out” on reading novels for about four or five years. That, back in the good old pre-social media days, most people maybe only read 1-2 chapters of a novel a day, and books were just ordinary entertainment and… Hold on, I literally wrote this exact article about three days earlier! People might notice if I repeated myself that soon afterwards.
A while later, since it was June when I prepared this article, I thought about writing an article about LGBT+ themed Youtube channels, about why there are channels on that site focusing on just this one topic. How it’s about making people feel less alone, how it has become more of a necessity given how far to the right the US (and, to a lesser extent, Britain) has lurched on this topic this year etc… But, although the extra Pride Month articles I posted in June were surprisingly meaningful and compelling to write, I wasn’t sure how many of these sorts of articles to post during the rest of the year.
But, yes, despite having “no ideas”, I literally had five of them. Even if they were ones that I ended up discarding for one reason or another. And, again, I think that the point of this total and utter mess of an article is that genuinely having no ideas is a surprisingly uncommon thing. Often, you do have ideas but they are ones that you end up rejecting for one reason or another. And, hey, I got a “better than nothing” article out of all of this too 🙂
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
