Two new video shorts for Spooky Geology
My typical approach to videos on Spooky Geology topics - where geology intersects with paranormal and eerie topics - was as a passive, non-reading version of the blog post. But, the video trend is toward more short and punchy things.
I’m not great at that.
Some (young) people from TikTok - the current leading platform for viral vids - floated over to my YouTube channel to see about Devils Tower and to follow up on rumors circulating on their feeds: that the famous national landmark is a giant petrified tree stump. This creative speculation was spinning around the flat earther community circles (can’t say “sphere”).
Yeah, I know. Crazy. But proposing superficial but dramatic ideas about things you know nothing about and places you've never been is clickbait these days. Wild speculation is entertaining for some. It’s simple to make assertions based only on appearances especially if it’s not likely people are going to fact-check your work.
When I noticed the inflow of new viewers, I thought I’d better retool the video based on the stats provided by YouTube. Viewership drops off really quickly as the piece goes longer. Even I can’t sit through a video after about 4 minutes. Get to the point! So I did. I took the key point about the tree stump that people seemed to be interesting in and made it its own video short. Here it is.
I’m still working on the presentation. I probably need to be even punchier. I’m trying to keep things moving and under 5 minutes, but my aim is still to be accurate.
This shorter format took me a lot less time than the longer videos.
So I tried again. This one only took me two days to put together because I had the images and most of the script done. It’s getting easier.
If you have a friend who likes weird ideas, natural anomalies, or just a different spin on science, please share these videos. But, it’s really helpful if you click “like” on them and then subscribe to the channel. That is the easiest, painless way to help me further my reach and make this work worthwhile.
Thanks for being part of my audience!
Visit the SpookyGeology YouTube channel for more.
Or check out the website to read instead of watch.
Hi Sharon, Love your stuff going back to the Skeptical Inquirer. My wife and I camped at Devil's Tower last year and I had no idea about the giant tree myth. I wish that I'd known about it at the time, so that I could have explained, with a straight face, to my loving non-geologist wife that the tower is, in fact, a giant tree stump. That would have lasted for a few minutes until she noticed my inability to hide an evil grin. Well worth a retaliatory slug in the arm and decrease in credibility. On a more serious note, at 2:52 in the video you say that "Satire is dangerous when people can't think critically." I fully appreciate and understand your intent, but the sentence could be twisted around to imply that since people (as a generalization) don't think critically, satire is dangerous. This sets off my freedom-of-speech alarm. Being a huge fan of satire, I'm admittedly hyper-sensitive but I also abhor ignorance. Yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre is illegal - and rightfully so. But satire? One could argue that if satire hurts people (which it could), it should be banned. It's a "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" dilemma because satire can also serve as a tool for implicitly ridiculing stupidity. Think of James Randi swallowing a bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills at the start of his lecture. To me, that was a form of ridicule bordering on satire. This food-for-thought is my backhanded way of saying "thank you" for your Spooky Geology. Keep up the fine work. - Jim.