crank it up

YouTube recently cranked up its video-playback speeds: you can now go as high as 4.0X, which is crazy fast. The old limit used to be 2.0X—twice normal playback speed, and it's pretty much my default speed unless audio is bad or the people speaking in the video have an accent that's impossible for me to understand at high speeds (looking at you, West Country and Glaswegians). Now, you can crank the playback up to 2.5, 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0X. I tried 4.0X recently, and I find it utterly incomprehensible. But for video addicts like me who want to consume more content in a limited amount of time, this increase in speed options is great news. At 2.0X, a 30-minute monster of a video takes only 15 minutes to watch, but if I crank the speed up to 2.5X, which isn't too bad, the same video now takes only 12 minutes.

When my buddy Mike was here last year after my heart attack, he said he doesn't watch anything at accelerated speeds. I take this to mean that he's a normal guy who's happy where he is while I'm the one who's plunging deeper and deeper into video addiction, consuming data ever more ravenously. I've also somehow compartmentalized my mind such that it's not a problem for me to watch movies and series at normal speed (via Apple TV, Amazon Prime, or Netflix) without complaint. So while 2.0X is now "normal" for my YouTube viewing, I don't chafe when I'm watching a new movie like "The Return" or a series like "Invincible" (Season 3 has been streaming—review pending) at regular speed. I do, however, chafe when watching YouTube videos at normal speed: everything feels too slow now. Weird how my mind has divided itself up in this way. Weird to live in modern times.

This mental division may also have to do with the nature of the content I watch. When I'm watching YouTube videos, most of it is either long-form lecture, presentation, narration, or dialogue, i.e., things I expect to go on a while. And unless it's a cooking video, which I have to watch directly to appreciate, I can just leave the video on at 2.0X and listen to it in the background while I'm, say, chopping ingredients for dinner. So if it's a DeVory Darkins political/news video, or a comedic monologue by Eddie Izzard or Robin Williams, I'm perfectly fine with 2.0X. Otherwise, if it's a new (to me) movie or series, or even if it's an old, familiar movie or series, the video will have my full attention, and I'll watch it at regular, 1.0X speed. Don't question this mental bifurcation: just accept the mystery.

They say you can get used to anything if you're exposed to it for long enough. My buddy Mike used to love one particular quote that expressed this idea in its negative form: 

Our torments also may in length of time
Become our Elements

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

I think this means that, if you're suffering in hell, you can get used to even that suffering: it can become your "elements," i.e., your normal, natural surroundings. It can become your "new normal." I guess firehosing YouTube content into my brain is my new normal. I can only hope that information overload doesn't lead to brain cancer.

ADDENDUM: my cell phone's YouTube app doesn't seem to have caught up yet. Unless I'm missing something, 2.0X is still the maximum playback speed on it. Rumble is still at 2.0X, and last I checked, Netflix never got beyond 1.5X, which I've used on occasion when watching French-language videos as a way to test whether my stroke-scrambled brain can still understand French at accelerated speeds (hell, I may as well use YouTube for such testing! 4.0X, here we come!). I blame a former coworker for getting me on this path: at the time he introduced me to the concept of faster playback, he was already watching vids at 2.0X speed. I caught up a few years back, and life has been an accelerated luge ride ever since.