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Cup Stacking and Glasses Picking

2011-09-28 · letter vlog · Hank · 3:50 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Sports (also: Personal life) · mode: Personal essay · tags: civic or action cta, community lore, on location

Hank argues that finding sport stacking weird shows that sports, like almost all value, are useless by objective standards and valuable only by a community's collective agreement; he also asks viewers to vote on his new glasses.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — At the mall: his glasses are bent and keep falling off; viewers will vote on five new frames as four years ago; turn to cup stacking

  • ★★ Hank is at the mall because his glasses are irreparably bent and keep falling off his face. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Hank will pick five frames and viewers will vote on which he should get, as he did with his current glasses some four years ago. — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — Sport stacking's official name; Alex Day's vinyl album in place of the wall poster; watching Steven Purugganan: 'amazing' and 'why?'; it is weird that we find it weird, unlike ball sports

  • ★ Since Alex Day has no poster and said in his recent video people could put his vinyl album on the wall, Hank has done that. (playful) — 00:00:29
  • ★ Hank corrects himself: 'sport stacking' is the official name of the sport in which you stack cups. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Watching world record holder Steven Purugganan, 14, stack cups provokes two reactions: that it is a physically amazing feat, and 'why?'. — 00:00:29 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank says it is weird that we find cup stacking weird: a 14-year-old practising it tens of hours a week seems strange, but children training at ball sports does not. — 00:01:00

00:01:29 — Sports are useless by definition; value comes from collective agreement (cup stackers, Super Bowl viewers), except perhaps love and family; we do things together because it is fun; sport stacking may be ending

  • ★★★ Hank argues sports are by definition useless activities with no objective reason to do them; their value is placed on them by mutual agreement of a group of people. — 00:01:29 · social construction
  • ★ Hank's examples of valuing groups range from several hundred cup stackers to 30 million people watching the Super Bowl. — 00:01:29
    • a number in question (doubtful): "30 million" — check against the recording
  • ★★★ Hank says collective agreement is where almost all value comes from; perhaps some value, like love and family, is genetic, but everything else is valued because a group came together to value it. — 00:01:58 · social construction
  • ★★★ Asking why we spend time doing anything, Hank answers: because we and the people in our communities get excited about ideas, do them together, and it is fun. — 00:01:58
  • ★★ Hank is kind of worried sport stacking is coming to an end, because there may be no way to get better than Steven Purugganan already is. (hedged) — 00:01:58

00:02:41 — Community created sport stacking and vice versa; a P.E. teacher turned it into a four-million-dollar business; sport stacking is cool and nerdy

  • ★★ Hank says a community created sport stacking and drove people to amazing things, and sport stacking in turn created that community. — 00:02:41
  • ★★ The man who popularized sport stacking was a P.E. teacher who, Hank says, now runs a roughly four-million-dollar-a-year sport stacking business. (hedged) — 00:02:41
  • ★★ Hank finds sport stacking pretty cool and very nerdy. — 00:02:41

00:03:08 — Five frames shown; vote by watching the video of the frames you like; Hank will buy the winner; glasses push-up counters; sign-off

  • ★★★ Hank shows five frames and asks viewers to vote by clicking through to a video per frame: its view count is the score, so viewers should watch only the one(s) they like best. — 00:03:08
  • ★★ Hank says he will buy the winning glasses and wear them for like ever, ending his constant glasses push-ups. — 00:03:08

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Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: social construction · sport stacking · Steven Purugganan

Also: Alex Day · Hank's wall poster · Super Bowl · YouTube

Later videos replying to this one