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My Secret Obsession

2022-11-04 · list · Hank · 3:59 · watch on YouTube

Topic: History & curiosities (also: Projects, Personal life) · mode: Curiosity & trivia · tags: self promotion, fundraising ask

Hank discovers he has been obsessively photographing signs for nearly 20 years and shares his favorite kinds: signs that reveal more than they mean to, hint at untold stories, age beautifully, try too hard to be clear, and, above all, are accidentally funny.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Hank discovers his hidden obsession: hundreds of sign photos since 2004

  • ★★ Scrolling his photos, Hank realized he has a sign obsession: Google Photos shows hundreds of sign pictures over 15 years, the earliest from 2004. — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — Favorite kinds of signs: revealing, secret, story-hinting, aging, clear and over-clear

  • ★★ Hank loves signs that tell more than they mean to: a swan-hunters retrieval sign reveals swan hunting and lost swans; a pit-toilet sign that humans clean them. — 00:00:29
  • ★ Hank also likes secret signs and signs hinting at an untold story, like three do-not-enter signs with one taped over. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Hank loves signs that become more beautiful as they age, such as a railway marker whose coating fractured differently around its letters and numbers. — 00:00:58
  • ★ His oldest sign photos are from a power station behind the lab where Hank worked in 2004, possibly the start of his obsession. (hedged) — 00:00:58
  • ★ Hank has photographed a trail-end sign marker at the National Bison Range so often that he has a catalog of its deterioration. — 00:01:34
  • ★★ Hank loves signs that try to be clear and succeed, like a danger sign in Italy, and those that try too hard, like a no e-bike sign with four indicators. (playful) — 00:01:34

00:02:03 — Awesome Socks Club advertisement

  • ★★ Looking through the photos made it clear to Hank that his favorite genre of sign is the accidentally funny one. — 00:02:03
  • ★★ Hank says the Awesome Socks Club sends a pair by a different independent artist each month, ships free, cancels anytime, and gives all profit to cutting maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone. — 00:02:03 · Awesome Socks Club, Sierra Leone, maternal death, child mortality

00:02:41 — Accidentally funny signs: Missoula, misspellings, grocery aisles, the hot banana, the octopus

  • ★★ Hank's accidentally funny examples include a Hall of Fame Missoula sign meant as two signs but impossible not to read as one, and a misspelled sale sign. (playful) — 00:02:41 · Missoula, Montana
  • ★ Hank hit the jackpot when his grocery store was reorganizing, producing aisle signs pairing unlikely items. (playful) — 00:02:41
  • ★ Other favorites: a giant bronze banana in hot Palm Springs, and DFTBA warehouse poster boxes that read differently top to bottom or bottom to top. (playful) — 00:03:10 · DFTBA Records

00:03:34 — Socks Club deadline, sign-off and bonus sign photos

  • ★★ Hank tells John that sign-up for the Awesome Socks Club is open only for the next week, so he might as well do it now; $5 off with the link in the description. — 00:03:34 · Awesome Socks Club, John Green
  • ★ Despite a long script, Hank had 15 extra seconds, so he shows more of his favorite signs. (playful) — 00:03:34

Humor (significant)

  • Hank lists what signs accidentally reveal about the world, then reaches a sign about a pony. — 00:00:29

    “This sign told me that somebody kicked the pony.”

  • A no e-bike sign has four separate indicators that it means e-bikes. — 00:02:03

    “in the meeting had a different idea for how to represent e-bikes and they decided to use all of them.”

  • Hank shows a giant bronze banana in Palm Springs, one of the hottest places in America. — 00:03:10

    “It's a hot banana!”

  • Hank ends the list with one of his favorite signs, maybe his very favorite. — 00:03:10

    “But please don't flash the octopus.”

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Projects: Awesome Socks Club · DFTBA Records

Concepts: child mortality · maternal death

Places: Italy · Missoula, Montana · National Bison Range · Palm Springs, California · Sierra Leone

Products: Google Photos

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