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Lyric Videos

I like to listen to music while I'm working on things that require concentration. Since my day job generally requires a good amount of concentration and abstract thought, it is pretty common to see me with headphones on at work. In fact, one guy even commented that I looked like Mickey Mouse because of the shape of the headphones and the way they were oriented on my head.

Regardless, I usually have some sort of music playing while I get my work done. Now, I don't have any particular song or album that I listen to over and over, so I usually just let my whims take over. I once spent an entire day coding away to Janet Jackson's "Escapade." I don't quite remember what I was working on, but I somehow got into a good groove (the work kind, not the booty-shaking kind) and I just kept playing the song over and over again. It's a very haphazard process, and it keeps things interesting.

I've found, though, that music services like Pandora don't really do the trick for me. I end up skipping over too many songs or wanting to replay songs randomly. So, I've resorted to playing songs on YouTube and taking advantage of the fact that you can create playlists out of your history. The system works fairly well in that I get to listen to what I want in the haphazard manner that I want, while also looping any particular section that I so choose. It's not an elegant solution, but it is a functional one, and that's good enough for me.

However, the one flaw in this plan is that for some reason, the proxy at work makes me look like someone from some country in South America. I think at one point one of us had a theory about why this was the case, but there's really very little I can do about it. Still, I look like a South American user to YouTube, which means that sometimes an artists' channel will actively block me. I've seen that "sorry, the video is not available in your country" message on more than one occasion. If this were legitimately the case, I'd shrug my shoulders and move on. But I know that I can (legally) watch that exact same video from a different device, so it becomes more of an annoyance than a fact of life.

Well, remember that I only need the audio for my purposes. I don't intend to sit and watch music videos at work, since I'm supposed to be working. However, the audio is key to my plan. So if I can find an equivalent YouTube video that has the same audio, I will happily "watch" that one instead. And as it turns out, there are a ton of people out there who upload lyric videos in the hopes of attracting hits. Since I don't much care about the video part of the music video, this works out perfectly.

Except for that, by and large, lyric videos are terrible at showing the correct lyrics. It's not just that sometimes they get the lyrics wrong, since I can live with that. What really tends to annoy me are the constant, consistent, and appalling spelling and grammar mistakes I see from people who post these videos. I've seen "there", "their", and "they're" swapped so interchangeably that they might as well all be the same word ("there" seems to be the most popular). I've seen "to" instead of "too" more times than I can count. And if the artist happens to use a word that requires even a tiny bit of knowledge of the English language more than dinner table, "pass the salt" type conversation, it's darn near hopeless. Did you know that the word "chic" can alternately be spelled as "sheek?"

Remember, I'm someone who gets annoyed at myself for misspelling words in general. These videos are enough to make me develop a tic. Even though I don't actually watch these videos, I've had to actually force myself to wait until the song is over to switch back to the browser. Otherwise, I might catch a glimpse of the language abuse someone posted, and my brain might very well explode.

I lead a rough life.

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