Sweeney: Lor and I have been discussing the idea of a new series, of sorts, in which we can discuss random YouTube videos which catch our attention. I think the idea first came to us during The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. We wanted a way to be able to say, “Hey, here’s this cool thing we’re watching,” but LBD episodes didn’t really lend themselves to recapping, what with them being so short. But, you know, it would have been great to establish some sort of precedent/category on the site for us to discuss, for example, Darcy Day. Or the Catching Fire trailers. Or the thousand other flail/rage worthy things that come across the internet that we want to bring to you so that we can all sit around and discuss how we feel about them because obviously Lorraine and I have lost any other way to process such feelings because nobody else in our lives understands why we have so many feelings about fictional things.
Lorraine: Which is nice opening for me to be totally honest about how this came up again, recently, when I wanted to talk to the Internet about my feelings on Miley Cyrus raping a wrecking ball. It’s nice to have a safe place to talk about these things.
Sweeney: We had a pretty great conversation about it between the two of us, sending links back and forth to various articles, but all of which were tinged with this sense of, “We should have done something like this,” because really, we want to talk about all the things with you guys.
As with most things on our ever-growing Spreadsheet of Dreams (which is a real thing that really exists and which grows at a rate faster than we can cross things off of it because of life and bills and the limitations of the number of hours in a day and our mutual love of sleep) it’s just one of those things that was waiting for some sort of push to make it happen.
If you follow me on Twitter then you may have seen me tweeting about something called Local Ambition, which probably didn’t made sense to you because this is not a thing that people know exists. Local Ambition is a cracked out crazy made-for-YouTube reality show. I think it aspires to be something like America’s Next Top Model. In actual life, it is a modeling competition that takes place in St. Louis, Missouri. The girls do not live in a house together or anything of that sort, because this is a low budget production if ever there was one. They just meet up every so often and have weird photo shoot challenges and also do confessional interviews where they talk about their lives and all the feelings they have about these things. As far as I can tell, so far, they mostly just do those confessional things with less of the modeling, because St. Louis. (L: Aaaand low budget.)
A made-for-the-internet reality show based in Missouri is not exactly the sort of thing that generates massive buzz, making this a little different than the viral video content that we envisioned for this series. However, I have been eagerly awaiting the premiere of this series because my younger sister competed in it.
Yes. My little sister is on a reality show. Of sorts. I don’t know if we can really call it that. I actually went to one of the shoots, but I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to what was going on because I spent the whole day thinking, “OMG I NEED COFFEE. WHERE IS COFFEE? THIS COFFEE IS GREAT, CAN I HAVE MORE?” I did hear lots of stories from my little sister about how the cast of this show contained remarkable levels of bat. shit. crazy.
HOWEVER, dear friends, I never, ever could have anticipated the actual result. The actual insane result.
Last Sunday they uploaded the first episode, introducing the first five girls. The other five were introduced this past Sunday in episode 2. I watched the first episode and had so many feelings. And so, as per usual, I’m asking the internet to sit around and discuss these pressing issues with me…
- How drunk do we think Christine was during her interview?
- Related: would she be fun to party with?
- Why did they show so much of her singing?
- Does she have ears? (L: Yes. I see them. Follow up question: Do they work?)
- I have nothing to say about Nina, except that she seems inappropriately normal juxtaposed against the other 4 girls.
- Ashley seems to have a lot of srsbsns anger issues. The girl before her is a wrestler of some sort, and yet Ashley’s the one with stand-out anger issues. Someone on Twitter told me that they were afraid for my sister. This fear seems legitimate. Will Ashley go into anger management before the series is through?
- Ace seems incredibly sweet though probably also high, but like it didn’t hit her until midway through the interview. It seems like she smoked right before the interview started, based on the apparent progression from zero to stoned. Yay/nay? (Also, probably my top pick for, “Most fun person to hang out with,” in this episode.)
- Finally, whose decision was it to end this episode on Sharon? There I was, laughing and enjoying the schadenfreude that reality shows are meant to provide, and then shit just got really depressing and uncomfortable.
Also, Christine gave us this moment, which I think can be put to great use in Traumaland:
The second episode was considerably less interesting, with the exception of the part where my sister is in it and is better than everyone.
- I immensely disliked Nicole almost immediately.
- I died laughing when she rapped, though. (L: WTF is with the musical displays?)
- Desiree is seriously precious. My sister is obviously my favorite forever, but I have nothing but good things to say about Desiree’s earnestness.
- Melody also seems far too sweet for me to have anything interesting or snarky to say about her. Also, she dedicated a large portion of her introduction to talking about her love of social media, so obvs she could be a friend of The Snark Squad.
- I honestly have no idea what Amanda said because that cricket noise was overpowering. (L: Whose decision was that?)
- My sister is the best forever.
- Seriously. Best forever.
Most of you probably don’t want to dedicate 30 minutes of your life to getting caught up with me on this train wreck of a show, but if you did watch because we’re Twitter besties, please share all of your feelings and/or answers to my burning questions. I am genuinely curious to see where this hot mess goes, obvious obsession with my own little sister aside.
This will be a less reliable/consistent series, but hopefully we will be sharing all the amazing things we’re watching on YouTube on something vaguely resembling a weekly basis.
Nicole is the co-captain of Snark Squad and these days she spends most of her time editing podcasts. She spends too much time on Twitter and very occasionally vlogs and blogs. In her day job she's a producer, editor, director, and sometimes host of educational YouTube channels. She loves travel, maps, panda gifs, and semicolons. Writing biographies stresses her out; she crowd sourced this one years ago and has been using a version of it ever since. She would like to thank Twitter for their help.
I'm a 30-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
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