Episode: 104
Title: HPR0104: Not about Airsoft
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0104/hpr0104.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 11:32:12

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MUSIC
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. This is Drupes and today's episode is entitled
Not About Airsoft. The video that we're going to be referencing in this little
talk is a tiny URL slash five kilo Yankee Bravo six tango. Alright here we go.
Now a few years ago some friends and I made a video of us modifying an L
cheapo airsoft gun. Now for those unfamiliar with airsoft it's a game similar to
paintball but instead of paint it shoots six millimeter plastic BBs. Now with
this small ammunition it allows for more realistic guns. For example I own a
full-sized Glock nine millimeter pistol. I also own an airsoft pistol that
looks and eerily functions exactly like my real one. It uses a gas called
Green Gas to propel the plastic BBs and operate the slide. The gas and BBs
are contained in the magazine and when the magazine is empty you simply drop it
and change it out with a new magazine and you have fresh BBs and gas to
continue to shoot your friends with. It's pretty cool but this one was not
nearly as cheap as the one we used in the video. Just like paintball the guns,
markers, whatever you want to call them come in all price ranges. We took a
$20 semi-automatic clear plastic airsoft gun and modified it to be fully
automatic and have a faster rate of fire. But this episode again not really about
airsoft or modifications of home electronics. It's instead about feedback in the
internet age. Page two. We submitted our footage to HACTV Underground which is
another BenRef project and released it to the world. Now much like Hacker
Public Radio we mainly received feedback when something was negative. Now
unlike HPR we had no formal method of comments but instead we relied on the
BenRef forums for people to contact us. Now we could see the number of downloads
from our site and as most internet media there are a few content producers but
there are many consumers and yes leaving a comment is providing content. Now
for those who have not seen this video or you saw it some time ago let me
let me describe it for you. It starts out with a BenRef-Centered intro with of
course a zero song playing and then it shows the steps of shooting the unmodified
gun, modifying the gun and finally testing the modified gun. Now as with the
proper video it has credits and everyone's names, the required web pages and
the artist of the theme music all contained at the end. Now it was used in the
episode excuse me it was used in a episode of some Canadian tech TV show and
finally it was put on YouTube by someone we don't know. Now YouTube has a
comments feature but it does not allow you to take the video around with you
which is inconvenient for some of us with portable media players but it's
really awesome for content producers as it shows just how many views you know
the video have gone on not just downloads and it has that aforementioned
comment system. Now I wish YouTube also displayed how people found that page
other videos, the viewers have watched where people were located, how much of
the video they watched but I guess on second thought maybe they do if you
upload the video yourself. Maybe they need a link for hey I made this video I
want to see the stats too. Someone that knows something about this should
probably post the correct thing on the hacker public radio page. All right so on
to these numbers of all this internet feedback we're talking about. For this
video and when I did this research there were 429,803 views. Just pretty good
that's just on YouTube and there were 1,393 comments. Now like I stated
earlier people are consumers of content not creators and for the percent as
that helps me out it's 0.3241% of the viewers on YouTube made a comment. Now
what a bounty of intelligence and wit that these comments provide us. Well
excuse me at least they tried. It seems that some people thought our $20
gun was not as good as their more expensive guns. Some guy apparently had
modified several 300 to $500 you know range guns and he was not impressed. Well
okay apparently Tokyo Marui maybe guns really really fancy airsoft guns are
much better than our mod. Hell yeah they are and go look at them I want some of
those. But then again they're a bit out of the $20 range according to the
comments someone's $700 $500 or maybe a thousand dollar gun so much better than
our $20 gun. I hope so. Smoking will kill you. Awesome there are medical
doctors who not only use YouTube and like airsoft but they also care about my
health. 33 find and helpful people gave out wrong information and actuality the
plastic gears did not burn out first or instantly and the problem the first
problem that we have with the gun was a nine volt battery exploded in my
living room while teaching one of our dogs to hunt. So that nine volt battery was
the first point of failure. Now this dog is not a dog that I like. Now I was
instructing this dog the fine points of using a blind and hunting. So I'm using
the blind or hiding behind the couch while waiting on the game him to try and
eat the corn a dog biscuit on the carpet. The nine volt battery exploded I was
scared dog got the biscuit months of preparation down the drain. It's a good
thing I didn't cover myself in deer urine first. Two gentlemen plugged the gun
into a wall outlet with expected results and for the record feet per second is
not the same as radifier and uzies were actually not designed for sniping. Now
as with the most popular question for Ben River Radio our most popular
question was what is the theme song? Well it's a song song by Zerl 45 out of
1393 people actually were asking that and yes Zerl is the man. Now if we take
the term geek or nerd negatively like it was used geeks nerds then over a
hundred of the comments for people calling us names including crackhead and
poofter. Now if being called a Jew was a bad thing then add three to that total.
Four people thought we were all versions while 53 thought we were all gay. Now
there was an Easter egg of a link to lemon party hidden in the intro but only 43
people caught that. It even fooled a couple people and seriously if lemon party
fools you you shouldn't be allowed to comment on the internet for at least a
year. Several people made fun of our names as we used our internet pseudonyms
in the video. Most of them are assuming some of them had fun names also. One's
guy he was like Bob 412 maybe that was his name but I'm assuming that some
parents didn't get together and name people crass drinks and mother man
spud merchant pink pig cheesy eboy gangster or master fish. Most of them made
fun of night lord but then again most of us do also. So what is what is the
point of all this discussion that I'm going on here? Well let's make up some
numbers. With the YouTube Canadian TV downloads we know about and downloads we
don't know about I'm gonna estimate holding my hand up to my head that a million
people have seen this video. We have received less than a hundred relevant
comments and that's including comments from people that we saw at cons and we're
like hey or just friends that calls on the phone were like hey cool video or you
could have done this better. Now that's a there's a metric shit ton of free
content available right now for anybody that wants it and we all consume this
stuff. Now we should all give back a little even if it is just a comment on
some web page. Some kids were watching us test this modified gun while we're
filming this video and they came over and talked to us and they shot it more
than we did and those kids feedback was worth much more than all of the
YouTube comments and it also took less bandwidth. You know YouTube uses 10% of
the internet's bandwidth. Maybe that's a made-up statistic I read it somewhere
though. Now hopefully these kids will be taking their toys apart pretty soon
just like we all do and I learned another thing. Paintball is better than
Airsoft. No it isn't Airsoft is the best. No it isn't. Paintball. Paintball is the
best. Oh shut up. Vim is better than E-Max.
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