Someone recently bemoaned the decline in evening classes. That back in the 1970s, people would come home from work, head off to a local college and learn to throw pots or paint by watercolours and this now seemed to be a declining art. I am not certain about the statistics, but the account at least seems believable.
There now seems to be this perception that any personal time needs to be snatched from sleep, from lunchtime, or from that ever so useful time originally given over to thinking.
Perhaps, when the engine is running at 6000 revs, then it is hard to let it slow down again to idle, and maybe there we find the current fascination for sleep.
In any case, the Procrastination Pen exists to try to look at sleep. Mainly from the approach that you distract that busy mind through restful background noise.
For a while now, I have been giving the odd recommendation from Calm. I’m not paid by them and I realise that you have to pay a subscription in order to listen. The advantage for me is that you then do not have to put up with the loud and obtrusive advertising that populates the intervals between YouTube videos.
I have seen that it is now possible to pay for an advertising-free experience on YouTube and I have been considering it. However, this would mean that my recommendations would be in ignorance of the reality for most, which is that just after a nice peaceful video something loud and distracting will kick in. There seems to be no allowance for the fact that it is 3am and no consideration that if the video you just listened to is peaceful, why would you want an advert based upon Monsters of Rock circa 1985 to follow it.
Anyway, here is today’s Calm recommendation:
Daily Calm
Interruptions
NARRATOR
Tamara Levitt
AUTHOR
Tamara Levitt
https://www.calm.com/app/player/8szz-qSorG
I like Tamara’s voice and this one is about interruptions and how to deal with them, which I think is likely to be relevant for everyone. If you have access to a Calm subscription why not take a listen. It is a little over ten minutes in length.
I was listening to a video this week as part of the stuff I have to keep up with. It is not medical and so I won’t be listing it in any playlist, but I contend that the voice is just excellent.
Three Decades in Kernelland – Jonathan Corbet, LWN.net
If this is of any interest you might want to give it a review. It is also squarely an “inadvertent” video as it is plainly not designed to be relaxing…
I have been, recently, evaluating a professional ASMR artist in these articles, rather as a counterfoil to the inadvertent ASMR material that I prefer.
YouTube have now decided that as I took a moment to review a steampunk-related ASMR video, now I am the world’s greatest steampunk fan and my usual set of suggestions based upon medical themes have now all got a definite sci-fi tinge to them.
Hey I can live with that. Hence although this week’s professional ASMR review is definitely medical, it is “not as we know it – captain”.
It comes to us from Dreamscape ASMR who most definitely does not need any promotion. The channel has 406K subscribers with one hundred videos and five playlists. This number of subscribers for that output shows a surprising level of efficiency. I am guessing something must be going very right.
The video is this one:
Taking Care of You When You’re Sick 🤒 SCI-FI SOLARPUNK ASMR ☀️ [Unusual Remedies, Deep Resonance]
It is a shorter than I have reviewed of late given that it is a little over twenty-six and a quarter minutes. There are a mountain of comments in the usual ASMR professional adulation mode. I wish I had whatever ASMR artists have…
the notes have the habitual level of self-promotion, so I’ve chopped them a little, the edited highlights are:
“1,286,378 views 4 May 2024 #cinematicasmr #ASMR #asmrroleplay
NO MUSIC VERSION: • Taking Care of You When You’re Sick 🤒 SCI-…
You find yourself battling a mysterious illness, one that manifests in an array of strange symptoms—like chromatic sweats, haptic hallucinations, and polarized vision. The city hospital dismissed your case as spring allergies…But I know it’s something more serious than that. After exhaustive research and numerous tests, I’ve begun to suspect that your condition might be a rare sensitivity to the recent solar flares. Here, in the quietness of my eco-friendly sanctuary, I will care for you. Using my scientific expertise, I am committed to unravelling the mystery of your illness and developing effective remedies. You are the most important person in my life, and I will keep you close—watching over you with unwavering vigilance—until we uncover the truth behind these unusual symptoms.
…
I hope you enjoy the ambience section at the end! I love when there’s at least 10 minutes of nothing important happening in ASMR videos so I can actually fall asleep. Scratchy pencil sounds are one of my favourites 🙂
–DREAM”
Even edited that is a healthy set of notes I’m sure you agree.
It starts with music – which is not great – and the music continues during the speech – even less great. I wasn’t taken by the voice to start with (obviously the only person, given the in excess of one million views). I did like the setting but I was less keen on some of the attendant noises, beeps, strange sci-fi related echoes. I did like the running water noises but, for me, it is always about the voice and I wasn’t as enthralled as all of those one million listeners.
I am not as bothered by paper-folding noises, and definitely not keen on the buzzes and hums that were designed to make the sci-fi atmosphere authentic. Of course there are the noises from objects being moved, objects being opened and closed, but there were also artificial voice sounds (which I wasn’t keen on).
I got the feeling that this was a more visual-orientated experience than the title would indicate. For me ASMR is about the sound. By about half way I was looking to do something else which is not a great sign in itself.
So this one is not for me, but over one and a quarter million viewers disagree so why not give it a try.
Moving on to the part of the blog that started the review process all those months ago, the locating of and the review of inadvertent ASMR videos and, to date, this has mainly consisted of videos on a medical theme.
As the weeding process of videos that do not stand the test of time in the Procrastination Pen playlist of ASMR videos, I am finding that I do not share the taste of some sites that exist to curate ASMR videos.
There seem to be videos which are considered good ASMR but which contain loud noises from equipment, distracting background noises, or strange interruptions from people, equipment or even animals.
I don’t think that such videos really belong in a playlist which is designed to provide the background to a person’s sleep time and so, I have been dispatching such videos to the archive list whether they receive a recommendation or not. At the moment I seem to be weeding the average of one video per week in this fashion.
The implication of which is that I had better keep generating more blog posts or that playlist will become so short it will be barely worthy of the name.
For today’s video we are back to an old favourite. She does not have the world’s best ASMR voice, that could easily be someone like Hollie Berry, it is a little too loud for a start. However, I do like her style of delivery and some of her videos have stood the test of time in the Procrastination Pen playlist.
The video is this one:
Eye Examination 2
It has notes which are thankfully brief: “151,236 views 17 Oct 2015
Jessica Nishikawa demonstrates common components of the eye examination. Subscribe at / jessicanishikawa
Follow Twitter @JessNishi”
It has comments and some of those comments are from ASMR fans, so with any luck we should be on solid ground here.
The video is a little under four minutes so hardly there at all really. (Lot’s more space for loud and off-putting YouTube adverts (grrr)).
It starts quietly and completely without any startup music. (Heaven be praised).
There is no concluding music, which is no less miraculous. In fact, this little video is more or less ideal.
For regular readers you will have spotted that this is Jessica Nishikawa and of course that is also the name of the channel.
Whenever I review a video from a channel which has multiple videos (this has twenty-six of them at today’s date). I look to see if there are other videos on that channel that could also be useful in terms of ASMR/sleep promotion.
In this case we have a video which is Eye Examination 2 which pre-supposes the existence of a Eye Examination 1 video to match it (and if we are luck 3, 4,5 and so on).
In this case we are not lucky. There is just one other video in the Eye examination series and it is this one:
Eye Examination
This too has notes: “22,511 views 11 Oct 2015
Jessica Nishikawa demonstrates common components of the eye examination. Subscribe at / jessicanishikawa. Follow on Twitter @JessNishi”
Again, some comments from ASMR fans, so this could be a good thing.
The video is a little over four and a half minutes and there is no introductory music. There is, however, the air conditioning from hell. it is as if the microphone is under the air conditioning outlet. We have encountered this before and it makes for very distracting listening. As if in compensation Jessica is raising her voice here quite a bit more than in the previous video.
Thankfully, there are no equipment noises, and after a brief delay the person recording must have cottoned onto the fact that the background noise is oppressive because the recording volume suddenly decreases. Would that there was an air conditioning sound filter and that it had been applied.
In deference to the fact that this is the only extraneous noise, I am going to trail this one in the procrastination Pen playlist. However, I do not have high hopes that it will persist there for very long.
The Jessica Nishikawa playlist on the Procrastination Pen is here:
The overall playlist of videos covered so far on the Procrastination Pen is here:
The videos weeded out because over time they are just not as good as the others is in this archive list:
I keep this in case subscribers to the Procrastination Pen have personal favourites that they want to hear.
The playlist of videos requiring age verification is here:
I can’t be bothered to stop my listening to log on, this interrupts the experience. You may not mind this in which case this list is for you.
I hope that you find the playlists restful and I hope you get plenty of sleep.
If you liked this blog post why not subscribe to this blog.
Until next time.
Photo by DeepAI
The Procrastination Pen 