YouTube Vloggers Respond to the Boston Marathon Bombings

If you're like me, you are glued to every news source you can find right now. Bouncing among CNN, Huffington Post, Twitter, Reddit and back again, hoping for some resolution to the complete shit show last week has been. Later, you take a break because you realize the futility of the whole exercise, but just a long-enough break to have the thought I wonder if anything more has happened? and then you begin the cycle anew.

Somehow that cycle led me to the strange world of YouTube vloggers—teens and basement-dwelling weirdos offering their reactions to the tragic events in Boston. I'm not very familiar with the vlogging community, being that I'm over the age of 18, but I was immediately transfixed. Cable news has had enough of my attention. If I'm going to watch someone ramble about Boston while we wait for new information, it might as well be this awkward teenager.

Some of them are kind of awful, most are pointless, all of them are pretty dumb, but I don't judge them too harshly. This is a strange way to cope, but we all need some avenue to express ourselves. Still, this definitely makes for some fascinating schadenfreude, or as I like to think of it, just humans bein' human.

Here's a teen who starts out strong by admitting he has no idea what he wants to talk about. After a while, he remembers, Oh yeah, those bombs in Boston! "That didn't look too good." He's your classic all-American awkward teenager on Video.

This little sociopath offers us a bad sense of humor and a worse Casey Kasem impression. I hate this guy, but I also feel bad for him.

Here's some guy in a basement who, apparently, has a few followers. He doesn't want to talk about Boston—annoyed that he is talking about Boston at all—but I… guess he's doing us a favor? I don't like this guy's tone, and his message doesn't seem to have much meaning, either.

This Southern teen says what we're all thinking: "It's fucked up." He goes one step further and promises to no longer attend any big events. I agree that it's fucked up, but I hope he doesn't stay away from too many events. I think he will eventually return to events.

I like to call this video "Sad Teen Doesn't Know Who to Be Mad at, but Is Mad, Sad, and Loves Talking."

And here's a guy destined to be in a Sandlot remake trying to figure stuff out just like anyone else, only with cooler hair.

And this little fella is too young to remember 9/11 or know how to point the camera above his chin. He promises to keep watching the news. I promise to keep watching him.

Anyway, my head is getting messed up. I'm going to go outside and pet a dog or something.

@grantpa