Hello and happy eleventh video anniversary! More or less.
Anniversaries mean I often make a kind of random video that's about...whatever so I
thought I'd talk about the cheese option and its power in community building.
If you have been subscribed to me or just watched my content for any length of time
then you will probably know that I am very fond of YouTube polls.
Possibly a little bit too fond of YouTube polls to be honest.
And on these YouTube polls there are a number of options which often recur. The first and most
common option is I don't even know you lady which initially started as a way for me to try and gauge
how far outside of my usual audience my polls were spreading but is not completely useless for that
because of the number of people who just click it because they think it's funny. I mean I always
expected that some people would do that but now I think the pretending not to know me people
really do outnumber the actually don't know me people so it's completely useless for that. I
will still keep offering the option because it is an invitation to those who don't know us to come
and join us. There has also been an option which is basically I don't really have a strong opinion
on this but I like voting which has always been a very popular option and kind of growing out of
that though possibly that was a bad metaphor we have the cheese option. And the reason that the
cheese option exists is because when I was 15 I got my hair cut really short and when I was
20 I decided I wanted to grow it really long and here we are stick with me it's going to make sense
I promise and if you wanted some here is some proof that I used to have extremely short hair
and also extremely high waisted baggy jeans. When I decided to grow my hair I'd never had
really long hair before in my life it had always hovered somewhere between like shoulder and sort
of armpit length so in order to obtain Arwen/Eowyn worthy hair I did what any internet connected 20
something in the noughties would do I went on google and there I found the long hair community
a forum which exists to this day now the important thing to understand is that the approximately 98%
women who inhabited this board had only two things in common one they really liked long
hair and they wanted to grow some or they wanted to take care of the hair that they already had
and two they really hated the dudes who were a little bit too keen on long hair for not so
savoury reasons I'm not gonna be more succinct about that because I'm hoping this video doesn't
get demonetised so the rules of the board were basically set up to a) keep out the aforementioned
people that we didn't want on the board and b) try and make sure that everybody else remaining
rubbed along okay together which was no mean feat considering the wildly disparate political and
religious opinions contained within the board so vaguely left-leaning British Christian who
wanted to grow her hair because it seemed like it'd be fun to style it was there getting advice
from everyone from extremely left-leaning atheists to extremely conservative American Christians to
Finnish Wiccans to just just everybody there are people from dozens of countries like mostly the us
but a lot of other places too and quite aside from all the religious or political debates that they
could have been having be careful about asking whether or not you should use silicones on a
hair care forum if you want to leave with all your teeth I'm mostly joking hence the cheese option so
the long hair community has a poll board and you can have polls on whatever subject you like on
there and quite often in these polls there would be an option for cheese it wouldn't matter if the
question was what are your political leanings or what is your ultimate goal length for your hair
or do you use silicones there would quite often be an option right at the end which was basically
something like I don't really have an opinion but I enjoy cheese and the beauty of the cheese option
was that it reminded people that one this this isn't serious business this is just a forum about
hair and two you don't have to give your opinion on everything all the time and that's okay the
cheese option was not the only thing that kept the LHC such a well-mannered place but I like to think
that it helped so i went back to the LHC today to see if the cheese option is still a thing that is
routinely used in polls and the answer is no. Sometimes it is particularly if the poll
question is a little bit controversial there will usually be some kind of cheese related option but
the cheese option is a very fond memory of mine because it is a gentle way to remind
people that this is a place where we talk about hair or in my case this is a place where we talk
about movies and like fantasy murder dresses so if you had been wondering why does she keep
going on about cheese it's so weird also I'm lactose intolerant now you know of course I
no I cannot end this video without telling you that blue cheese it doesn't really do anything
for me I am very partial to Red Leicester and cheddar is also a classic but my favourite kind
of cheese is brie. You can feel free to leave your favourite kind of cheese in the comments or not as
you will it's just for fun we don't take things too seriously around here, happy anniversary!