The older I get, the more I appreciate the way I was raised. A lot of people say this and I suppose a lot of them mean it, but I am especially thankful that my parents were the way they were when I was a kid. More accurately, I'm glad for all the things they didn't do. Ultimately, I think that's just as important as the positive actions of parenting. For example, it's great when one's father shows up for the little league game but it's just as important that he doesn't get drunk, pick a fight with the referee and publicly urinate while attending said little league game. Even in cases that aren't so extreme, it's essential to have adults in one's life who don't act like children. Though it's a natural part of growing up to see your parents' flaws, I'm glad that my folks consistently acted like adults when I was little. I can now have sympathy, even pity, for those kids who aren't so lucky. Kids like Youtuber Shaycarl's kids.

Shaycarl is an amplified version of a creature called the Dad With A Camcorder. Now, the term "camcorder" is quickly becoming dated but the concept will never die. Ever since the invention of the hand-held video recording device, there have been desperate suburbanites who have used it to stave off boredom and perhaps wiggle themselves into a little corner of fame. This is where we get backyard wrestling, Jackass stunts and the endless stream of "kitten does cute thing, we go dawwww" videos. But the most egregious of the bored, camcorder-wielding suburbanites is the DWAC. He has the device with him during all non-work hours. He relentlessly films the minutia of his life, which necessarily includes the daily mundanities of his family. At first it's a goofy novelty but it quickly devolves into an irritating obsession. The digital age and Youtube have only served to exacerbate this problem.

DWACs used to be limited to the economic and storage stresses of magnetic tape. Their addiction to home video was expensive and work intensive. As a result, they needed to focus their efforts after a honeymoon period of recording every little burp that came out of baby's mouth. Thus began the twin traditions of the unwanted holiday video and the dreaded America's Funniest Home Video. The latter, for those who recall the show's original run, was once the nadir of television. It was a fundamentally lazy bit of programming that consisted almost entirely of DWAC videos. We thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, but then Youtube and digital photography made it possible for DWACs the world over to record in effectively limitless volumes and share them with thousands, even millions of people every single day.

Shaycarl is the logical conclusion of the Internet Age DWAC. Three years ago he started recording vlogs that occasionally featured his family, then last year he got the bright and totally original idea to do a "one video a day" channel, which he called Shaytards, ostensibly to support his weight loss efforts. He held true to the premise of the Shaytards channel for a while but it inevitably transformed into what all one-a-days do. It's now a ramshackle deposit of shameless DWACism, a guy running around with a recorder capturing the most boring bits of his life and punctuating it all with forced silliness. Sure, his three-year-old daughter thinks it's a riot, for now. When the younger Shaytards grow up, they're either going to resent their father for toting around his camera at every waking moment or they're going to be insufferably "fun" just like him.

So, Shaycarl, this is your intervention. You seem like a nice enough guy and I'm sure you love your kids, so do them and the Internet a favor by putting down the damn camera. They'll thank you for it later.