I joined the ranks of the many twats / wankers who own this camera.

The GoPro is a curious object, with an annoying advertising slogan sprawled on its back. It invites you to be a hero, and assumedly a narcissistic one who intends to record their heroics.

But what is a hero?

The epithet, have-a-go hero, often describes a foolhardy man who takes on the responsibility and personal risk, while making a cameo appearance in an anecdote which might increase his chances of having sex, however fails to walk away like in the movies.

Without failure and irony, a have-a-go hero would just be a hero.

The camera’s marketing, as does advertising in general, lacks irony and self awareness. When the Stranglers declared, no more heroes anymore, it was as much a request as an observation.

But the GoPro’s slogan is an empty promise, lacking sensitivity to the nuances of performance, as say the actor Buster Keaton, who used failure while behaving like a have-go-hero. The stubbornly working class man was capable of portraying earnest human experiences, far more successfully than any advertisement ever could.

Advertisements only attempts to fool you into feeling a bond with a product, an inanimate object or service albeit tangible, while the camera can create fiction that allows the audience to imagine and embraces humanity.

In this video I will build a threaded tripod mount with the hope that three legs will ground any lofty heroic ambitions.

By this point of the video I am attempting to test a thread tapper I have made from an existing 1/4 inch bolt. A camera adaptor thread contained 20 teeth per inch. I made a pig ear of the first one, and managed to find another threaded bolt for a second attempt.