Patron exclusive: California Travelogue 2022

Hello everyone! Thank you for taking the time to watch my dreary vacation footage! But more importantly, thank you all for supporting me. Let me take a moment to talk about that.

I couldn't have gone on a vacation at all without your help. My job does not pay great, Patreon is literally half my income, and without it I would not be able to pay the bills for my household and have enough left over for the occasional hamburger, let alone a road trip. What you're doing for me is literally lifechanging and I can't actually be grateful enough. That's why this is a patron exclusive.

I went back and forth on a public release. I brought a camera on my vacation with the intent of making a normal channel video - then I got back, reviewed the footage, and changed my mind. You'll see this when you watch the intro, in which I declare the footage Not Fit For Release. I changed my mind again about that, but let me explain why I felt that way.

For one thing, I captured a TON of footage. I wound up with about six hours of video, which isn't atypical for a normal shoot, except that's usually 45 minutes worth of performance repeated over and over as I make mistakes, change my mind, etc. This, however, was nearly six hours of *actual content,* unique events that I mostly didn't want to throw out.

My first thought was that it was way too long, and I tried to find places to cut it up, but it proved impractical. So the video is just very very long.

The bigger problem was that I felt the quality wasn't quite up to my standards. I shot this on a Gopro Hero 4, and I did not realize just how out of date that camera is. It has no builtin stabilization; the mic is not the miracle worker I thought it was; and while I did bring a gimbal, it died half an hour after we left.

As a result, the footage is shaky, it has bad audio in many places, we forgot to ever clean the lens, and on top of all that, I just didn't really plan very well.

I didn't record intros or outros for any of the "segments." I started shooting in the middle of events and didn't realize how little context I was giving. Some of the subjects I encountered were more technical than I was prepared to explain on the fly.

I also shot the segment at Devin's place using two different cameras, something we had never tried before, and it didn't occur to me that they would have two different framerates. So that's a little jarring. There's also issues with lighting that made a number of scenes unusable.

So there were a bunch of problems, and the resulting video was a shaky, blurry, disjointed mess - or so I thought.

Watching the finished product on my girlfriend's TV, I found myself thinking "Wow, this is a fun video. I *could* release this..." It just looked and flowed so much better than I thought during editing. But you know, that would have required me to do a lot more editing, to remove parts I'd really rather leave in - and I'd much rather just give you folks the whole thing.

You all helped me have fun, and you deserve something special in return. So, rather than recut this for a public release, I'm giving you three and a half hours of retroelectronics adventures.

It's not "raw" - I've removed as much of the chaff as possible, so this is pretty much all killer / no filler, and I think you'll love it. I had a blast, saw a bunch of wild stuff I'd never seen before, and had a great thrift store experience to boot, so you'll probably have a good time too.

It is a Bit Much, of course. I added chapter breaks, and there's webcam punch-ins and voiceovers here or there as needed. Hopefully that helps it read a little better. Thank you all again, and I hope you enjoy the trip.

(PS: Parts of this footage may show up in my next couple main channel videos to explain where I got some things, and I may also clip out the Goodwill segments and release just those as a public video, but 95% of this will remain exclusive.)