Channel Update #33 (Feb) – a video a long time coming

There’s a new second channel video and I have so much I could say that don’t really know where to start. I guess I’ll try to be methodical.

The video is about politics and the internet… and a little history and philosophy too. When I decided to take a break from the main channel I had an overly idealistic notion of just making videos on anything and everything that felt important to me in accordance with my mood at the time. The issue with that is politics becomes impossible to avoid, more so than I initially realized, and avoiding politics is important to me because over the years I have come to view online politics itself as a problem. And as it’s a problem far too big for me to solve I usually settle with trying to avoid contributing to the problem myself and just creating content that I enjoy and I hope others will enjoy too. Until now.

The reason for the change is that avoiding politics feels too limiting, and if I’m going to talk about politics then I’d rather do it directly and openly, allowing people to see exactly what I believe and letting them draw whatever conclusions they wish. One of the things I dislike about politics is that it so often feels manipulative, and to me this approach feels the least manipulative way to tackle the subject.

The problems don’t stop there however because as far as subjects go this was an incredibly challenging thing to talk about. Writing the script for this video was incomparable to anything I’ve done before. I think part of that was because the topic was so important to me but it wasn’t only that. I never thought I’d be able to change many minds but I did want to try to communicate my thoughts effectively yet I found I had far too many thoughts. The notes I have for this video go on for pages and pages, much more than any other video I’ve made and that’s not including older notes on the same subject dating back several years. When I started writing I thought I’d make 5 distinct yet related videos trying to cover everything, but then after a couple days of work I changed my mind and decided the videos wouldn’t work individually and it would be too confusing.

So I ripped up what I wrote and started again from scratch, and then a couple days later I did the same again after deciding to change the order of the video. Deleting progress didn’t stop there though. In fact it was a continuous feature of working on this video and, for the first time ever, I deleted an entire 9 minute fully edited section of the final video (it was about academia and postmodernism), and I also went back to write and record some new parts half way through editing. The reasons I don’t usually do these two things is because by the time you get to editing the video you have had so many opportunities to cut something (when writing, checking writing, reading out loud, recording, editing audio, and repeatedly when editing the video) that I find anything that needs cutting should be cut already and the further you get without cutting the more sunk cost fallacy kicks in. And the reason I don’t go back and record more audio or rerecord anything is because I did it for one line once and found it slowed video production down so much that I told myself I’d never do it again as it’s not worth the time and just opens up the potential to get stuck being overly perfectionist.

Still for this video I broke that rule and oh god did that go badly. When getting my microphone out I managed to drop it… a few centimeters… onto carpet. Anyway, somehow it broke. At first I thought it was the cable so I bought a new one (didn’t work) and then I bought an xlr cable and audio interface (I had reason to believe the problem was the usb connection and my mic has both usb and xlr). Anyway that also didn’t work so, frustrated, I bought an entire new microphone of the same type… but that didn’t work either. This was more than a little confusing. Many hours of trouble shooting led me to being even more confused and my leading theory is that it was just coincidence and that the new mic was also defective. Anyway at this point I sent everything back to amazon, sent my original mic to the manufacturer to be repaired, and just used my old mic, which despite great effort on my part sounds very different but oh well.

The problems didn’t stop there. When I finally uploaded the video it was getting demonetized during the copyright checks, so I had to get a manual review from youtube to get that overturned and, believe it or not, there were plenty of other problems too that I won’t mention because otherwise we’d be here all day. In fact while writing this (which I was doing straight after setting the video live) the video has been age restricted and fully demonitised, despite human review already giving it approval and full monetization, so I guess the problems are not over. My appeal has also been auto rejected, so it seems the video is dead.

Of course problems are to be expected, but I’ve had more problems on this single video than I usually have in an entire year of making videos. So much so that at this point I honestly feel… nothing. Usually finishing a video makes you feel something. Happy to be finished working, disappointed things didn’t turn out as well as you hoped, anxious about how it will perform, excited to see what people think etc.

Right now however I feel nothing at all and those usual concerns and emotions seem pretty insignificant. Which is a little ironic, as never have I worked so hard on something, never have I cared so much that it turned out well, never have I had so much reason to be worried what people will think etc. The point, if there is such a thing, was that I kept going and finished the video. I tried. It was a complete disaster, but I tried. 

The only thing worse than making this video would be not making it.

I think the next video might be back to gaming related and on the main channel. I don’t want to overpromise anything so early, so I won’t, but it makes sense and I have an idea. The second channel is probably dead after the age restriction anyway.