https://youtu.be/AdC-Z5kykxI

New show! With some incidental Huong Le simping. It will definitely happen again

https://youtu.be/1oWywzLivUs?si=eJrDWfrnkBqRsFLj

Tuned in. I need to do a better job of getting these things out. 

https://youtu.be/goWMclZw3DU

It REALLY begins. Here I am showing up after procrastinating all day.

I'm nervous. Are you nervous? I'm really nervous.

So tomorrow around this time I will be recording the first episode of Showing Up for the coming year, which I was going to call Season 2 but the other two shows I do every week are Season 1 so I am going to sneak into my YouTube Creator Studio and change the Showing Up playlist to say "(season 0)" so the new one can be season 1.

I have been doing this shit for four entire years and it still makes me nervous, not least because I still have absolutely no idea what I am doing for the show tomorrow.

I don't think it can be stressed enough how unbelievably bad I am at this. It's not a lack of skill or a lack of training or total ignorance about how any of this works, it's that when I used to try and do it "properly" I got way too bound up in dumb shit that didn't matter. No matter how hard I worked or how much effort I put in, I was constantly saying "I can do better." I was destroying myself like that. Take after take after take until I got all the footage I needed and put it all together and eighty hours into the editing I would say "this sucks, I'm starting over."

The only way I've managed to get videos out week after week was to treat them like streams (and initially, they were streams) -- I'd hit record, and whatever came out came out. When I hit stop, I didn't watch the video back or do any editing whatsoever. I just uploaded exactly as it was.

I'm adding one more little thing right now: having a focal point for the video. Ideally a little bulleted list of items I'm gonna cover. And with less than 24 hours before I have to do the video, so far that list is... um... I don't have one.

I do tend to procrastinate, after all.

My sort of pie-in-the-sky dream for the coming year is to clean and polish the videos so they have intros and theme music and there's a plan every week and I stick to that plan and produce something worth watching, three days a week. every week. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. With written posts every Sunday recapping the previous week.

This is going to be a mess for a while. I am pushing towards my work being something I currently cannot meaningfully produce with any kind of consistency or reliability. Usually you get people who pick one and stay with it: either they are making videos consistently on a reliable schedule, or they are making videos with reliable quality and meaningful content.

I'm trying to do both. I can do consistent, I've been doing that for four years now, but upping the quality is both difficult and absolutely necessary. Consistency alone is not worth squat. You have to be reliable and have quality. I'm fairly satisfied with consistency. I'm not at all satisfied with quality.

And that all just kind of skates around the elephant in the room, that I am building a game and progress needs to be made on it. The videos have to come out, the quality has to go up, the game has to be developed. All of this at once. It's a whole lot to take on.

I don't expect to dominate this task from day one, and I don't even entirely expect to have it dialed in by the end of the year. Might not even have it by the end of next year. And that's fine! Sometimes things take time. I've been creeping my way along trying to get moderately good at art for seven years and I am not doing that well, but fuck it I am trying and that is what matters.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm being too ambitious, if I am trying to do too much when I could be doing something much smaller and easier that would be done faster. But that's what I'm doing - taking small steps toward the big project, so I will eventually be able to work directly toward it without needing to develop new skills and habits because I have the ones I need.

And I'm also trying to reality-check myself about how good things "have" to be. They don't. You can half-arse almost anything if you just get the damn thing done, but I always like to joke that I am tired of half-arsing things and it's well past time for me to make a complete arse of myself.

I think what I should probably concentrate on for the first week is just talking about what these videos are going to be moving forward, so there's a meaningful intro to each playlist. That would get me off the hook for making detailed plans for the first week.

Doesn't help with next week tho.

I try to put my struggles on display so other people know it's okay for them to have struggles, too. Life is not easy all the time for everyone else. They just don't want anyone to look at them when things are hard. But that just makes other people feel like losers for experiencing struggles; they never see anyone else struggle. And I think that's destructive.

I think it's good for society, for humanity, to see other human beings struggling. Especially if you see them struggle out of their problems.

But even if you don't, it's beneficial to see someone else struggling consistently even if they aren't getting anywhere. Even if it doesn't seem to be making a difference, it matters that they are still trying. 

I'd like to think I'm getting somewhere, but even if I'm not, I'm going to keep trying. I'm going to keep showing up. And I'm going to keep working to be better. 

That's all any of us can do, really. 

https://youtu.be/jTKmo3BMDv4

That's it! That's all! The era of the Old Man Yapping has ended. It's all gonna be focused from now on. 

Well, probably not, but I'll make SOMEWHAT more of an effort

https://youtu.be/B3Au5YRKHmk

Showed up and complained about the things I said I was gonna do and how now I have to do them