scrap snippet: perfect impossibilities

There's a lot that I want to say on my YouTube channel but that's okay I guess when the thing I have to say isn't particularly suited for a visual medium over any of the other things I want to say. I can go to my Pretzelize Me Cap'n! blog but that also feels like it needs to be more official. So here's a thing, scrap of thing really, and maybe I'll have other use for it one day but it'll be here for now till then:

It's weird how some things would be so perfect, but then turn out to be impossible for the exact same reasons that they would be perfect? Let me give a couple of examples.

Like, it may seem a shame that David Bowie died before he could play Tamatoa in Moana, instead of the character being played by Jemaine Clement, but the only reason "Shiny" was written so Bowie-esque-ly is because it was inspired by Bowie's passing itself, and there's no conceivable world in which Bowie would thus even be around to play that glittery boi. But Jemaine Clement is cool too, so there's that at least.

Or the neighbor kid in Spider-Man 2, (looks up,) Henry Jackson, how they wasted the opportunity for that random neighbor kid to have been Miles Morales instead- only, Miles Morales was only invented after Donald Glover wanted to play Spider-Man because they were replacing Tobey Maguire after Spider-Man 3, and Henry Jackson could never have been Miles Morales, and Henry Jackson is from Queens and Miles Morales is from Brooklyn besides. You totally know, though, that Henry Jackson is probs gunna be some Spider-Person swinging around the future of Earth... (looks up,) 96283. Like, maybe.

New Vlog Up

https://youtu.be/DA3Z3n5iZbQ
This randomly generated URL is not bad. Can dig, can dig.

The thumbnail I made for the video is my best yet, and the editing isn't too shabby on this one either; my vlogs get consistently little hits, but that's fine, I didn't have much to say this month.

A.0?

The new laptop will be coming in anywhere between like the beginning of next month to the end of next month. 3.0 is so far on its last legs that it's at 3.1 by now I'd say, and I may never get it working again. If I do get it working, that is to say, it will be by getting it back to 3.0 again somehow. It doesn't even bother flipping to the BIOS screen when I boot it up; it's asking for my keyboard layout preferences at the start. Awesome.

Haha, I got it to the BIOS screen!

In the meantime, since I'm getting a new... nuts, it's at the keyboard layout selection screen again... since I'm going to get a new laptop (at a price greater than the fisheye lens... but I really do need a new laptop, I just proved it with the 3.1 stuff, so nevermind...) it's going to need a name as well, not 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever. Maybe A.0? Or something? I should start another one of those polls, like how I did with the 2.0 branding...

And this time I'm going to have the background you voted on! Never actually did get around to it on 2.0...

Ssusspense

watching greak british bakeoff and how do they get it so watchable? that's hwat I'm tryign tto gifugre out suspense but you still want to see what happens before 'what happens" happens so that criteria for what happens makes sense. the editing as well is jjust topnotich. rewatching some of my stuff my edititns's been getting bnetter at least.

Continuity is evidence against lady last Thursday, but deja vu fits into continuity??

Had a third idea but can't remember it now. 

Super Smash Family

There was a family reunion Smash Ultimate tourney this afternoon. I came in third place somehow. There were some pretty major upsets.

writing right now is physically painful to me. i'm going to bed gnight (maybe update this post in more detail later)

EDIT Alright so I've got motivation to write right now but not this. Uhm I got a dairy queen blizzard mini, for free (coupon was third place prize.) I started off facing against a number one seed, when I was third seed- coming in third place probably won't change my seed rankings, because I'm still definitely third seed tier, but well I am a lot better one-on-ones than in multiplayer FFAs.

Snippets (on) Wisdom

Alright, so let's... there's only a few days left in the year now, less than a week, but if the rest of the year has been an indication this week is going to last two somehow. Things are so strange.

I have a lot to say but none of it really belongs here. Snippets, maybe. Wisdom doesn't exist for its own sake, not even as a practicality so much as a guiding principle. We call wise those who speak of love because loving is something we do every day. Wisdom requires us to worship, in order to appreciate it or in order for it to be wisdom. But in order for us to take wisdom into ourselves we must also open ourselves up to take folly in as well.

My dreams haven't been as strange as they should be; it's my waking that's strange, but these influences don't offer up immediate strangeness in itself. Seeds for later.

Any detail could save a life. Pray in all things that everything you do has wings of its own.

Christmas Card 2018

Scan turned out a lot crisper than I was expecting. It almost makes me want to add in a layer of digital coloring...

twas twasn't it

I think I know where my phone might be (I've been missing it for like half the month??) so that's good. I was worried about doing a Christmas card each year (and this year I could IG that!! but alas, no phone) but that's acceptable to do on the day of, so I'm going to bed peace y'all (no pun intended, but, peace!)

"C O N T E N T"

b r a i n w o r k i n g

so trying to vid-a-week i guess only two videos this month though TIME TO VLOG but really should still be working on C O N T E N T otherwise; writing future videos etc (other blog has answers other blog k  n  o  w  s  ) really focusing ideas to get audiences to care, studying building channels and all that

is this what i'm d o i n gw i t hm yl i f e good question

okay time to give up on all dreams i guess

right now i feel like doing NOTHING it's a bad time to plan the way that shopping on empty stomach is bad time for that except opposite. shoppinglist this is

all i want out of life right now is to make it through christmas. plan later.

n ewy ea r s??  ?

Shepherding

The nativity pageant thing is over. I played a shepherd in it for, each performance that I was in, which was all but one. I think I'm the only one who cared that much about historical accuracy in the pageant, wearing sandals instead of sneakers and taking my glasses off for the performance, but it is what it is. I got to shave my neck now that this is over (shepherds didn't shave their necks back then, like, probably?). I'd been going to trim my beard further but this is good and feels good and looks good and maybe I'll keep it fuller.

Weird to think Christmas is only a few days away.

YouTube Vagaries

You know those vague technical problems I ran into but can't talk about? They're good now. The project isn't over with, but we can continue with it. I want to talk about YouTube stuff now.

Doing a video a week but not having time to really record anything this week, not anything cohesive that is; I'd wanted to talk about Spider-Man once I'd seen it, just a hot take on that which I'd be able to edit together quickly, but I wound up not seeing Spider-Man yet and you know how that turned out, and I could do something on Aquaman similar but that's so complex I would need to focus on one specific element or something, instead of the gestalt of the thing but it's too compact for now.

Building up an audience I need to figure out who that would be, and why they should care, and that's more difficult than it sounds. Similarly to the Aquaman thing, I need to find some common thread to focus on, pursue that. Research the playing field. Find an entry point. Et cetera.

Fresh AquaMan Hot Take

I watched Aquaman today. Spider-Man will be on Saturday. 

Boy is there a lot to unpack.

It's certainly one of the most unique films I've seen in my life, and I'd like to believe that's saying something. I'd have to rewatch it if I want to articulate exactly what I mean when I say it's not quite like anything I've seen before, but it's a loooooooooooooong movie, so I'm not champing at the bit to see it again too soon. And it is a lot like things I've seen before, of course, like watching it I'm going, hey I understood that cinematic technique, I see what you did there, deal, but. It is a pretty unique dang thing here.

Like, TRON is a lot like Star Wars in a lot of ways, but it's the only movie that looks and feels like TRON, you know?

It's not so much throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, as, throwing everything at the wall and not caring if it sticks or not. And it is glorious. The director James Wan got his start in horror films, and people who started in horror are some of my favorite directors, because for some reason they just, first of all have the craft down pat, and know how to work with the artists and craftspeople under them, but also have really fresh takes on everything, know how to maximize the creative potential of any given property and any given scene. Peter Jackson. Sam Raimi. James Gunn.

Aquaman is also unique in that it's very much a product of its time. Like, it could only ever get produced now. This age of cinematic universes, and mass-scale special effects, and learning from what went wrong with other fellow DCEU films and what went right with other competing MCU films and just going gonzo at worldbuilding the way the Mummy did, RIP Dark Universe. While also feeling like the cinema of a decade ago, the Avatars and Dark Knights of the landscape, with 2+ hour runtimes and epic plotlines and dense worldbuilding (the thinking being, the longer the runtime, the more we can monopolize the movie screens, maybe put this movie on multiple screens in your cineplex if you want more showtimes, leaving fewer screens for our competitors. Business! (Show business!)) (Maybe they're doing it here because Aquaman is the only DCEU film to have come out this year, and so they need to cram this one movie to bursting with all the DCEU they can muster?)

And like there's no way this movie didn't cost a billion dollars to produce. Look at the hairs flow! CGI flow like that doesn't grow on trees!

Thea'r Work

buncha second gears wanna come in here I'm their little field trips and eat out popcorn and but or concessions. And watch their fieldtrip movie. Just Grinch, but there's Spider-Man tomorrow. Finally.

Wishlist

Mom's getting on our cases about getting her our wish lists; I'm hosting it here because I've got links to preferred vendors. Mostly I want video equipment, and that can of course run the costly side, but I think I've found some pretty swell deals.

Samyang 12mm f/2.8 ED AS NCS Fisheye Lens

Rode VideoMic shotgun microphone (just the mike is fine though I wouldn't mind with boom mount, "dead cat" windbuster, and cable)

A new laptop for video editing etc- or, old laptop really, I'm thinking an Apple this time, looking at used MacBook Airs (link on Amazon to what I have in mind; that second guy has good quality and $0 estimated tax!)

So yeah.

Avatar! (The James Cameron One): The Theme Park: A Video Essay: An Analysis

This came out a week ago. It's a long video, about 56 minutes I think, but this is good stuff. The kind of stuff (not the exact kind of stuff, but the quality level) that I want to produce. So let's dissect it a bit, shall we? 

The video quality is only pretty alright, not terrible or anything but pretty baddish (she's not that washed out in the video itself as in the thumbnail, but she is just as vaguely not-quite-in-focus) but the audio quality is great. People are willing to forgive middling video quality; it's all about the audio quality. (How was the audio quality in my latest video btw? I ran a noise reduction to remove the background hiss, and I think it turned out well.) There's very little music, none non-diegetic except over the credits. (I experiment with music in, music out. I don't know. I could see arguments going either way, in my own videos.)

The editing here is awesome, on a macro and micro scale- she's not afraid of jump cuts, and she places them well. The flow from ideas to idea is coherent and well-segued. The ideas themselves are well-researched, but the content only relies partially on academics. A lot of the information comes from personal enthusiasm on the subject matter; most of the runtime deals with personal experience.

Presentation-wise. She's both humorous and informative. 

I try to inject humor into my videos. And also like, information. Both of these things I excel at in real life, but neither of which I can quite translate to any of my videos with any consistency. Make that, any success at all. Need to curate that better, but not sure where to begin. A lot of my humor comes out in interactions with others, what makes others laugh, and also other people giving me a springboard to bounce lunacy off of. The things of my own which I find side-splitting may not translate to others even realizing the inherent humor. And I know the things I know, so of course I'm not sure what information would even be valuable to share with others, or what things people just sort of already know.

Though of course that's an effective content model, listicles of things the audience already knows. So that they can say, "ha I knew that," watch the video or read the article to see if their own knowledge of the situation gets brought up, if their own opinion is shared. (Do people already know that that's why they read listicles? See man this is hard. I don't know if what I know is like common knowledge or what, which is why I usually do vlog things. Because I like vlogs the best, on the channels of hosts I care about; and also because of course such-and-such a personal detail of this last month is going to be unknown to the audience. It's low-hanging fruit.)

Also, she's got loads of Patreon patrons. Loads and loads and loads. Just, like, loads. But less than 400k subscribers. There must also be a content model, some effective business plan on how to maximize social networking content, but that would require further digging. It's something I've been meaning to look into, how different channels effectively use social media platforms. 

On the Growing of a Channel

My YouTube sub count grew by 50% this evening just by Kaellen and Hannah subscribing. I may have more YouTube subscribers than followers on Instagram; I don't know, I haven't had my phone to check.

I was taking photos for their Christmas card and Kallen just asked me if I was working on a project involving SpongeBob, he'd heard somehow, and so I him, and they both looked it up separately then and there, and we just sat there for a few minutes as they went through a couple of my videos with me just sitting there instead of taking photos, them watching my videos around me. It's a weird experience.

I'm not sure why I don't tell more people or whatever. It feels like I should be actually doing things with it. It feels like I could be a little bit better, on writing and directing and acting and editing and videographying everything. Just a little bit better on each of those, and then I'd be ready to share my stuff more. 

And the videos themselves being viewed by and through other eyes. It feels simultaneously too personal and not personal enough.

People watch YouTube on their phones a lot. I need to keep that in mind from now on. I'm not sure how that would affect anything any different, but it does make me feel better about my latest thumbnail; it actually looks pretty good on mobile, when I'd been thinking, on desktop, that it could have been a little bit better. 

The act of shoving the content out involves loads of compromise, but learning to make that compromise was part of my making a video a week in the first place now. 

Next vlog title idea: "Now where did I park." Eh?

New Christmas Video

It's been two weeks, on a one-a-week ideal schedule; I severely underestimated how long it would take for me to edit everything together, and also my idea of what the video was to be shifted several times through the creative process. Maybe I'll tell you more about it on Pretzelize Me, Cap'n!
My First SpongeBob (Hospitalized at Christmastime)

?????feel liek tiping lik this

Like I wanna go see spider mans but like im the shepperd in this live action nativity pagenat and like i'm not even sure the times on that so like its so hard to schedule stuff and like CRAP why do things have to be so difficult 

i havnt see my phone in over a week now i dont know were it is 

Comparisons Between Driving Tests

I failed again. It gets easier and easier. Today marks six months to the day since renewing my learner's permit, but it doesn't mark its end. It's fine; the only downside is that I have to wait to see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse tomorrow instead of today, because there was nobody to drive me into town (or more accurately, nobody to drive me in and back out again.) I guess it might as well be time to review what I need to fix for my rescheduled appointment next month.

My first driver's test, I kind of went too fast, didn't slow down, still think it might have been the slope of the road causing me to roll down faster and not slow as fast; this time, I think I did a pretty reasonable job of staying within the speed limit, but my decelerations left a lot to be desired. Waiting way too long, when pulling up to a sign or a light, to start slowing down. My first driver's test, already going to flunk, I was still asked to try and parallel park; this time, not even.

My second driver's test, pulling out of the DMV parking lot at the start and failing because I pulled in front of a car down the road (it was very very far down the road, so I'm still not sure why she instaflunked me for that); this time, pulling into the DMV at the end, I overshot the parking lot and had to pull into the parking lot of the hotel beyond instead, then back out and try to make it back in again.

Traffic has a massive butterfly effect, effect, but it's nice to know that I still probably would have failed that second test anyway, seeing how I failed this one more than five years on.

A Brief History of Driving Tests

My driver's test is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon at 3:30. I'm trepidatious.

I honestly don't know how solid my chance is at passing. I'm either going to pass it or I'm not, which means that to the best of my knowledge it's like 50-50. That really is how statistics works. It's wild.

You need to be able to parallel park, and I've done that before, but I'm nowhere near the "don't practice until you get it right, practice until you can't get it wrong" zone. My first driver's test I instaflunked that section. I did manage to parallel park, but I pulled up partially onto the sidewalk to do so. I'd accumulated enough frowny points by that point that I would have failed the test regardless, but this was icing on the cake.

The second time I took a driver's test I instaflunked as we pulled out of the DMV parking lot. I'm probably some sort of record holder for quickest failed, so that's one positive out of that situation at least.

Passing my driving test is like dying. It's something I've never done before.

Solid Salad Day

Blastin' through the Foldable Human let's play archives. There's a lot of material there so I don't think I'll ever get the 100% completion achievement or anything, but I've already taken a huge chunk out of the backlog. Finished the Undertale pacifist run let's play just a few minutes ago; he said he was going to do genocide route next but that was three years ago by this point. Has Undertale really been around for that long? Guess it's not that long in comparison to other things, but.

Anyway, though I didn't really watch any less let's play today than the last few days, it's definitely been a lot more productive of a day for me. Today felt really good, really solid.

Folding Video Games

I have been watching SO MANY DAN OLSON LET'S PLAYS lately. He streams every Monday on Twitch, hosts archived streams on his YouTube channel (most unlisted but accessible as a playlist) and has a  super obscure secondary channel I only discovered today that has even more archived streams, not unlisted but with not-that-many hits on any of them, this super obscure thing. His main channel is mostly about movies, but he plays a lot of video games as well: he likes to stick with more obscure, kinda crappy titles when he plays, generally movie tie-in because of course; as a sort of archive of all this ephemera that would otherwise be lost or else overshadowed.

He also streamed his playthrough of Undertale for the opposite reason, because it's so good.

Today he played that crossover fighting game that everyone's talking about: PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale! I actually kinda like that game but yeah it sucks.

https://www.twitch.tv/foldablehuman

Input/Output Balance (and other balances in general)

I think the technical difficulties I was talking about yesterday (and the other, unrelated technical difficulties which I'd decided to work around later) have been fixed. Sweet! Now onto talking about other difficulties I guess?

I haven't posted a really hardy post on this blog in a while. I just need to outcrease (increase my output!) in many media generally, but I've been caught in a rut lately of falling back onto familiar, input-based habits instead of artistic creative output-based ones. Even during NaNoWriMo, my non-writing time was just awful in terms of input-output ratio. 

I really don't know how to solve this problem, other than perhaps gamify my outcrease, hack the parts of my brain that just want to fall back onto small trivial tasks to get them to work toward large non-trivial ones? I've looked vaguely into gamification as a lifehack, but no one app or system really stood out to me. It needs to have a good balance, for one; not just the way it fits into one's life but in the way that intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation needs to be balanced. A lot of these cryptocurrency things look really kinda pyramidish to me.

Even reading my scriptures daily is at this weird zone between active and passive, too involved for casual input such as YouTube watching but too passive for involved input such as gaming.

If I go to bed right now, it will be the first time in days that I'm going to bed before 2:00 a.m.

Vague Technical Difficulties

Oh gosh that may actually be a Christmas spoiler so never mind. I don't know who all reads this. But in as vague of terms as possible (but you don't even know whom the gift is for, so I really don't need to be that vague, because even if you knew it wouldn't really be a straightforward guess beyond that) there are some technical difficulties, and not just because 3.0 is so far beyond being 2.1 anymore, but other truly baffling computer problems. You may think I'm some kind of tech expert, but 90% of the time I'm just as baffled as you; I just push forward and find the obvious solutions and stuff. And a different machine entirely would be the easiest thing to do, in this situation. Which tech wouldn't be that easy to track down anymore, so it's not thaaat easy??

Driving and Unskills

Been "busy" playing Smash Ultimate, which came out yesterday. There are a few things I need to do. Taking my driver's test in less than a week now. I failed the first two times I took it, but those were years ago. I now what fails you instantly now; I've done basically all of those. Driving around occasionally, for practice, there are frightening gaps in necessary thinking patterns; my instinct is to slow the car down when there's a dispute at an intersection, instead of speeding up, and it's kind of a miracle that I haven't been t-boned three or four times over by now. I'm not very good at the things I'm only just starting at, and apparently at the things I've practiced hours and hours at either. Even the things I think I'm good at, or I should be good at, I'm not very good at. But I guess maybe that's like the Dunning-Kruger effect. Or maybe the WHAT'S THE WORD FOR IT ARRGH the thing where you only show your greatest work to others and feel like a pretender and a fraud all the time in the presence of other artists?? Whatever that is. See, I just proved the, thing. However.

imposter syndrome, that's it

oh and see also the peter principle? that's another one that may have effect

metaphorical cordyceps

I don't want to be ready for anything. I'd rather spend  my time doing merely the technically productive, instead of actually producing anything. They're very good at hijacking your brain. Like the fungus genus Cordyceps, but looking it up now, what it's doing is hijacking the body of the ant directly, circumventing the brain entirely? So never mind. Other than, I learned about Cordyceps through meaningless puttering around, so, it is a necessary part of my creative process. Like I said. It's technically productive. But it only enlarges the hole of I-should-be-doing-something.

Like, Instagramming? I said I'd IG twice a week, and Wednesday would be perfect for that, but I didn't post anything. Hurh.

And Pretzelize Me, Cap'n hasn't been updated since the beginning of October.

Do you think that adding another social media account for me to do will make me more likely to social media ever? Or like would it do the opposite? Because tumblr is... aw heck, never mind, not tumblr. But as a, medium. As a canvas. When I can't even with the others. nvm

Apparently with most people it's that they social media too much??? My goodness.

Or maybe that's also just a distraction. Maybe it's good that I don't ever social media. sure it would force some productivity into my life, a means to an end and not the end itself, but who needs that means either

in other news , with this computer (the one where you have to ctrl+alt+del and go into task manager in order to open anything because trying to open up windows explorer itself "references a token that does not exist") if you try to type more than four characters into the URL it exits out automatically, and if you so much as click on the URL if you're on a site that has more than four characters (read: all of them) the same applies.

weeeeird

New Video (Dec 1)

https://youtu.be/bGFEt2bpZDM

This was supposed to go up on Saturday- with the idea that I'm doing one video a week- but it usually takes me, longer than a single afternoon, to edit everything and upload it. Obviously I couldn't do any of that until I shot the video, and I couldn't shoot the video until December being too busy writing to get any video shot in between. I still need to do another video for "this" week, but I already know what it's going to be about and everything. Expect that on Saturday.

Alex says my thumbnails are getting better. More clickable. That's great news.

Music and Graph Paper

Thinking of adding music to the backgrounds of my videos; trying to compose my own but it's slow going arranging MIDI instruments to sound good. I've already a video or two with my early hands at it, and it doesn't sound very good!

Royalty free options are available; I already have a track from bensounds.com downloaded on my computer from the YouTube workshop from college, the one class I managed to attend. Did you know that incompetech.com also has royalty-free graph paper, for all your graph paper needs? I'm not sure if there are any companies out there charging for digital graph paper, but, if there are, it's also available for free, and maybe they should have considered that before they based their business model off of ripping people off for digital graph paper?

A lot of royalty free music doesn't sound much better than the stuff I come up with, so... there are some gems, but they require digging. Plus you have to match the mood to the content of your video and stuff? But it looks a lot more professional right out of the gate, with music.

Video??? (Blog!)

Meant to have a video yesterday but I didn't even get it in today. So??

Also wouldn't this be better for Pretzelize  Me Capn since its about that? Maybe. I decided today that that should be about graph design, and furry stuff.

Word Count Overshot

There was a ward dinner last night when I was trying to write, and it took a couple of hours but it was fine apparently because I made 50k by the end of the month (if you include The Funny Home in that word count, because I wrote most of that Halloween story, past midnight on Nov 1st technically...?) and that's only the words on my blog anyway, because I did fill in a few blanks in there into a copy of the first draft file directly, found the bracketed content and edited that, in chunks too small to bother posting up.

But I also wrote past 50k words as far as I could, just to be on the safe side, and I'll tell you the story behind that. This new crop of words, I also had a little bit of bracketed content, for one, and decided not to have that as part of my official 50k. For some reason. There were also a couple paragraphs of content I'd written previously, outside of NaNoWriMo, which I could interpolate into the bed of word count here though it didn't technically count as November word count.

And also the NaNoWriMo word count tabulator counts "*"s as being individual words, when Google Docs did not, nor was I intending for that to be the case. There were 69 of those in total, in the Doc.

So there we go. 155 words I needed to overshoot. And did so successfully.

There was, like, some stuff from Halloween, that I'd actually written in time... but it's impossible to say which is which, by this point, so, we're saying it was ALL November. Yeah.