Captain's Log...

I haven't made a blog post since before the sorta-premiere of my video project (it was not as complete as I'd've liked, but, as will be hinted at below, there are a few roadblocks in putting in the final pieces that have stalled me these last few months.) I still don't have much to say publicly, but I realized that privately I do say things, in the Google Doc I keep as a journal/diary. And I had things to say this month.

Formatting has been changed for readability, adding emphases and paragraph breakings; also, footnotes added, to explain biographical details that are lost when the entry is excised from its context.

9.22.24

I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek recently.

Might be because of the Bell Riots taking place this month.

Might be me getting into it a tad more than I usually am deliberately, to hype myself up to get the Star Trek Adventures 1e bundle on HumbleBundle (especially because I feel guilty spending money on anything except gaza funds.*)

Maybe it’s because the optimistic future grounds me and provides some perspective and sanity in the present-day political climate, all whacked-out and spooky. (The official timeline suggests the Second American Civil War happening soon, and World War III, so I try not to think about that aspect, although I have come up with a very cool concept for a Star Trek prequel show that takes place in the very very very near future (replacing my answer of what show I would produce were I greenlit for a Star Trek show of my own, over Dan Well's STAR TREK: MERIDIAN (if I were greenlit for a Star Wars movie of my own, it would be about two sisters who work at their uncle’s moisture-farm-type-place and rebuild a speeder piece-by-piece getting into the nitty-gritty of the hover-technology engineering, while gradually being radicalized into joining the rebellion/resistance.)))

It’s definitely not because Star Trek Day happens to be in September; I was well into this latest kick/fixation/hyperfixation by the time it turned out that was coming up, and even then I didn’t tune into the celebration or anything because I read on Tumblr precisely once that Paramount had issued some sort of mealy-mouthed “We Stand with Israel” message, which would only go along with Star Fleet principles because Star Fleet is hypocritical sometimes– we don’t believe what corporations say anyway, as exhibited this year rather chillingly by the backtracking on corporate Pride during Pride Month, so I’m not that uncomfortable with continuing my Paramount+ subscription– it’s more problematic that it’s a Paramount+ as-a-Prime-Video-channel subscription, when Amazon’s web service provides Cloud technology for Israeli government and military. As does Google. And I’m typing this in Docs.**

Speaking of Tumblr, I knuckled down and just (meaning merely, but yeah less than an hour ago, during the time of writing this entry) reset my password so that I can access it on desktop- now that that shakeup’s been accomplished, I can might-as-well start a second tumblr blog, for Prince Pretzels, so that I can reblog the awesome furry art that comes across my dash without it being off-brand for my writing blog. Then I can add my tumblr to the endscreen of the video, and hopefully I can start work on the video some more. —I canceled my Speechify Studio this month, a couple days before the deadline, I don’t know how I’m gonna do the bits that are better off reworded but at least I can say with my whole chest that the video was made without AI assistance of any form.†

And speaking of resetting passwords- I’m trying to log into my byui account,†† so that I have access to my transcripts, so that I can do crunchy number stuff and tell for sure that my GPA would be high enough (need a 3.0 for admission consideration, which is laughably above what my score actually be, but there’s an application appeals process to waive the requirement) without my performing so low in the actual art-class parts of my arts degree, and meanwhile also have my actual transcript so that I have it to apply in the first place– but I can’t do it, I can’t get in, I think I must have changed my password at some point after graduation for some reason?, because the password I’ve always had isn’t working (maybe it has something to do with my Adobe account, which had been linked to my school e-mail?) and going into the password reset process it’s asking me a security question I’ve got not the foggiest notion toward the answer regarding. It’s painful.

9.23 And the Irish Reunification of 2024, of course, but that could be a any-month-this-year thing. I watched that episode today and was reminded of that only coincidentally, watching the episode rather to see them talk about the dimension-shifting science of the Elway Theorem (I also watched the episode where they talk about Fermat’s Last Theorem today only coincidentally, wanting to see the episode where they talk about pre-warp 21st-century space travel, as the Charybdis factors somewhat into my idea for the show I would produce.)

Anyway– the RTF‡ people finally got back to me this morning about my prospective UTexas application, which I sent on the first of the month (the date when applications opened up)- I opened the email but clicked out of it, chickening out of what they had to say with only a great deal of bravery allowing me to click into it in the first place; checking my other email account and seeing there was a Facebook update from H Ross Workman: it was from his family, announcing his passing.‡‡ That’s what I really wanted to talk about today. And then, I figured, if I could read that, I might as well have the guts to read the email from the University academic program coordinator, and clicked back to that- it’s mostly links, at least one of which I’ve already checked out, but there is admissions process info that I have now that I didn’t have previously, so that’s good.

But President Workman. It’s not his voice, his words of counsel that I hear when I think of him; I think of Brother (Huntsman?) saying “don’t graduate,” when I came to him about the idea that I didn’t seem to be doing well in my chosen degree emphasis. Don’t Graduate. How warm yet firm and breathtakingly headslappingly obvious, coming to me then in some kind of natural association when I try to pull up memories of President Workman instead. Don’t Graduate. Though it was too late by that point to try to pull any such stunt. This was, six years ago. Ten years ago, though, the exit interview with President Workman, his counsel to me- take as much college as I can, get as high a degree as I can; it’s going to take years but those years are going to fly by. He said to get a job to put myself through college, and, well, a lot of my life right now is banking on the idea that I won’t be able to find one of those when I am at college (I couldn’t find one during my Associates or Bachelors’ degrees so I don’t trust my prospects for Master’s or Doctorate) and trying to save up while I can, though that’s not going the best either, with the, only working one day a week generally (though I did help do vet checks this morning, put in a few solid hours’ worth of work.) But let’s assume I’ll be able to do that, fine, don’t sweat it.

Ross Workman. I never really had trouble seeing him as both a great man and a human. He screwed up what city in Nevada I’m from, during the exit interview, and I didn’t bother to correct him, because (because?) it happened to be a city I was eyeballing for college; that’s a subject we can’t seem to escape when talking about him. Like Riker Data and Worf trying to exit through the revolving doors of the Royale, finding themselves dumped back where they started.

The funeral’s on Saturday, in Utah. I missed Gayle’s funeral.§

9.29 Guess I might as well give a quick rundown of the other TV I’ve been watching lately, for biographical purposes: late last month, after starting up the first of the Star Trek kick as of late, I started watching Leverage: Redemption again, making it all the way through the end of the current season. I was watching it together with Hannah and Kaellen but never got around to the end of the first season and then Hannah-and-Kaellen was no longer a thing and it felt like starting back up again and finishing watching on my own would need to be more momentous, but it didn’t of course and I guess we make momentous moments ourselves.

And I finished and so replacing it in my rotation is Elementary, which I watched on Hulu back in the day and never quite finished season 1 of, but now have, after fiddling around a bit and watching a couple episodes I’d already seen to find my place where I’d left off- the episode where Detective Bell gets shot at, I remember not making it very far after that, it struck me as kind of copagandistic how Sherlock praised the cop for making enemies but rewatching it it’s not nearly as bad as I remember. (Robert Hewitt Wolfe of DS9 doesn’t join the crew of the show till season 2 and I’d wanted to get back into Elementary anyway but I can’t say that the Star Trek connection has nothing to do with my decision to start the show back up again; I’m on a longer arc of murder-mystery kick already as it is, getting super into Columbo back in June. (Jonathan Frakes being a somewhat regular director on Leverage likewise not having much bearing on getting back into Redemption, but I can’t say it’s entirely out-of-mind.)) The first new episode for me, then, being the one where New York City is on lockdown due to the nor’easter blowing in, felt somewhat surreal to watch, on the same day that Hurricane Helene wracked the east coast, leaving entire towns basically wiped off the face of the map– with the discretionary funds I can already afford all going to other charities already, one can only hope one’s tithing is going to disaster relief instead of tax-free stocks and bonds trading.

Other shows I’m making my way through: Community (we got Peacock to watch the Olympics) and Person of Interest (I’d already watched the pilot a couple of times, once when it premiered and once a couple of years ago (January 8th 2022) when I was going through a simultaneous Brian D’Arcy James kick at the same time I was starting up watching The Player, which is a show with a vaguely similar premise that only lasted for half a season though was at least showrun by John Rogers (Leverage full circle I guess.)) This time took, and I’m three seasons in already; tomorrow I plan to watch S4E1 of both it and Community.

9.30 And maybe, as one probable reason I’m getting so heavily into Star Trek again now, it’s all the Moby Dick references in First Contact. That was my, book in the book club last month. It’s weird that I’m only getting around to mentioning it as a potential reason here at the end.

Taking a new tack at it after spending the past couple of days scrambling to record a bunch of audio

Putting the new audio into the video, and yep the audio quality is way divergent (autofill suggestion suggests "way diversityier than" for "way div;" not even a word; way divergent anyway) and super noticeable, and it would take approximately the entirety of the rest of the time I've got just to put the audios into their right places, much less put footage over them, all so that the audio quality bounces around super jankily but at least the script is something with a marginal amount more polish, and I realize-- it's unnecessary, we can use the draft we already have, it's flawed, there are some boneheadedly obvious connections there I don't make, but it's still got so much stuff in it that I'm amazingly proud of.

 I might use some of the new audio in the project, but, I'm going to be sticking largely with what I'd already had- after all it's right there in the name and everything: the Doc file I was editing and everything finishing up the script is called the January 2nd draft; most of the audio I've got was recorded from a script called the May 4th Draft. The January 2nd draft was the one that was supposed to be influenced by the notes from the At-A-Glance, and, it is, I did get those notes in there. But, I've got the 5 Year Out mark on January 2nd 2025, on the calendar I created to explain the creation process of the video... maybe I will do that director's cut thing I thought I would do, a year ago. 

For now, work on getting the finishing footage over the audio I already have. Which means tracking down a halfway old autosave from before I started restructuring everything... Ah whatever, it's not gonna take that long to put everything back the way I had it.

I talk about Robert Downey Sr's Putney Swope in the video, with the metaphor being about how tackling every angle I can, that's the compromise. It felt a little hypocritical recording new audio for that section after discovering a new connection, when that section's about how it's okay to let some connections go unconnected (Robert Downey Sr.'s POUND, which connects to animals with human faces, and also shares a name with Eliot's friend Ezra.) The connections are there, it's not like they're going anywhere.

I don't begrudge the time "wasted" on recording the new audio; there was some stuff that genuinely did need to get rerecorded, maybe. And I'm learning to be more accepting of things going to waste, because, a couple of reasons, learning to let go of the neoliberal commodification of absolutely everything, but also, seeing things in terms of affordances instead of intentions, what things can be used to do rather than what they were made to do- the author is dead, all we have is the affordances.

I'm okay now with the fact that not all the experts I've contacted for research purposes have gotten back to me, there's always the Jan 2nd Extended Edition. If any newspaper or anything had bothered to interview me about the project I would've told them it's longer than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but shorter than the Extended Edition- maybe with the Jan 2nd cut I can finally surpass that 12 hour 6 minute mark? Because like, I'm not sure how much longer the project was going to be with the new audios put in, but, I think it would've tipped the 9-hour-30odd-minute video into over the 10 hour mark, and like, apparently there's a hard limit to get out of there by 6:30 pm, when I do still want intermissions...

Scrambling to rerecord stuff for my video at the last second

Recording audio today! My 9-and-a-half-hour video premieres in, 4 days, and, I still have audio to record. Like, a lot of audio to record. Most of it rerecording, but some of it adding some stuff in at the last minute. It's taking even longer than I thought it would and I thought it would take long! I'm glad I failed in my goal to record audio at night! Don't have much time to type!

My 2023 At-A-Glance was missing for months, and it had a lot of great notes about which sections needed to be rerecording entirely, but it was only rediscovered a couple of weeks ago, so, like, can't actually, do the stuff that I thought would've been a good idea, although I could finally recover the notes I took on certain sections that I realized could've been restructured or signposted as being in list format (notes were taken by listening to project all the way through; the ideas come across differently when spoken vs when you can see how they're laid out typographically.)  

My recording setup today is so much better, getting really good audio, but it's just going to have to be the noticeably better new audio right next to the old stuff. Honestly, I'm kinda attached to the old audio anyway. Hopefully I'll be able to get this done by the end of the month, spend the 1st putting the new audio in place in the project and putting footage in place, spend the 2nd finishing off the graphics and   everything, spend the 3rd putting the music in place, spend the 4th premiering it. I don't think I'm gonna succeed in even this goal, I've been recording all day and am only halfway through what needs to be done, so we might need to ship with incomplete graphics maybe?, but I'm not stressed actually. Too much has come together too conveniently for it to have been anything but Providence, and if God's got my back as I finish this stuff up, then like, cool.

List of Philosophers/Academics Mentioned in the Latest GSSB

I'm doing a blogpost a month this year and it's the end of the month and I need something to write about! Luckily GAMES STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES, one of my favorite podcasts, released a new episode today, and I listened to it while working on my project, and can write about that!

It's a podcast about making academic books on games studies accessible. I wrote down every scholar (etc) they mentioned or cited in this episode, though, (just got curious when they mentioned my boy Lévi-Strauss and decided to go back to the top and take notes this time,) and it's still... quite academic.

Jaroslav Švelch- the book they did this month is Player vs Monster, instead of his Gaming the Iron Curtain, because it's shorter and they have to read like four books a month across their various podcasts. Maybe someday.

Katherine Isbister- How Games Move Us

Kyra D. Gaunt- never mentioned by name, but the catchphrase of the podcast, "the social is predicated on its exclusions," is from the book The Games Black Girls Play, and it gets discussed several times throughout the beginning of the episode.

Torill Mortensen

Darshana Jayemanne

Sarah Stang

Julia Kristeva

Barbara Creed

Stephanie C Jennings

Gerard Jones- Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence

Noël Carroll

Michel Foucault

Immanuel Kant

Mary Douglas- Purity and Danger

Klaud Lévi-Strauss

Norbert Elias- The Civilizing Process

Graham Harman

David Wengrow

Forrest J Ackerman- Famous Monsters of Film Land

Hiroki Azuma

Patrick Crogan- Gameplay Mode:War, Simulation, and Technoculture. 

Peter Galison: The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision

Patricia MacCormack

They talk about this video near the end, which video I've referenced myself on this blog, so, Chris Franklin? Who introduced me to the Ranged Touch line of podcasts, incidentally enough.

Getting in on that Book Club Convo

For Christmas we started a family book club, and the first book up was Boundaries: When to Say Yes How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life. I was at dress rehearsal for Fiddler on the Roof during the discussion on it so I missed that! So I figured I should make this month's blog post about it!

December's post, "ambition, obligation, followthrough," is about how I do many a thing I do because I feel obligated to do it, which is fitting to bring up again given the subject matter of the book. The central metaphor of the blogpost is the final couple of episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the Third Impact, which is funny, because Boundaries is a very Evangelion book. Christianity aside, even (all the Christian images in Eva are just because Japanese people think it's cool and exotic.) 

The Third Impact (the first impact was the creation of the moon and the second impact was the awakening of Adam) is the dissolution of human boundaries, causing all human beings' souls to essentially merge into one as we evolve into the final Angel. The Angels (an advanced alien species who are also the progenitors of humans) shield themselves with forcefields called AT Fields, which it turns out that humans also have: Absolute Terror is that which keeps us separate as beings and prevents us from intimacy. The Hedgehog's Dilemma. The evolution of our understanding of boundaries as an infant, growing up and realizing that our mother is not ourself but another, is an important philosophical theme that gets discussed in these episodes, and is talked about in Boundaries the book.

But anyway, like, I don't know what they discussed during the discussion, but I guess I should talk about my actual takeaways here though, like, what did I learn here, if I do things only because I feel obligated, how do I set boundaries for myself there? When I'm already okay saying no to doing things I don't feel obligated to do? Do I have a choice on what I feel obligated on and what I don't? I'm not sure the answer to that. Maybe it's possible to get finer toothed with it, tease out parts of tasks that I do feel obligated on and separate them from others?

I'm certain yes, but that leaves me uncertain of where to go from there: for example, I feel it would be better to write more to this post, better still to have something to say on the book, better still to have more personal takeaways, but I only feel an obligation for the first few things. There is plenty I'd love to say no to, but still feel an obligation towards, so maybe this idea of drilling down on which aspects I feel that obligation about and why can be a takeaway, even if it's not something that the book is even about.

Another thing that just sprang to mind after I hit publish on this: prioritization! Today I felt "obligated" to make a blog post, do rehearsals, get in some final updates to my monthly journal, catch some films before they leave streaming, finish up my brown-tagged graphics on my video project. Overcoming an illness, however, and sleeping fifteen hours today (and about to go to bed early right now) I prioritized doing this blogpost apparently. And rehearsals. And Duolingo; I'm out of streak freezes. As nice as it would have been to work on my video project today, getting my brown-tagging in by the end of the month (premiere date May 4 2024!) I can't feel the roof of my mouth, so, my health has always been more of a priority than working on the project, even when I'm doing serious crunching I've always gotten in at least seven hours of sleep.

Of Negative Tests and Workloads

If you read my WordPress blog you'd know that a.) I tested positive for COVID-19 two weeks ago and b.) I've been watching a lot of Lindsay Ellis videos lately, kinda. I still have all of "loose canon" to get through, those videos are relatively short but there's a lot of 'em, and AS A GRAPHIC DESIGNER IT'S REALLY BOTHERING ME HOW THE SINGLE AND DOUBLE QUOTES ARE ACTUALLY JUST FOOT AND INCH MARKS you don't see these kind of shenanigans on WordPress, I grew complacent or something.

‘“”’ see isn’t that refreshing. I mean it’s not "incorrect" to use "straight marks" necessarily, or even at all, they’re just forms of quotation marks, it’s not like programs that convert ASCII-style marks like that to their curly brethren are 100% accurate in their automatic doing so, but (is that why it)’s bothering me so much because the " marks look like a positive COVID result

So I figured I’d get a post in today, while it’s still the day that I’ve tested negative (for the first time in my life actually, I think. I hadn’t actually taken a COVID test (I don’t think) until that first one on Jan 1, which read | |, which = +.) Here’s the thing- I was kind of getting used to having COVID. I was getting used to never leaving the house and barely even leaving my room. I was especially getting used to not having to go to work.

One year ago, from the very beginning of April to the last week in June, I took what was initially supposed to be one month off, which spiraled into almost three-- working on my project, my 9-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube project. (urgh and it’s doing a double en dash instead of a single em dash)

Initially the plan was to work on that project last Tuesday, from even before I would turn out spending the day in quarantine: it’s a vlog of 2 January, and so last year for a chunk there the idea was that it would come out 2 January, albeit a few years on. The idea before that had been 4 May, and that’s the idea again, but the current draft is labeled the 2 January draft- so, you figure, January 2nd would be an excellent time to finish a draft labeled January 2nd. But.

all- of- my- notes

whichI’dbeengoingtocompile

in the, it’s fine it’s fine, draft,

all my notes that I’d taken over no less than three separate occasions last year watching through the entire almost-10-hour-video and taking notes, those notes are in my personal planner: which, thing number c.) because I also talked about it in my WordPress blog, it’s all in my personal planner for last year, and said planner is ???, might as well be at the bottom of the sea, lost it somewhere a few weeks ago and I’m at a total loss as to where.

So I couldn’t actually work on the draft on the day I’d been planning on it. And for an entire week, a little over, I couldn’t even put in any editing work in the places I knew were already working but could just use some footage going on in the background, because it was like, nooo, it needs to be done in the correct order. In my brain.

So last week I spent watching... (...grabbing my personal planner for this year and looking through it) westerns, and Real Steel, and the Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3 director’s commentary, and a double feature of Titanic and Birdman of all things, and rewatching Jurassic Park and Glass Onion. And a bunch of Lindsay Ellis videos. And reading a bunch too. But no working on my project! Except for to, mask up occasionally and upend a bunch of furniture in search of my dang At-A-Glance!

But halfway into this week I could finally start working on my project again, At-A-Glance or no. Did that for a full day, only pausing to film for a different project while the lighting was good, and to catch the latest Folding Ideas video which had come out within the past 24 hours. Mostly working on my project though. Editing, but also making the adjustments to the script that I remembered at least needed to be made. That was Thursday. And yesterday...

Yesterday I took a break for, not the entire day but it felt like it was going to be.

Tim Rogers’ Action Button Reviews is a YouTube series I take great inspiration from whether I want to or not, where he talks ostensibly about video games but really about everything; the shortest episode is over three hours long, and he bleeds for that time, through each and every video. He’s on season two right now, but the finale of season one is a multi-part choose-your-own-adventure playlist where he talks about Cyberpunk 2077: a game pretty good for something made entirely of problems. There are eight parts to the review: an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion; the idea is that you open, choose two of the internal six chapters to watch, before reaching the conclusion. (If you watch all eight chapters the whole thing is even longer than my own 9-hour-twentysomething-minute video, but that’s proscribed. And so instead you watch through it three times, which takes a little over four hours longer.) I’d already watched through it twice before, and so yesterday I began (and today I finished) the path where I could sweep up the final two chapters I had not yet gotten to. I’d forgotten how much Tim Rogers bleeds for that time.

I also watched a Lindsay Ellis livestream she did with a bunch of her YouTube cocreators (her cocreators! thing number d.)), on Nebula (though it is on YouTube, just unlisted (you can get to it through a playlist though.)) It’s about persona, the identity these creators, semi-public figures, craft to present themselves as on the internet. It was also pretty raw, and contextualized a lot of stuff I hadn't even realized lacked context beforehand.

So there was, time, for introspection on a lot of stuff, why exactly (for the millionth time it feels like sometimes) I feel like this video needs to exist in the world, why I need to make video at all. Last night I dreamt I was starting up a new channel, and had a good workflow and a solid first video guaranteed to be a hit and generate a lot of views (maybe even some ad revenue.) And I’d just started, but I felt like I could reliably put out one video every two weeks- and my agent (?) was thus all, great, you’re going to need to do two videos every one week. And I had my passion project video which it would take two weeks to do, but I had one day before I needed to put out a new video, and no matter what I decided to do it was a compromise, and I was waking up on a morning where I would need to do an entire video from conception to publication in one day.

But I actually did do work on the video yesterday.

Five sections, not counting interludes, each section taking place in four segments, that's twenty segments in total. Of those twenty, I have one that’s basically finished (just need to shoot a five-second bit of footage) and one that’s let’s say half-finished (there’s a text I quote extensively from and I need to make it visually interesting somehow, but the rest of the segment is 100% done.) I’ll plug in an hour’s worth of work and I’ll wind up with twenty seconds of footage in the background, of a nine-hour video: but those are some handsome twenty seconds.

All this is to say, in between the introspection and the editing and the fact that I’m used to not having to go into work, and the fact that Tim Rogers did seventeen consecutive 20-hour workdays in a row to edit the masterpiece that is his 5:56:26 Tokimeki Memorial video (bleeds)(I'm not sure of course how comparable it is putting together video game footage and putting together movie footage)* and that I want some bleedtime before the May 4th deadline, and also I’ll have Fiddler rehearsals again for the next two months... I really really want to do that again, just for this month, taking time off of work so that I can work on the video. 

But also I’m afraid it’s just going to look like I’m chickening out of working outside because of the weather.

*To compound the question of how relevant this is, but to explain the relevance at all: by the time I reached the end of June being off of work for those three months, my editing pace was sluggish. I felt uninspired, felt like I wasn't getting anywhere, and was working on the project less time per day than I worked while I was still holding down a steady job. There was no reason anymore to miss out on my job, which I genuinely love. Now, however, I’m feeling genuinely inspired to edit again. But sometimes there’s a (visual) metaphor you can achieve using video game footage that you shot, that you just can’t achieve with footage from the movie you’re talking about.

ambition, obligation, followthrough

(experimenting with formatting, it kinda just feels right)

｢because people tell me to｣

1.  obligations for 2024
2. 2024 campaign
3. book club
4. fiddler on the roof
5. Watching Every Cats and (Sequel Trilogy) Star Wars in One Day: A Vlog and Also a Video Essay

why do we do the things we do: a question I've been asking myself for years. (like Shinji Ikari (going there!) being confronted with the question of his own motivations for doing things in the final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion)

it's a question that I've had to confront head-on a couple of times this year, managing to sort of glance off it both times- going in consulting with a few friends on my script for WECa(ST)SWiOD Aaron asked me (and I'd been asking why the audience should care, and I'd been asking what my central thesis even was, and both these questions were circling around it but also glancing off of it) why I even decided to start the project in the first place, why I decided to vlog so much on that initial day knowing that I'd be making it a project to begin with, and I only sort of had an answer; auditioning for Fiddler and filling out the cast role questionnaire where it asked why I even wanted to audition or be in the show in the first place, which totally took me aback because it's not a question I'd ever thought to ask myself, and I only sort of had an answer.

 i feel obligated i guess. 

I realized today, chafing against being told to do something I already felt obligated to do, that I just,, feel,,, obligated. I'm not sure what's deeper than that, but at least we've uncovered that.

The noble Brutus

 hath told you Caesar was ambitious.

 If it were so, it was a grievous fault...

My obligations list for 2024 seems somewhat ambitious, in some regards. Shifting a gear, unsure if it connects to previous thoughts, but a thought nonetheless I've realized recently. (going back in my YouTube history to find what triggered this realization, it's from ym birthday, I happened to watch on my birthday.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5byfi2JVdo about a vdeio game that was promised and Kickstarted and was ambitious but never came to fruition, because the ambition was just ambition, and anyone can be ambitious. you can have all th' ambition in the world but it means nothing if you lack followthrough. 

AMBITION IS NOTHING WITHOUT FOLLOWTHROUGH

A couple of lessons taking into the new year- is the followthrough just something I do because I feel obligated to that also, I don't know.