What has inspired me.
Retread the steps that got you to where you are now.
The past two weeks I have been in a rough place mentally. This often impacts my mood and my ability to work as consistently as I would like. The result is this feeling of slow and steady decline. It can feel impossible to escape this but I always find a way. Something often helps me push this feeling aside is reminding myself what inspired me to try to do this for a living. This blog post is going to be a list of things that helped land me where I am today.
When I was a child I was obsessed with two things, Lego and video games. The earliest creative things I did always involved placing blocks and building castles. In the early 2000s I got access something that changed my life, Lego Mindstorms.
This quickly led to me having more and more interest in computers. I spent weeks with my Dad in the basement working on various weird Lego robots. Dad would do the programming in either the default software or NQC (Not Quite C) We joined the Vancouver robotics club and competed in various robotics competitions. My collections of Mindstorms grew as the years went by. I eventually got the Lego Webcam. This changed everything for me. I spent hours building Lego and making small stop motion videos with it. The software sucked and the frame rate on the camera was terrible. It was honestly a bad camera even for the time, But it got me curious about video creation.
In 2007 YouTube came into my world. I have this vague memory of sitting at a friends house and watching Queenie by the forever strange Cyriak. I would like to warn you that it is odd and disturbing.
In the early days YouTube was something that I was interested in but video editing was beyond me and I had no concept of how to even start. The stop motion videos I had made with Lego were just a series of photos. I never did any editing after the initial creation. I started my first YouTube channel in 2008 with a friend of mine at the time. We did some standard skits and attempted to make shows that mimicked the YouTubers we liked at the time. We managed to get a whopping 50 subscribers. Mostly just friends and family members trying to be nice. After a summer of messing around with a video camera we lost interest and the YouTube account was eventually closed. Later in 2008-2009 I started three separate YouTube channels. The first was a group project with some friends who had a modded XBOX 360 and a modded Wii. We were going to record game play at his house and talk over it. Inspired by many of the popular channels at the time. Nothing ever materialized there. The second channel I started was game play montages mostly focused on the Free to Play shooter "Crossfire" this was where I learned how to edit videos (badly). They were bad enough that I won't link them here. Yet, I'll say that they do exist online if you can find them. Eventually that channel became random game play clips and there are a few league of legends videos up there as well. My game play is absolutely horrible because I was just learning the game at the time. The last channel I started in that time period was a really old fashioned tutorial channel. I stuck bold impact fonts on the screen and pointed out websites with Mega links to download movies.. Not my finest hour but I did learn some more basic editing. As with most things, I lost interest and went off to do other things. Most of that creation was between 2008-2009. In 2010 I started messing with DAWs mostly FL Studio and Logic with a tiny bit of Ableton. I released some music online during that time but eventually dropped the hobby. I had become busy with working and my girl friend at the time.
In this window of time one thing stuck and remained consistent. I was watching a lot of YouTube. Something that changed my life forever was "Household Hacker" one of the hosts Traveler released this video in 2010. This was how me and my friends found Minecraft back then. We played for awhile and bought the paid version. While my group lost interest faster then most people I kept watching. I found AnderzEL and the legendary Seananners Welcome to minecraft series. As you might have gathered from above I was not that interested in minecraft. But I did enjoy watching it, I also imagined maybe making videos like these myself one day but it seemed so massively out of reach that I would never have a chance. That was until I found Total Biscuit. I found him while searching for WoW cataclysm coverage. I never played it but I wanted to know enough so I could understand what my friends who did play it were talking about it. I slowly became obsessed with TBs voice and style of coverage. He also introduced me to the existence of Giantbomb and I grew to love the Giantbombcast. In recent years I listen to the GB spinoff groups such as The Jeff Gerstmann podcast and Nextlander.
While I was discovering all of these voices in the video game space I was also learning about and discovering traditional Rogue-likes and that was how I stumbled on Dwarf Fortress and Rogue-like Radio.
In this era I did not do much creation. Mostly consumption. I had learned enough video editing to feel that I could edit a video when I needed too. I watched from afar as YouTubers grew as I watched and felt that I could do the same. I even told someone at a job fair that I went to near the end of highschool that I wanted to play video games for a living. While I would not start streaming until 2013. That lasted for a few months before abruptly stopping due to an unexpected move. In 2014 I got started streaming and made my current YouTube Channel. It took way longer then I thought it would. At this point its hard for me to even watch my old work from back then. All I see is flaws and I want to smack myself and tell me how to fix them. I was constantly exhausted and overworked. I eventually compromised most of my remaining friendships and relationships so I could work full time and stream 30 odd hours a week. Looking back it was worth it. I just wish my learning pathway was more direct and less wandering. The advantage the slow growth of my work gives me is context. I know what its like to be a nobody in a space and how to build up from nothing. I worked full time and built a career in my off hours.
This post is rambly as hell but my point is; Sometimes when you are feeling down about yourself. Retread the steps that got you to where you are now. Maybe it'll help you relearn why you are doing what you do. At least, that's what it does for me.
Schedule.
Next month is going to be busy. I might need to shift the schedule somewhat due to my little sisters wedding and a planned trip with my dad. Keep an eye on this space and my discord for updates on that. This week I am aiming for Tuesday - Friday but I might take the Friday off if my mood does not pick up by then.