SebastianSB
patreon
Video Essays: What the Heck Is Going On, Anyway?
🕑 Added 2022-02-08 21:14:42 +0000 UTCSo, that video essay channel, huh?
Right here, if you've missed it so far: https://www.youtube.com/c/BoringKeith/featured
What's going on with that? I sure mention writing a lot on the podcast and some other places. I even make the mistake of naming my topic, only for seemingly nothing to come of that. It might be like half of my tweets? And yet the channel is pretty bone-dry.
What taking so long? Videos are hard to make, sure. The editing is a slog, and filming can be rough. But honestly whenever I'm not doing those parts I miss them. Sure, the Monster Hunter video was agonizingly time-consuming to edit, but at least when you're editing you're always making forward progress towards a concrete goal that WILL be finished eventually.
Writing? Writing is an abyss. You can spend all day on an essay only to want to delete that same section the next morning. You can get seven thousand words into something only to question whether the entire topic was worth writing about in the first place. It's often the case that the most motivating things to write about drive you to write about them so much because they're fairly personal, You get a lot done but then end up with something that has you questioning whether you want it out in the world or not.
And then, god forbid, you talk about anything that's actually important? Now you want to research it all as thoroughly as possible and maybe show the script around first in case you accidentally say something harmful about a group that really doesn't need more harm done to them.
So uh, here's twelve thousand words in the form of various excerpts from essays in progress. This isn't the sum of my work. Just little chunks of various things, the parts that seemed more complete. Will any of them ever get finished? Maybe. Man, if they'd all been finished I'd have a dozen more videos under my belt. If these ever become videos, the parts you're reading here might be changed significantly or removed entirely by then.
Spoilers for the media in question. The colored text is my thoughts today about my writing, though I didn't sit down and read everything front to back today.
Excerpts: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Kl3URa-mcNhnY0Wl_OlSLwlPWCtdCgGB8f3lnKBaKD0/edit?usp=sharing
Sorry if this document ends up being incoherent. I just wanted to make sure I got it done at all to give Patrons the occasional perk and show that I am indeed working on things in the background. I'd be curious to see how many other channels are this kind of mess, considering how wildly inconsistent upload schedules are from channel to channel.
Comments
Joseph Coco
There's a couple of things in there I'd love to watch. Keep at it. I used to try to write mini-essays back when Google+ was relevant. Eventually I scraped my expertises and hobbies and it got difficult to find new / interesting observations. I don't know how people like Randal Munroe and Zach Weinersmith are able to constantly feed the idea-mill much less formulating them into coherent jokes.
Dorian Jensen
I always love seeing these kinds of process glimpses behind a creator's work, so thanks for that! Particularly intrigued by some of those idea stubs, so I look forward to some subset of them hitting the light of the day. Actually flagging/responding to the parts of these that sparked my interest would be incredibly obnoxious, but one thing I will say: Pride (2014) rules. It's one of my favourite movies. Definitely recommend watching!
Adam Snyder
Here's an observation that's completely incompatible with how Patreon works xD, but sometimes it can be harder to finish something if you share too much in advance, since you subconsciously get the satisfaction of finishing "hit" just by talking about it. Unenviable situation for sure, unless you have super chad discipline. Anyway your stuff is good and we're here to support the process in whatever way works for you. :)
