update 5/25 (medication, mental health, & godfeels) (Patreon)

hello again folks!!

so to start, an update on the "some things i liked in hell" stream highlight video. i'm working on it slowly but surely! the holdup is twofold: first, while i am FINALLY back on adhd meds and that has helped a lot, my mood stabilizer (lamotrogine) takes a solid month to get up to an effective dose, and the other meds my psych recommended to compensate for that in the short term have been playing some really fun games with my sleep schedule, and my day-to-day moods are still all over the place. second, editing unscripted ramblings about media is hard! especially when you have a brainworm that likes to whisper in your ear constantly about how everything you do is terrible. i am taking conceptual antibiotics to address that little parasite (see: point the first) but progress is slowgoing.

in the meantime, if you missed that stream you can watch part 1 here and part 2 here.

so what about ~other stuff?~

i got a new whiteboard!! and these are the vids i am currently mulling over. i know that i have promised the matrix video for a dog's age at this point but i think i overestimated my ability to Have Coherent Thoughts About The Matrix And Its Extended Media after working with Soph on our feature-length vid The Matrix Sequels Are Good Actually for three months straight. speaking of which, that vid should be going public later this week? when it does i'll be sure to share it here.

i will say the most likely candidates for being my next project are Stop Making Sense, The Hollywood Film, and Legion. i only watched the series finale of legion a couple days ago and i am thinking it might be the next thing i focus on because of the three it is... how do i put this exactly. the most conceptually low-impact of the three? but then again i've already written 1500 words of that script and it's already proving to be a bit of a monster.

alright so. i'm going to not talk about videos so much anymore in this post and talk about other things that i am working on. i am saying it like this because i feel a little guilty that the first project i jumped headfirst into after finally getting back on adhd meds was... my homestuck fanfiction.

for those of you who don't know or are only dimly aware due to my video on the subject, i have an ongoing homestuck fanfic called godfeels. and out of every single project currently sitting on the little shelf in my brain that i reserve for things that have the potential to compel me out of my preternatural capacity for inaction, godfeels is the one that shines brightest. and i feel like i need to talk about this a bit more candidly than i have in the past, because the fact is that it IS eating up time and energy that i could be putting towards the very videos that are ostensibly why y'all give me money in the first place.

so look. i cannot overstate just how thankful i am for your support. 2020 was an incredibly rough year for all of us both emotionally and financially, but by some miracle i barely lost any patrons in that time. i was terrified that i would lose this base of support and be forced to go back to working retail, but you folks stuck with me despite barely posting here, barely making videos, barely podcasting, barely streaming...

the model of being a ~content creator~ right now is to do a video a month at least and to stream constantly and to post exclusives and do all this extraneous stuff that are basically just more opportunities for people to give you a couple bucks in exchange for entertainment. and the thing is i know that i have enough followers already that if i made a tight schedule and stuck to it, released vids on time, released a podcast biweekly, streamed four or five times a week, i could double my current income within a month.

i'm not saying that to brag. honestly it feels to me more like a curse. the idea that a more stable income could be possible for me IF i were myself more stable? like if only i could just be normal and have infinite energy and work constantly on this grind, then my bank account wouldn't run dry at the end of every month and i could maybe afford to set aside money to be able pay THE OBSCENE QUANTITY OF TAXES that self-employed people have to pay in america and also upgrade some of my aging equipment or be able to afford to rent a studio since the road noise outside my apartment is so loud i basically can't record anything here unless it's in a closet or at 2am. knowing that these things are possible and within my grasp actually does less than help me. after all, if it's so obvious then why can't i do it?

maybe i have lost my work ethic. maybe i am still stepping up my lamotrogine and it'll be a while yet before i'm back to my old self. buddy there are so many maybes and possiblys and hypotheticallys and could bes knocking around in my skull you could mount it to a stick and use it as a noise maker at a soccer game. i mentioned up above that i wrote 1500 words of a script about the tv show Legion. i did that yesterday. it took me several hours to get to 1500 words and by the end i felt bodily tired. and like, i was hungry at the time so that probably had something to do with it? but as soon as i started writing it felt like, okay, here's the parade of asterisks and disclaimers. here's the part where i try to tell marvel fanboys not to harass me for telling them that avengers endgame was bad. they will harass me anyway. here's the part where i want to say that legion is the best tv show produced in the last twenty years, a statement that is deliberately provocative and hyperbolic and yet will not be taken in the manner it was intended and will instead become evidence of my assumed intellectual superiority and my refusal to Just Have Fun, Man.

and then there's godfeels. currently i am working on the last chapter of godfeels 3 part 1, it's already over 10,000 words and not even 1/3 of the way to the finish line. a good friend of mine has spent months working on an art piece that will be featured towards the end of the chapter that i am SO incredibly excited to show off (shh don't tell anyone). at this moment in the story the protagonist is on the moon fighting an army of weird aliens who snuck into our universe using stealth ships that function by being made of material so metaphysically cringe that no radar or sensor would be caught dead detecting it. hell, here's literally the second paragraph of the chapter just so you can see the kind of mischief i'm getting up to here:

it's silly. it's weird. it's also the first thing that i have had real honest Fun working on in a very long time. and this story is going to be continuing throughout 2021 and probably through a good chunk of 2022. this weird, intricate, melodramatic, genderfucked comitragedy of a space opera i've got planned for the future of godfeels is the first thing i think about when i wake up in the morning and it's the last thing i think about when i go to bed.

and then i remember that i can't really monetize it because it's not an "original" work, despite the rapidly ballooning cast of original characters and the increasingly unrecognizable stable of homestuck protagonists. i could start a godfeels-specific patreon but that in itself just makes me want to curl up and die. i just want to write this story, man. i'm in love with this story. and literally every time i try to set it aside and work on any of the shit that is supposed to be The Thing I Am Known For i just. i don't feel compelled. i write out my thoughts and i structure my arguments and then i read them out loud to myself and all i can think is "who fucking cares?"

and that's not a self-deprecation thing. i think it was for a long time, and of course we can't forget my aforementioned brainworm, but these days it's more that i just feel stagnant. like so what if i can identify and articulate the arguably Marxist themes of some recent popular media when after the video is over the Disney corporation remains the pet devil of the great satan that is the american empire? increasingly i just feel dirty when i say anything nice about media produced by these awful corporations that are using their limitless wealth exclusively to make our lives worse. and that's... i mean, i know that's depression talking. i know that i just stepped my mood stabilizer up a couple days ago and that has the paradoxical effect of temporarily destabilizing my emotions in the short term. i know i'm being kind of childish. but, again... knowing these things doesn't make it easier. knowing every contour of this torturous intellectual roundabout doesn't keep me from falling into it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and

i had a conversation with a friend recently, a friend who also does video essays and has been feeling particularly disillusioned with youtube as a career choice. i was saying that when i work on video scripts i see a list of arguments and counterarguments, maybe some interesting observations and a couple funny gags, hopefully a conclusion that makes a good point that will stick with people. and when i work on godfeels i see a churning sun in the void of space throwing atoms into the aether like messages from god. when i work on godfeels it's like a divine wind is passing through me and i am at last Doing something that is actually worthwhile. i know that sounds like a really fucking silly thing to say about a fanfiction of a webcomic where an alien clown drinks faygo to get high, and it IS. it is silly! it's actually really fucking inconvenient that working on this stupid fic is the most emotionally and spiritually fulfilling labor i've devoted myself to in YEARS because it also happens to be the least potentially profitable thing currently under the creative umbrella of me!

anyway, my friend said in response that they felt similarly. but that they also feel a divine spark in the act of examination and interpretation, in absorbing and filtering art. those are their words. and i want to clarify that neither of us is necessarily using "divine" in the literal sense of like, God is talking to us or working through us or whatever. it's more like that feeling you get when you see something beautiful and momentarily become aware of the numinous. when you feel it in your gut that you are part of a universe that is inconceivably vast, and yet somehow you know that nothing you have done with your life has been a waste of time.

that conversation made me realize that i lost track of why i even wanted to do youtube sometime over the last couple years. and i don't mean in the sense of like, "i have opinions so i should do video essays." my inspiration, my ambition, has always been the creation of art. i used to feel so much excitement at the possibility of synthesizing art and criticism! but as time went on, the business model of The Video Essayist crystallized, and it became indisputably clear that the kinds of things i wanted to make were existentially antithetical to the algorithm. so i thought, okay, maybe i can find a balance? maybe i can subsidize whatever weird stuff i'm thinking of doing by making more mainstream accessible vids? and like, on paper that makes sense. but i think in practice i have always overestimated my ability to switch between different modes of thought. my attention is fickle, and no one has ever been able to make me do something i didn't want to do. not my parents, not my friends, not teachers, not bosses, not even myself.

but the reason i bring up this conversation is because it also made me realize that i, too, still feel that spark in the experience, in the examination. and i do believe i can bring it to my work again. i know this post is like a million words at this point and it probably sounds like i'm building up to "i'm retiring from everything" but that is not the case. i do fundamentally still want to do this, or at least something like this. i enjoy it, i'm proud of the work i do, and i know a lot of people are inspired by what i make! i know that none of you would have continued giving me money after all this absence if you didn't think i still had it in me.

and i also know that i have written so many posts like this where i resolved to Do Better, and then failed to do better. granted this time i have good reason to suspect that conditions are actually improving. lockdown is ending! i'm medicated again! my girlfriend is moving in with me in a couple months! 

my goal is to publish this last chapter of godfeels 3 part 1 by the end of may, and then focus on videos for a little while. particularly the videos that i think have the potential to be more than just an opinion in a fancy suit. by the second week of june i'll be up to the full dose of my mood stabilizer, so i think at that point i'll be in a much better place cognitively to put on my big girl pants and get back to work.

i know this has been a long and meandering and maybe in places uncomfortably personal update, but even as none of you are My Boss i still feel an obligation to be honest with you about what's going on. your support has kept my bills paid and my belly full for a long time.

thank you