Out of the Spiral (06/06/24)

Hey everybody - wanted to put this out to let Patrons know what's been going on with the channel and me in general as it's been pretty much radio silence for the past month. I've been holding back in part because I didn't want to 'spoil' anything, but if you're reading this then you're probably interested in knowing what's in store. Soooo I decided to get over it and Post.

The short version is that I started working on a video covering the Amazon Fallout show like a month ago and it ended up being very easy for me to write many many words (as you may have guessed from how many times it's come up on the channel, I'm a big Fallout fan). The trend towards extremely lengthy media breakdowns on YouTube is something I've mentioned before and I generally avoid it - I think it can be quite forced and repetitive if done poorly - but it became clear to me that if there was any subject I could get an hour or two out of, it was this one. This itself partly explains the gap between videos, but along with this a lot of life circumstances just happened to get in the way through May, and after coming back to my script with fresh eyes there wound up being more than a few things I wanted to change. A few weeks later, I've essentially rewritten what is already one of the longest things I've put together, and can now report I have something I'm much happier to work from.

Longer version. Disclaimer, I may have said some of this before, I have a terrible memory.

One of the big annoying things about the 2021-22 Bad Times is that I basically lost the ability to write anything, every attempt to do so ultimately boiling down to "oh no this has spiralled in so many directions how do I make sense of this" "oh no I forgot what I found interesting about this project in the first place" "oh no I no longer care about this thing I spent a month working on", rinse and repeat. This would be tedious enough on its own but, combined with general self-confidence issues and an increasing sense of distance from my audience, the idea of setting up a camera and talking into it for several hours started to feel more and more alien. This is what led to the slightly bizarre choice of coming back from a 2 year hiatus with an unscripted Half Life 2 riff, and the more experimental videos that followed over that year. There were definite positives to this - I feel a lot more comfortable speaking off-the-cuff in videos - but even a year ago I was only just starting to relearn that sense of focus and discipline that I had in the early days of the channel. I started to truly get that confidence back around the time of the Wonka saga (comprised of notes, though still not fully scripted) but the real shift came with my video on Squid Game - the first project I'd almost entirely scripted since 2020.

It's a very weird thing to say a video essay about Fallout is the culmination of my attempts to deal with residual mental health issues, but tragically it is also true (Editor's Note: I was going to put 'deal with the fallout of a mental health crisis', but I have instead put it here in this note so it can be ironic). I could not have imagined writing 1hr+ of material on one subject until the last few months. At the same time, this longer writing process coinciding with a few unavoidable distractions has also been an uncomfortable reminder of the Bad Times - I can't deny that over the last few weeks, I've had quite a few nights lying awake anxious, paranoid that I'm spiraling into the same behaviours of endless doubt and reiteration. I chug a glass of cold water and remind myself that a memory is not the same as a regression, and the fact that I'm aware of these negative thought patterns only shows that I have learned from the experience. So first things first: express the thoughts instead of letting them bottle up inside you. Check. Now, I focus on getting this damn project done, so instead of reading me ramble about my bad brain for the eighth time I can give you some fun and interesting videos. I will check back in with you all soon.

Jack

xoxoxoxo