Back in the blog saddle again
Hey there. Long time no write. My bad.
I’ve been on a quest to get things reordered and set up better in my life lately and this blog was one of the things to fall through the cracks.
In the last couple of months, I’ve:
- Gotten my business in order in terms of license and registration
- Sorta gotten project workflow and prioritization figured out, at least for the short term
- Gotten my filing and bookkeeping sorta sorted (not my strongest suit)
Plus the usual stuff with streaming 5 nights a week on my main 5 projects, starting a few more, reading up about and starting to set up a newsletter to be launched soon, etc.
Oh, and looking into ways to title my videos better since I seem to have decent audience retention and interest… if I can get people to click. This is an ongoing issue with social media in general: I get lots of feedback in person that my work in cool/interesting/awesome/whatever—and from utter strangers who have no reason to lie about that to protect my ego or whatever—but little traction online, so clearly there are things I could be doing better.
I’ve also sort of gotten a handle on OBS for streaming but have mostly used this to record my weekly art & illustration recap videos… which I swore I wouldn’t then spend hours editing yet somehow I always do edit them…
Anyway, so I have 3 prongs of the weekly what I’ve been up to fork, with a lot of overlap in the way I’ve been doing 2 of them, letting this blog fall by the wayside.
I’m thinking I’ll break it up in the following manner to reduce said overlap:
- My plan for the newsletter when it launches is to keep it super-short (<1000 words and better if it’s <800). I have a template made up wherein I talk briefly about progress on a couple of my projects then have a short and hopefully funny blurb from a character in a third project. It’ll be weekly and we rotate all of the projects (I used to think I’d have multiple newsletters, one for Noah, one for the rats, one for Zamo, and a general one for me, but that’s overwhelming.)
- Since I’m using OBS for the recaps, why not actually livestream the recaps? Even if I do it as a private stream so as to not have a chat to be distracted by, I can make it public after. One and done, not one and let’s edit that for a few hours, then upload, etc. And I will try to keep it a little less chaotic and off-topic (famous last words…)
- Revive this blog but talk a little less about production and more about process. Make it more personal and about what I’m thinking about these days.
Idea being that if someone follows me on all three they’re not just getting the same thing shoved at them, which would be boring.
Plus I do actually like writing the blogs, but when they’ve been a bit too focussed on the recounting stuff I’m working on it becomes too “I already said this in the recap video” etc.
Everything in its place, minimize repeats.
Well, with that said, I guess one of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is permanence and planning for it and creating sustainable systems where my goals will naturally flow from those systems then not spazzing about the outcomes because I know they’ll come eventually. Finding processes that are enjoyable in and of themselves.
First example: a while back I struck on my breakfast system: every few weeks make a couple double batches of a couple types of fruit and nut muffins, freeze them in Ziplocks inside a bigger labeled Ziplock. Every 3 days take out 3 different kinds of muffins to thaw, have one a day with an apple and a 1/4 cup of nuts and water for breakfast.
I have a similar system for lunch/dinner wherein I portion out different marinades and meat, freeze those, and then I can just take out tomorrow’s lunch, let it that overnight, and grill or broil at the appropriate time and the work’s been done.
Now, I keep saying I’m going to quit snacks and sweets entirely, so no need for a dessert version of this, but I then keep buying candy when I want something sweet and that’s pretty much daily.
I made rhubarb bread on Monday and have been having a slice each day and thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve also found before that with homemade cookies I’m satisfied after a couple whereas with candy and chocolate and storebought cookies I can eat them until I feel sick and an hour later want more again.
So, I think over the next week, I’m going to implement a similar system with both fruit- and nut-laden quickbreads and cookies: have 3 or 4 options of each portioned out in the freezer and work my way through those instead of storebought crap.
The goal: be healthier and cook more at home, plus follow that whole “30 plants a week” thing, while not feeling deprived.
Similarly, I lost 20 pounds last summer by walking most days and I’m aiming at that again this year. I’ve made a schedule that’s very slow in building up volume but that will be better for my tendons etc. versus pushing harder and getting strains and sprains.
In about a month, I’m seeing big differences where my speed is faster and my heart rate is slower because I have better cardio conditioning.
And then for the books all the livestreams I do
are the same thing: a couple hours per project per week on stream and I’m making steady progress on projects that had been stalled for a couple years.
(Now to improve my housework and yardwork systems!)
So that’s the sustainable systems part of it. Now about that permanence…
I saw this post recently and it really struck me. We live in constant uncertainty, thanks to the media bringing all of the world’s problems right to our phone. And there’s always economic uncertainty, and political uncertainty, etc.
And it’s poisoning us.
In some ways I’ve always lived with uncertainty: as a teen I was so sure I’d move to LA when I was 18 (spoiler: I never did), and I would flit from one circle to another. I thought I’d go to art school (and I did) but then crashed and burned and was off to UBC after a single term at Emily Carr.
At UBC I changed my major 4 times and never graduated, just left. Jobs, back in and out of school, ever shifting focus (art to whatever the Hell I was doing at UBC to a retail gig to graphic & web design to the music biz to comedy and podcasting to painting to writing), etc… I always came back to cartooning but it was usually more a hobby than trying to capitalize on those talents.
Then there’s the move from Vancouver to the Island, first in the village my dad bought a place in, then to my own place in a town 20 minutes away. For a while 5 years ago it seemed I would marry an American (former) friend and we’d live in Arizona… no, the San Fernando Valley… never mind, he’s an asshole and we don’t speak anymore…
And I’ve mentioned before here about thinking where I’d go when my father goes, which seemed like a more pressing concern in October but his health seems to have stabilized of late.
So the odds of me moving to Calgary (where my brother’s at, plus a cousin) anytime in the next five years seem rather slim.
And even if it happens, well… we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
For now, I need some certainty. I’m here as long as my dad’s around, and a year after that for the probate and sorting out the estate. And he’ll probably be around for a while yet.
So, one means of eliminating uncertainty is to stop even considering relocation, even as a distant plan. When/if the need arises, I’ll deal with it then, but thinking about it sooner is straight up toxic.
There are some forms of uncertainty we just have to deal with, but I don’t need to be adding to the pile. Instead, I’m working on my sustainable systems and focussing just on my own life and what I can control or manage.
Getting back to what I was talking about at the beginning with business, fighting the algorithm is extra uncertainty I don’t need. So, while I will continue to post here and there on Facebook and Instagram, mostly my aim is to communicate via my newsletter and my videos and this blog… the latter two, of course, are subject to their own algorithms, too, but they seem to be fairer algorithms that whatever the Hell Meta is doing such that any given post I make on the Noah’s Archipelago page only gets shown to maybe 20 of the 1700 followers I amassed on there.
Of course, I always heard “you need to have your own email list blah blah blah newsletter blah blah blah.” But I ignored it because I was lazy and because, well, I was uncertain of how to proceed with it.
Better late than never, though.
Over the last year or two, I’ve started envying people who get off social media entirely. I don’t know if that’ll ever be realistic for me, if for no other reason than YouTube counts as social media and I love me some YouTube, both making videos and consuming them, but I definitely feel I’m on Facebook a lot less. And I’m pretty kamikaze on Twitter/X: post the thing on the one account, switch and repost it from another account, get the Hell out before the doomscrolling can begin.
Even Instagram is increasingly useless.
One of the problems is that, like so many other people, I outsourced keeping up with friends and relatives to social media and I’ve gotten really terrible at keeping in touch outside of the odd Facebook like. That’s another “sustainable system” I’ll have to work on.
I mean, I text with my brother and my best friend, and I have IRL friends in this town, mostly from church, and some of them I don’t even have their phone number, I just know that they’ll be there on Sunday morning.
(Or, y’know… at those Toastmasters meetings I rarely get to.)
Which is the way human society has worked for millennia: we know each other because we meet each other in person, particularly at church or the local temple or the local market. Even such old-fashioned things as letter writing have only existed for about 5000 years, and for much of that only for a small elite segment of society.
Anyway, I guess maybe this year I should actually send out Christmas cards. Maybe even birthday cards.
(Not gonna do anything wild and crazy like actually phoning people, though… that’s a step too far, lol… maybe in 2028…)
Speaking of the YouTube algorithm, here’s something kinda funny. So… they say that you should keep videos for different audiences on different channels, otherwise it screws things up because Audience 1 won’t click on videos for Audience 2 and vice versa so then the YouTube borg thinks that your videos suck because half of your audience hates each type of video therefore all your videos suck and shouldn’t be recommended.
Or something like that.
So I made an extra channel for vlogs and my recaps, but of course it takes a while for new channels to get traction. And then after a couple weeks of this I notice suddenly my old recaps are getting views again, but now they’re out of date. So then I put the next couple recaps back on the main channel and in a couple weeks, sure enough: the recaps have virtually no views but also it seems my click through rate is worse again.
So, my solution is to go back to the secondary channel for recaps but have a playlist on both channels that has the recaps, and to do them as “collaborations” so they should get pushed out to my subscribers, etc.
The punchline is that YouTube apparently insists that this is all nonsense because the algo treats each type of video as a fresh start but screw that: I can read my analytics and definitely things are better when I put the recap videos elsewhere.
And don’t get me started on how much better my stats have been since I stopped posting shorts entirely, even though some of my old shorts still get the odd view here and there.
I don’t really have time to bother with shorts right now, but if I did, I have yet another channel just for clips and shorts… which is again supposedly not necessary except that it is.
Oh, and speaking of YouTube and the algo and stats: YouTube pushes vertical streams more vigorously, so I’ve been streaming using my phone, and therefore 80-90% of my discovery is via the vertical live feed.
However, 70% of my viewers watch on a computer. Which vertical streams look kinda shitty on, and small, and therefore there’s a few replays after going live but not many, presumably because the format is a mismatch.
I’m thinking that I will slowly start phasing out the vertical streams.
From here on out with Zamo on Wednesday nights, we’ll be doing bonus content for the first omnibus book. Those don’t have to be vertical, so they will be the first to switch to horizontal format streaming with OBS from my laptop and I think I’ll start that next week.
My other 4 nights all currently have projects with vertical page layouts, so for now they’ll stay vertical streamed from my phone while the Wednesday streams can start horizontal and hopefully gain viewers.
Next will be Mondays as Myles Maarav’s Pursuit of Happiness is going to be finished, at least for the current phase of art, in about 6 weeks. When that’s done, Mondays will switch to working on illustrations for a Ricky & Myles “reader magnet” freebie for my newsletter and, like with Zamo, the pages don’t have to be vertical so I’ll swap to horizontal streaming for those as well.
That leaves Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Tuesdays’ 2027 Noah’s Archipelago calendar project will be done in 6 weeks, and after that I’ve got another one of those “reader magnet” freebies which can be streamed horizontally.
For Thursdays’ Noah coloring pages and Fridays’ Ricky B. Goes To Sea graphich novel pages I’ll probably stick with phone streaming and vertical format for now.
It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out in the analytics after a while. Do I end up with an Audience 1/Audience 2 scenario? But then, if I have fewer viewers with horizontal streaming but they stay longer because the format isn’t annoying for them to view on their computer, it might be that I get the same amount of watch hours overall but with better audience retention stats. Which, in theory, the algorithm borg loves.
We’ll see.
In any case, I think I’ve blabbed long enough for the first blog back after a break.
