Yeah, apparently this was something of a mystery! A point that was made by Ettin when this came up is that to get to my Youtube channel is like, five not intuitive steps.
Based on this, I’m doing some minor updates to places around the site. My About page now mentions my Youtube channel, there’s a button on the sidebar – this button! – that takes you to my Youtube channel, and… and…
I’m kinda not sure what else to do?
See, one of the worst things to have in your brain is a negative feedback loop that interprets silence as disinterest from people who are too polite to say anything. I know for a fact a lot of my friends don’t read my blog, and that’s something I’ve kind of had to become okay with. That becoming okayness however has not actually fixed the brain problem, because it means that I kind of intuitively see everyone I know who doesn’t read the blog or listen to the podcast or follow the twitter as disinterested and actively not interested in stuff. The idea they might not have noticed or not checked it out right now or the presence of being advertised on a miserable hellsite full of sadness might be diverting their interest in me talking about videogames doesn’t seem to latch into my head.
When I post a Youtube video, it is very luck to get fifty views in the first week. That’s a bit of a bummer, I hope it’s clear. Also in terms of views it blows most of my blog posts out of the water? It’s a place with a lot of experimentation for me, and it may not look like it; it’s often a question of ‘how much reiteration do I need to do to make something people will like or respond to.’ It’s all high effort, but sometimes that high effort is about editing and sometimes it’s about having the time and space to record stuff, or downloading and playing a bunch of games to find one that works. Do people want me to be lets-playing? Do they want video essays? Do they want the stuff that I can do in a single day, or do they want the long form essays? Am I cheating people by turning existing essays into videos? These are questions I don’t have a good handle on! Especially since a large portion of my Youtube presence is still me learning how to use different software, including OBS, Sony Vegas, and for the Making Fun videos, Microsoft Movie Maker.
This has also a secondary thing; I’ve not bothered to give my channel a robust personal identity with like end cards and specific graphics because it always feels a bit vestigial. Basically, my channel’s failure to be popular has resulted in me not doing things that might help it become more popular. I don’t do the Call To Action (like, rate, subscribe) and while that may make it feel more like I’m an adult, or something, it does literally and tangibly hurt the channel. It feels like nobody cares that much about my Youtube channel, and whatever it is, it’s just a secondary thing, something people are giving as it were, pity attention. I have 300ish subscribers and numerous videos that don’t have 300 views. Now, a sensible person might say ‘then share and promote those videos, idiot,’ but my rotten brains says something like, ‘they have seen it and they have judged it and they do not want it, don’t push the issue you asshole.’
This isn’t a healthy default mental mode to take, and an additional part of the problem is that I also exist in a space where I’m regularly shown men, and I do mean specifically men, taking up more social space than they’re offered. I am aware of the presence of abusive men in spaces that feel entitled to the attention of their audience, and it’s very easy for people to say ‘you don’t over-promote yourself,’ but even checking feels like I’m doing something socially wrong. Asking if I should promote myself more feels to me a lot like asking for reassurance, it feels like I’m checking for validation, and that feels like attention seeking behaviour, and that feels like a sin.
Anyway, I have a Youtube channel! If you’d like some of my favourite works on the channel:
Love is Strange is a cool little game and it makes Life Is Strange look bad!
Platform Capitalism is capitalism that turns the need to interact with a system into capital it can exploit, and that’s bad!
I really like the old 90s shooter Blood, so hang out with me playing it for forty minutes!
“Hey Talen talk about Skyrim,”
“Okay, but what if instead I use Skyrim as an excuse to talk about interesting things in language?”
This was probably my first big proper attempt at a video essay that I recorded video for and did the edit on. It’s such a big task it framed a lot of other tasks for me – I feel that thirty minutes of your time to talk about a game is a bit too long, and the actual script (which hovers around 5,000 words) loses coherence a bit too easily when you have that much time to work with. Building a large, exhaustive and thorough case is, I feel, best done with written word so people can back-reference if they want, and videos should be used for conveying tone, style, and the paratextual experience a bit more.
I’m really proud of this, and I do intend to do some things like it in the future, and I love a few of the jokes I put in this one (cowards), so I do expect to do this, but I may be doing it when I’ve got a really good essay lined up as well, and not expanding up to the higher run time/longer word count.
Hey, you know how America’s censorship laws are messed up? Would you believe me if I told you it was heavily related to the work of one extremely messed up asshole? Well, check it out! This was a Halloween video because I find this kind of thing really scary.
Anyway, here’s some of my work, please look at it and like, comment, and subscribe.