Production update 2020-05-18

I'm not dead!

First of all, I need to apologize for the lack of updates. I'll get into why, but honestly, I shouldn't have let the silence go on for that long.

So, what happened to me?

Well, to put it simply, I couldn't work. I kind of wish I had a good reason, but it really just boiled down to this: I couldn't bring myself to edit Part 2. But let's back up a bit.

I moved in with my parents on April 7th, and it took a while to get set up, but after about a week, I was ready to go. But, I was also busy with finding an apartment. Because my girlfriend is an essential worker, I visited the apartment we wanted, so that meant a 2-hour drive to and back from Montreal, which I used as an opportunity to spend a few days with her after the visit. Once that was done, we signed the lease and all, and we'll be moving in on July 1st!

Now, all that's left is furnishing the place, so my girlfriend and I have been preparing just that. She does the bulk of the legwork since moving things from her place will be much easier than from mine, but we discuss every purchase and maintain a list of everything, so I'm still very much involved in the process.

While that takes a bit of my day, I still had plenty of time to work on Part 2. Unfortunately, my heart wasn't really in it, mostly because 1. this project had been dragging on for so long that I just couldn't see the end of it, and 2. Part 1 doing so poorly with YouTube tanked my motivation to pour dozens of hours into editing Part 2. Instead, I played games for a little while, but then, as days turned into weeks, I was feeling guiltier and guiltier about it by the day. It got to a point where I was just generally unhappy and frustrated with myself. I did have a brief stint of productivity that enabled me to finish recording all the audio for Part 2 within a week or so, but aside from that, I was pretty goddamn useless.

Of course, I wasn't proud of this behaviour. So, I couldn't bring myself to post an update. What kind of update would that be, anyway? This guilty feeling was negatively affecting my motivation. It can sometimes have a positive effect, whipping you into doing something, but in my case, it was only making things worse. But you guys aren't the only ones I give updates to. Every day, when we talked on video chat, my girlfriend would ask me what I did that day. And every time, I had to admit defeat. I didn't get anything done. I woke up at noon. I watched a YouTube spiral that got stupider and stupider with each new video. I played a game without enjoying it. Admitting that to her face felt so bad that I started dreading that feeling every time she called. I knew I had to get out of that, but I just couldn't pull myself out of this procrastination hell.

And guess who came to the rescue: my turbo girlfriend! A few days ago, she told me she'd watch me work. I had to turn on screen share, and she'd watch me edit the video. There was no way around it now, I had to open Premiere and get to work for real. So I did it. I got past the mental barrier of actually progressing. I had to launch OoT, do a wrong warp, record the bits I needed, edit that into the video, and... I just did it. And the next day I did it again. And that's how I got out of the hole. I am working everyday again.

So, that was 3 days ago. Since then, I have been editing during the day, and doing other stuff during the evening. I will be visiting my girlfriend this week so I'll be out for 3 days, but otherwise, I'll be working to release Part 2 as soon as possible.

So, where am I at now?

Like I said, the audio is fully recorded. As for the edit, well, a bit over 3 minutes done. Not great, I know, but I can still see the video being done in a little over 2 weeks. A release in the first week of June should be reasonable.

I really want to apologize to everybody on Patreon for going silent for so long. I've always been prone to crippling laziness and procrastination. It turns out that even when I have an incredible job, that procrastination can still poke its ugly head every now and then. An excellent series of blog posts on Wait but Why? illustrates my situation very well. The whole series is worth a read, but my situation is best described as The Disastinator from Part 3:  https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/procrastination-matrix.html 

I want to thank everyone for their patience. I still read the YouTube comments, and I'm glad that people still appreciate my videos, even though the upload schedule is so slow. But I appreciate you even more, since you took the extra step of directly financially supporting my endeavour, and without you, I don't think I'd even find the energy to make good YouTube content on top of having a day to day job. So, thank you for allowing me to be doing this. I hope this shed some light on the past couple of months.

Lastly, I've been considering ideas for future projects, and I think the future is bright. Expect a return to SMB1, another Mario speedrun explained, and the beginning of a video series in the future!