Feeling lazy today, so I figured it would be a good time to finally get around to launching my project where I go through the 406 videos (almost all made my yours truly) on my YouTybe account and posting the best of the lot here, along with, of course, my sparkling and entertaining commentary.

Before I get to that – wow, 406 videos. When you make one every day, they add up fast. And I just want to acknowledge that most people have not made 400 videos, or 400 of anything creative really, and that I should be proud of that accomplishment.

And I am. Sorta. Look, I’m working on it, okay?

And that’s not even all of them. I had more but they were on my previous YouTube account which got nuked for copyright violations plus me being an idiot and ignoring the many, many chances I had to take down the offending video and save the account.

Oh well, lesson learned. Now, on with the show!

First, me being silly with images!

Those were fun to make. I love riffing off things like that.

Although I could never figure out a way to present them that I found entirely satisfactory. Caption before the picture? Caption after? Caption during as subtitles?

That’s why I started doing the jokes via voiceover eventually. That had its problems too, but at least the timing felt right.

Jay Leno made it seem so easy! And all he had was pictures on cardboard.

SHOW was originally meant to be a show where I presented bits of fun video as a kind of host. But it did not take long for me to realize I was entirely surperfluous and it worked a lot better if I stayed out of the picture.

I’m glad that episode is still there. It’s my favorite. It turned out really well and it shows how I was really getting into the art of editing video at the time.

I find it highly satisfying. It’s kind of like composing and kind of like writing and kind of like painting a picture, but it’s really its own rich and marvelous art.

That stuff with the coach and the kids is a real sex ed video, by the way. I tired my best to put the clips in order of ascending pervertedness and blatancy of homosexuality.

It was a simpler and more innocent time, where you could make something like that knowing that nobody would call you out on it for fear of seeming like a pervert themselves for noticing.

That’s a real thigh-slappingly racist cartoon from the 60’s, too. Isn’t it strange how the products of a simpler and more innocent time can be some of the most horribly wrong stuff around at the same time?

Oh, and I swear I had no idea how homoerotic that “Capital I” song was until I saw it in the context of that video.

Rubbing it here, scrubbing it there..

More after the break.

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I’d forgotten all about this. Yay, another compilation!

Tons of great stuff in there, including a bunch of clips from the episodes of my vlog that aren’t on my current YouTube account.

I am especially happy that it includes clips from my most patient and supportive reader, the always fabulous Felicity Walker.

Love you, dear. Love sharing you with the world.

“Remove all numerals except six. ” Numbers disappear slowly while dramatic music plays in the background. “666!”

That clip still blows my mind. It take real talent (of a sort) to come up with something that frontal cortex bogglingly stupid.

Well, it was either that, or some hack screenwriter would have had to do math, so clearly, that line was the only choice.

And yup, Ayd’s was a real product. I know the clip from the ad seems too good to be true, but the world is just that fucked up sometimes.

Ayd’s has nothing in it to make me nervous!

And then there’s Community Notes. That is still the thing I have made that came closest to coming out exactly how I wanted it.

Music is too loud relative to the voiceover though. Dammit.

Oh, and I wasn’t sure about that Zombie Clown Patrol bit, but people seemed to find it pretty funny anyway.

Damn I miss that shirt. It was so damn comfy.

And now one of the few things I have written that was actually produced.

It has MORE FELICITY WALKER!! Awesome.

Yes, I wrote that silly ass thing. Seems a tad simplistic and crude to me now, but then again, I wrote that 10+ years plus a VFS education ago.

For all the good THAT did me.

Fun fact : that voiceover was provided by my beloved roommate and life competence provider, Joseph Devoy.

And yeah, the acting is a tad unrefined, but what the heck, none of us are professionals, and this was something we put together just for the hell of it.

I did the editing too, of course. I edited all these videos. Just part of the service when you watch a video by my crazy self.

Interviewer : You write. You act. You edit. You compose music. Tell me, why did you decide to master all these disciplines?

Me : Because I’m a depressed loner with serious social issues and it was the only way to get things done without involving other people.

It often turns out that way. In modern society we admire people for their independence like it’s an admirable character trait when the reality might be they are severely psychologically maladjusted and thus did not have much of a choice about it.

You know. Kinda like me.

Actually, exactly like me.

Which is pretty sad. but at least I got loads of talent out of it.

Now it’s just a matter of becoming sane enough to make money with it.

And how hard can that be?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My marverlous roomie Julian just introduced me to an idea he picked up from a speaker he saw as part of the Vancouver Fringe Festival.

It’s called “positive catastrophizing”, and I like it.

Catastrophizing, for those who don’t know, is a process by which a depressed person’s mind conjures up terrible consequences for relatively trivial actions.

Example : “If I go to that party, I probably won’t know anyone, and I will just end up feeling alienated, and that will make me drink too much, and then I’ll probably mouth off to the wrong person, who will then stab me to death with a grapefruit spoon. “

Note the subtle intellectual dishonesty. That is actually a long string of dependent contingencies where if any of them fail to happen, the whole thing falls apart and the predicted terrible end does not occur.

But it is treated as if it’s a certainty. Hence all that use of the word “probably”.

This is one of the many ways the mind tries to make sense of the neurochemical state that is depression. It is a product of depression’s constant need for excuses to not do the sorts of the things the healthy portion of the mind wants to do but which prompt fear and aversion in the diseased portion of the mind.

It’s “sour grapes” writ large. It’s okay to stop trying to reach those grapes because they were probably sour anyhow, he said based on absolutely no evidence.

Depression thrives on these kinds of excuses : reasons not to try.

Positive catastrophizing turns that mechanism into a way to stop doing things you should not be doing in the first place.

The speaker was a former hard drugs abuser, and he described the positive part of his brain saying, “Hey, let’s do drugs!” and then the depressed part saying “Yeah, but if we do drugs, we’ll crash, and feel terrible, and end up doing things that land us in jail…”

Makes sense, right? Catastrophization (man that’s a long word to type) destroys motivation and thus behaviours, so why not unleash it on the self-destructive things we depressives do to self-medicate?

I’ve been struggling to apply this brilliant idea to my own situation, but it’s not easy because I don’t have self-destructive behaviours, I have self-destructive idleness.

I mean, I definitely have an addiction : video games. SO I suppose I can say to myself, “if you spend all day playing video games like usual, you won’t get anything productive done and you’ll hate yourself for that and you will end up in the exact same place ten years from now and REALLY hate yourself for that… ”

Hmmm. Judging by how hard that was to type and how upset I am right now, I think I may have struck paydirt.

I mean, face it : the one thing keeping me from getting anywhere in life is video games. The addiction consumes all my time and energy, leaving no space for doing something harder and scarier like looking for freelance work.

While I am playing video games, I’m not scared. I’m not depressed. I’m not anxious. I don’t feel lost or abandoned or isolated.

It’s the closest I get to feeling sane. And in the world of video games, I am not merely healthy, I am a kickass awesome hero righting wrongs and beating the ever loving shit out of the bad guys.

The only way I am ever going to escape this trap I am in is to cut back on my video game playing and the thought of doing that scares me.

A little voice in my head says “But without that…. what have I got?”.

A lot…. technically.

But the reality is not the same.

More on this later.

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It’s the money, stupid

No wonder I have been so depressed lately.

My money situation is bad!

And the funny thing is that every time this happens – I end up depressed because of money stress – I go through the same process.

I blog about how horrible five week months are because they make me have to survive for five weeks on the same money that usually pays for four (so it’s like a 25 percent penalty) and passionately no employer would get away with this and so on etc.

Then I apparently complete forget that and mope about wondering why I am so darned depressed all the time.

It’s a simple formula – financial insecurity equals emotional insecurity.

I think I forget this over and over because I don’t want to face how little power over my own life I have. How vulnerable I am to the whims of fate.

And in general how much it sucks to be poor.

Because on regular four week months, if I play my cards right, I can kind of fake it. Pretend like I am normal adult human who can go out with friends and indulge in his favorite snacks with the same ease as any other modern consumer..

But it’s bullshit. I am constantly trying to stretch my budget and worrying over how to pay for my currrent lifestyle, sad though it might be.

I can never just relax, knowing I have things covered. That kind of security is for functional, tax-paying citizens.

Us tax burdens cannot afford the luxury of relaxation.

And I know this is not entirely outside my control. If I wanted more security, I could cut down my expenses. Bring my own food from home instead of buying McD’s when we go hang out at Felicity’s parents’ place. Not have sugar free dessert with EVERY meal. Eat before I go to the comedy night with Felicity and drink water. Cut out the Saturday night ordering in now and then.

All of those are sane, practical steps I could take to ease my stress.

And they all depress the hell out of me. I am addicted to this pretend-adult lifestyle and like all humans, to me a loss of lifestyle seems a little like someone dying.

Once we grow, it hurts to shrink. Some would rather die big than live small.

Of course, there is always the dread curse of employment. I could totally log back on to UpWork and scare myself up a freelance gig.

The fear I feel when I think about doing that is crazy. I am amazingly talented and I know how to sell myself to prospective employers with my creativity and enthusiasm. I have no doubt that it would not take long for me to find work.

And yet that seems so out of reach. Maybe because I want it to be. I dunno.

What I need is a daily routine, like with this blogging. A goal I can set for myself every day and stick to until it becomes habitual.

Imagine if I had something that was roughly the same amount of work as this blog, but that I actually get paid to do.

There is such a thing as a professional blogger. It IS possible to make a living at this.

One of these days, I am going to simply elbow my way to the podium and let the world know how I really feel.

And on that day, watch the fuck out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.