And other weird stuff.

Don’t worry, I will get to today’s video eventually, but today, I have decided to do the other stuff first and save today’s vid for la piece de resistance.

Yeah I know there’s accents in that but I am too lazy to look them up.

First, the local update. Not a lot to tell, really. Worked all afternoon on today’s video. Feels good to have a place to put all that energy. Despite the lies that depression told me, I have actually had a wild overabundance of personal energy for a long dang time.

It was just stuck behind a massive clog in my flow. So I went around self-sedated by routine and isolation in order to keep myself calm and keep the energy blockage from hurting too much.

But that’s the wrong solution. The right solution is to destroy the clog and get yourself flowing again.

Don’t worry, I am not going to go into any constipation metaphors tonight.

And the process is far for complete. I feel like the blockage is shattered but there is still all the rubble and debris to deal with. By pouring all my energies into making videos and writing blogs, I hope to keep the flow going and push all the rest of the stuff out as well, and maybe even finally become a healthy normal person instead of a cramped up energy miser wrapped up so tight around his pain that he can never be free of it because he cannot let it go.

You get attached to your pain after a while. It’s a constant in your life. But one definition of insanity is “trying to change everything without changing anything”. You have to make peace with the fact that there is no change without cost. At the very least, you have to be willing to give up the stability and security of your current terrible position.

You can’t make things better without making them different. Neophobia kills.

Hmmm. I should do a video about this stuff. Might help some people.

Anyhow, next thing is a darkly amusing bit of comedy for us boomers and Gen X’rs about those kids these days and what it’s like working with them.

More great stuff from Landline TV!

And yeah, I know, it’s an exaggeration, but I imagine there is a lot of truth to this. Every generation finds a new way to screw up their kids, and it’s often, at least on some level, the exact opposite of the way the previous generation did it.

The Greatest Generation made it through the Great Depression and World War II, and raised their children with a combination of strict conformism and previously unknown material comfort. They were giving their kids the childhoods they wished they had.

Their kids grew up to be Boomers, and rebelled against conformity and materialism, and chose self-realization instead. They raised their children with a great deal of personal freedom, especially for themselves. They were giving their kids the childhoods they wished they had.

Their kids grew up to be Generation X, who had (coporatively) little to rebel against, but instead became alienated by the lack of institutions, parental attention, and social connection that was the result of all that self-realization and seeking of freedom by their parents. They raised their kids with an overabundance of support, attention, structure, and praise. They were giving their kids the childhoods they wished they had.

Now we have the Millenials, who have been given a lot of support but not a lot of freedom, who grew up with heavily scheduled lives dominated by well-meaning helicopter parents driven to prove that they are there for their kids all the time, to protect them from everything. They were giving their kids the childhoods they wished they had.

Not sure how they will mess up their kids. Presumably by giving them enormous amounts of unstructured time, being very hands-off and always waiting to be asked for help, never ever putting their kids on meds, and raising a generation of kids wondering where the hell everybody went.

Okay, I have made you wait long enough. Here’s today’s vid.

As you can see, production values have gone up a tiny notch. Little bits of text have made their debut. Not sure if they are more entertaining or distracting at this point, but still.

Plus, some pictures to talk about. I was feeling self-conscious about how heavy all my discussions had been so far. I mean sure, I find myself fascinating, and there is definitely a market out there for heavy thinking type stuff.

But it’s no way to get rich and famous, and so for the next little while at least, I will attempt to nudge myself towards more entertaining and accessible content.

After all, I am a funny and charming dude with great writing skills. Surely I can work my way towards making really kickass content like the stuff Yahtzee and CPG Grey and Vsauce.

But the thing about guys like that is PICTURES. So very many PICTURES. Just the idea of having to find and/or make all those images makes my head hurt. I can create lots of verbiage either live or in text, no problems, but getting all those pictures and diagrams and stuff together seems insane.

Certainly not something I see myself doing on a daily basis, at least, not yet. Weekly, maybe. Then I can take my time finding images and whatnot.

But daily? Oy. I used like six images in today’s vid and it still took me all afternoon to make the thing. And most of that was just all the trimming and placing and stuff.

Maybe as I go, I will get better at those parts and be able to devote more energy to things like image hunting or grabbing video from other sources and so on.

Ah well. Sometimes it seems like the wheel of time grinds slow and fine, and other times it feels like life is a freefall towards the grave and I’m nowhere near terminal velocity yet.

See you tomorrow, folks.