Microbyssal: An Attempt To Edit

i have been streaming and editing videos for years now. if you check my main account you'd get to see all of this history, but you'd also get to notice how the trickle has been slowing down considerably. infact the output has been radically inconsistent. times where I upload 3 videos a week of around 10 minutes each, to 2 videos a week, to trying out some occasional longer videos, to just going with infrequent uploads.

i wish i had a conclusive answer for why. but i've kinda been struggling with this myself. why can't i get myself to edit anymore? and as with many things, the block to productivity made me feel inept. which in turn made the block harder. this is The Productivity Trap. when it comes to a job, the solution tends to collapse into the only choice - you ignore it because of the money. if you don't need the money, then firstly... you lucky motherfucker. but secondly, you can just look elsewhere - most of us however don't get that choice.

when it comes to hobbies however, the options open up, and become a lot more interesting since survival isn't exactly in the mix unless you're violating The Golden Rule of Your Hobbies Should Not Have The End Goal of Being Profitable. If you have any hobby where that is the main motivation, then you should honestly re-evaluate whether you actually care about it, and either adjust your framing of the hobby entirely, or pick a better hobby. nothing wrong with wanting to make money doing what you love, but it is an extremely lousy and fragile reason for investing into a hobby to begin with.

so first, the Ignore strategy. extremely unwise. when you don't have money to work as an efficient burnout-helper, all this will do is burn you out more and more until it becomes too much and you take an open-ended hiatus at best, or complete quitting at worst. most present the former, but the truth of which one you'll end up going with depends entirely on the passing of time, and whether you can summon any passion regarding it again.

so instead you can Cash Out. instead of going full throttle until you BUST, just take a break. this is significantly healthier because you're far less likely to quit a hobby due to burnout this way - instead you can take your time. if it's a hobby worth your time, you'll eventually find yourself getting drawn back to it. maybe give it a shot every now and then, just to see what it feels like, or if you feel better. however do not rush yourself, or else you can basically undo all the progress you've made - especially if you just return to your previous workflow without checking in with yourself to see if it's actually sustainable.

i tried both. and eventually i found myself in a place where nothing worked. i could still make videos, but they had to be forced. i thought this was because i hated editing in general, and although editing can be a draining process, that clearly wasn't it. so i thought okay, it must be my process - i need to figure out a better workflow, method, plan, whatever to get myself back into that groove again. but the issue is incredibly complex, and although self-reflecting is invaluable, it also has limits. kinda like an injured person trying to diagnose themselves. it can help a LOT, but there's limits.

the method i found that helped me self-diagnose was to just try to get myself editing something, and pay close attention to my thoughts to try and catch any automatic emotions/reactions that get abstracted away by the wave of rationalisation that follows - and eventually I found the following list.

1. Barren Audience: The fact that I haven't had much noticeable progress at least in terms of the size of the community was clearly not helping. My goal was never to blow up and become popular, but you do expect at least some growth over the years even if you throw up a middle-finger to the algorithm. This was actually kinda crippling, and something that could very well have ended my desire to edit at all. Luckily I could hold it back with, what I'm compelled to call - "Points of Cope". The biggest one being of course that the algorithm is bullshit and this whole field is luck based. I'm far from the only one to fail at this for years - not out of any lack of quality - but simply because the spotlight never came their way.
2. The Ruina Era: This game. I love this game. I really do. It's one of my favourite games ever and I highly suggest it to everyone. However sometimes I wonder if streaming and editing it was a mistake. This is incredibly ironic, as they have been my most successful videos and streams by astronomical measures - from 1/2-digit views to 4/5 digits. They were exponentially better. However this was a double-edged sword, and the edge facing me was far sharper than the other - because this induced an extreme pressure to maintain the streams and videos in order to make the most of this "shot" I was given. Which then meant I was heavily disincentivized to do anything else - because any time spent on anything else is time wasted on something that will not get the same amount of pull, and it's time not being spent getting myself to the actual end. I want to emphasize that all of this is entirely self-inflicted - the community was pretty nice and it really showed me just how fun streaming could be. I became used to the chat being an atrophied shell - so it being active and bustling was really fun to play off of. But when you overthink too much, which ironically you can see while I'm playing the game... good things have the tendency to curdle.
3. Completion: Completing a project felt amazing. The bigger the project, the better. However, the bigger the project, the longer it'd take before I reached that point. In addition, this means more time to simmer in expectations, and my mind can't help but drift about how THIS video will be different. How THIS video will truly get there. Which goes into a force that runs counter to the satisfaction - the disappointment. The longer the wait, the longer that my expectation will build, which means the more intense the crash will be when I'm inevitably faced by Point 1 again. The main thing that offsets this is pride. I'm far more proud of my longer videos than I am of my shorter ones - because of the higher threshold of effort needed. Compilations were a compromise, squeezing out the satisfaction as I combine all parts of a series and get confronted by the fact that I have edited 6 hours and 42 minutes of Paradise Killer gameplay. And I do mean edited. The video has 80 views, but because it's a compilation I didn't really care that much, especially not when compared to just how much shit I've worked on.
4. Curation: So clearly the solution is to do short videos right? This point was the "final boss" stopping me from pursuing further ground. I'm proud of my ENBYSS channel, and short videos would, as time went on, take over my catalogue and sort of dilute it into something that's far more akin to... content. I do not want to be reduced to a fucking "Content Creator". I am a CREATOR. I don't create CONTENT. I simply CREATE. This is a silly distinction I know, but "content" brings cognitive baggage in that the image it inspires in my mind is that of a conveyor belt moving sludge into the mouths of consumers. I like thinking my shit has more value and worth than something that's entirely designed to be "consumed" by someone. And if I just started dumping shorts on my main channel, it'd feel like I'm turning it from a humble little joint you'd occasionally visit to a fucking McDonalds. In other words, my own standards were getting in the way.
5. Youtube Shorts: If you went to visit my main channel, you'd also notice that I made quite a bit of shorts. Short videos that were separated from the main footage AND were artificially boosted which led to big numbers? Sounds right up my alley. And everytime I gave them a shot, that's what I thought. But there was always this rot at the bottom of this endeavour. They were vertical videos. I do not think my stuff makes much of any sense in a vertical format, and it always tends to be an annoying dance to format everything and try to preserve as much context as possible so the thing won't go full on incoherent. And soon the numbers weren't even a plus, infact they were a minus as they kept bringing my visions of basically violating the integrity of my channel. If they fit, if they made sense, then sure. But I was actively and significantly compromising in order to fit them into the vertical format, and through that lens the numbers felt less like a success, and more like I was actively bribing people to pump my numbers up.

And thus came Microbyssal. Truth be told, it was supposed to be Microbyss, but that had already been taken. Minibyss and Nanobyss hadn't, but I wanted the Micro- prefix so... yeah. I got myself to abide by some things:

1. Scrub through footage or whatever.
2. If you find something entertaining or interesting, begin "scanning". no more scrubbing, now you carefully look through the footage and see if there's something here.
3. Once you've edited enough, if the whole thing isn't peanuts - so like, under 10 seconds, then there we go! Short done.
4. Keep editing shorts for as long as desired.
5. Once stopped, render all the shorts and upload them to Microbyssal.

This separation meant Neutralisation of the problems with Curation, Youtube Shorts, and in a tangential way, my Barren Audience. It was completely separate, so there was no "history" to look back to to consider a "failure" - there's no consideration as to whether it's corrupting my main channel - and there's no compromise needed to fit a format they do not make sense for. For all intents and purposes, these are just like any other video, but shorter and less structured. If an ENBYSS video is a completed project, a MICROBYSSAL video is a handful of lego bricks.

The benefits made themselves extremely clear as I found myself rapidly making shorts, to the point where I have currently decided on a 2-a-day schedule and still have a backlog. My mind is already racing about all the streams I can now edit on, which in turn has made me realise how far I was restricting myself due to the concept of having to make a Whole Project. I've been trying to get myself to edit my Deltarune Ch. 3+4 streams into videos, and the most I got were a bunch of shorts, and a 50-minute video which is unlisted because it's just the first pass I never got back to. Now I really want to check my streams and try to carve out more shorts from them. The only problem being the fact that I already released a bunch as youtube shorts, but I'm not sure if that'll stop me considering how I objectively view them as shit content. I don't like calling my stuff content, but all of my youtube shorts feel like "content" to me.

Plus I can actually edit Umineko stuff even though I've barely made it to The Point Where Shit Gets Real, which I'm apparently very close to. Exciting. Scary.

I'll see how long this lasts. I have a calcified habit of starting things, feeling like I'm really invested in them, and then dropping them after a while. The fact I've been streaming and editing videos for this long is, for all intents and purposes, a miracle. HOPEFULLY we can work another miracle.

Also, it's very amusing seeing videos with single-digit views again. I think my years of experience have turned the hollowness of seeing a video flop into amusement. It doesn't even feel like a failure, it just feels... obvious. Like of course that's gonna happen. It'll probably happen forever. But those rare moments where a short takes off? They'll be sweet. A little treat to compare with the desolate wasteland of funny.

Here's to MICROBYSSAL - may it persist for longer than a couple weeks. Hopefully at least a year. Maybe I could even compile shorts on MICROBYSSAL into videos on ENBYSS - or even use them to speed up editing as I add connective tissue to make a cohesive video.

Let's hope!