The Story of Stubagful

I don’t know how many people are going to find this interesting. It’s a bit navel-gazey to write extensively about your own work, especially if you’re only vaguely but not that well known.

At about 21000 subscribers at time of writing, I haven’t done too badly on YouTube. A small and dedicated following was something I dreamed of for years. Not so big that I’m the target of harassment, doxing, and abuse for doing basically nothing at all, as is so common on the internet, and not so big that fame clouds my mind. Big enough for me to be able to look at it and say “yes, that’s good enough for me.”

After trying stand-up comedy a handful of times, running a student radio show in the 11pm “let’s stick this mad weirdo right at the end of the day where no one is going to listen to him” slot for my entire time at university, I was stuck for a creative outlet. I knew the likelihood that I would find an agent or a production company willing to take my output seriously was incredibly low. My self-esteem was at rock bottom in my third year of university. I’d alienated everyone around me and had no confidence in my creative abilities anymore and was close to giving up, but I still had this deep-seated need in me to make something. Anything.

I’d had a YouTube channel in my first year of university. It was just me in my room with my little DV camera that my parents got me for my 18th birthday where I’d talk about whatever I felt like and made rubbish music videos where I’d set footage from TV shows to whatever music I was listening to that week. I ended up getting in an argument with some troll in the comments and deleted my account in frustration. Thin-skinned I know, and I now agree with that troll that what I was making at the time was total crap, but it was the way they said it, y’know? And if the only attention you’re getting is someone going “you’re a piece of shit”, that’s going to make an impact, especially for someone as depressed as I was.

Throughout university, I watched video reviews by contributors to ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com — a site that is now pretty infamous for poor management and mistreatment of its producers, but it was a comfort blanket for me. I was incredibly alone at university and the idea of this collection of nerds around the world watching and making fun of movies with me when I had no one to watch anything with provided me with a sense of community that I was missing, even if these were people that I didn’t actually know, and the conversation was restricted to one side of the screen. A lot of this content has now aged like milk and is full of edgy humour that’s very symptomatic of what dorky loners on the internet in the late 2000’s would find funny. The word ‘cringe’ gets thrown around a lot, but the Nostalgia Critic didn’t seem ‘cringe’ at the time. I ended up being drawn more to the slightly more mature creators on the site like Lindsay Ellis, Todd in the Shadows and Kyle Kallgren, and was watching less and less Nostalgia Critic by my third year.

In my last three weeks at university, I had the house all to myself. My flat mates had moved out, I’d handed in my dissertation, and I was basically just waiting to be taken home, so I decided to start a YouTube channel where I did what these people did. I picked some random films from decades past, set my little DV camera up again, and threw out similar edgy jokes and set it to clips. I created a persona called the ‘HerbalCrackpot’, based on the fact I looked like a scruffy drug addict. In character, I would create deranged conspiratorial readings of children’s films. To complete the creepy look, I’d sit in the dark with a lit candle while delivering said jokes. I can’t watch these videos now without cringing, but I’m proud of my young, depressed self for actually trying something.

Its actually a good thing the YouTube channel name ‘HerbalCrackpot’ was taken, and I had to use a different name, as I would end up retiring this video strand as I grew out of that style of humour, so I had HerbalCrackpot as my display name, and I had to use a different name as the channel name.

A history teacher I really got on with (who is probably reading this, Hi Ms Traill!) used to called me ‘Stubag’. There was a kid she was friends with when she was younger who was also called Stuart, and her dad used to call him ‘Stubag’. No idea where the name originally came from.

I tried ‘Stubag’ as a screen name, and it was taken. YouTube autosuggested ‘Stubagful’ — with one L. I liked it. It sounded like ‘two bags full’ from baa baa black sheep. So I went with that.

I made the first three episodes of my deranged review show all in one go and bulk edited them over the course of those last three weeks at university. The first one I uploaded was a review of the Barney the Dinosaur movie. It was totally accidental that it had a purplish colour palette. The moon was bright that night. I tried to replicate it in the second one but failed and went with red. I allowed myself to be more off the leash in these videos than I usually was around people. What I was trying to do was exorcise the twisted gnarled bit of my personality and keep it confined to the internet so I wouldn’t drive people away again like I had done all throughout university.

I hit upload on that first video in my last week, woke up the next day, and it had somehow gained about 3000 views overnight. I was dead pleased. More pleased than I’d been in months. I’d had a couple of comments (one negative, complaining that I swore too much) but still, it was a massive surprise to someone who was so depressed he could barely pull himself out of bed in the mornings. I was an overnight success by my standards.

The next video I posted was about the Beatles ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ film. It got about 50 views.

I’m still not sure why the Barney video rocketed up to about 10’000 views so quickly. I wasn’t getting any new subscribers from it and there were barely any comments. I started to think maybe the viewers weren’t real. It was as if YouTube could see me and was giving me pity views and going “well done you! You did something!”

Most of my following videos barely broke double digits.

I kept up this format for most of that summer as I worked my supermarket job, volunteered at the community radio station, and looked for work. I couldn’t get a decent internet connection at home, so I uploaded videos at the library or at the radio office.

I started thinking about how I could expand my content into a wider variety of topics and maybe make my videos a bit more normal.

I was losing my enthusiasm for video games, so the idea of doing let’s plays didn’t really appeal to me, so my idea was: hey, what if I basically did a let’s play of a popular book?

Given my targets tended to be things I could rant about in a funny way, I picked Fifty Shades of Grey because it was popular at the time, and people giggled when they talked about it because it was about sex. If you can’t remember what Fifty Shades of Grey was: it’s a book about a billionaire playboy who seduces a bookish university student into a BDSM relationship and somehow became one of the highest selling books ever written. I came up with this idea that my copy was possessed and was forcing me to review it against my will. I shot the first four chapter reviews in bulk and drew pictures in MS paint to dramatize the story. I knew I wanted to include dialogue and lip-syncing would take too long, so whenever a character was meant to be speaking, I drew a speech bubble and made a line appear inside it at three positions and saved three frames. Put them together in a timeline and play one frame every half a second and copy/paste several times over the bit of audio you need and it looks like the wiggly line is moving with the dialogue. I still use this technique today.

So I started uploading them on a weekly basis.

I started trying to think of something else I could do, and an idea for a third strand appeared. I’d posted two extra episodes of my student radio show on my podcast feed where I talked about the worst episodes of Doctor Who, and they’d had a decent number of downloads, so I decided to try and adapt it into a video strand about Doctor Who. Doctor Who was something that I had been a fan of for years, so why not? I started posting weekly reviews of the then-currently airing season 7 with Matt Smith and Karen Gillan. Nothing too intensive or well-thought-out. I just got some clips off YouTube and set them to an audio file of my reading a review I wrote in about five minutes with no redrafting done at all. This was before I got my full-time job and I couldn’t afford a pop shield and the microphone was a guitar hero microphone that had been stolen from somebody else’s house. These reviews sound like garbage. I think a couple of these early videos are still on my channel somewhere. I came up with a name for the series and called it ‘He Who Moans’ — as in a biblical pronouncement of my statement of intent that ‘I am he who moans’ — I complain about Doctor Who.

These videos got about 50 views a piece. Rare comments and likes, and I was still trundling along at about 12 subscribers. I left the Doctor Who videos between series.

It was quite surprising when people in my life told me they’d watched my YouTube videos. My friend at ZoneOneRadio, Matthew, randomly mentioned my Fifty Shades of Grey videos when I went down to the studio one week when I’d gotten to about chapter 15. I got a bit embarassed. I’d never actually advertised my videos to people I knew. I made a separate Facebook page and personal twitter to post the links because I didn’t want to bother anyone who’d added me on Facebook and wasn’t interested. I’d never told anyone that I made them. I don’t know how they found them. Googling my name probably.

It’s still strange nowadays whenever I randomly meet someone who’s watched my channel. I went to the Cannes Film Festival this year and convinced someone on the same accreditation as me to save me a place in the queue to get into the new Martin Scorsese movie. We talked about TV shows for a while, and I mentioned I was a huge fan of Chris Morris and he said “wait, I know you, I’ve heard your voice before. Did you make a YouTube video about his show Jam?” I like that I’m the sort of person who people know of, but they don’t know why.

When Matthew moved to Australia several years ago, he told me that he met two disconnected people on the other side of the world who knew who I was before he mentioned me. One was a young boy who was the son of someone in this circle of suburban middle class parents, the other was a radio engineer in his mid-40’s. I like that I have a broad appeal.

Anyway, the Fifty Shades of Grey project was a lot bigger than I anticipated. 26 chapters sounded easy when I started, but they did start to drag after a while because it’s such a stupefyingly repetitive book, but I was improving my art style along the way. I finished it around Summer 2013.

It was around this time where I started to think of long projects I could do in blocks. I know they say that on YouTube you should be consistent and make the same types of videos over and over again, but I wasn’t really doing it with any long-term goal in mind. I was doing it because I knew I needed an outlet for the twisted gnarled side of my personality that I would mask in social situations because I didn’t think people would accept me for who I am. It was purely an exercise in managing my ability to fit in with people. The idea that people would actually start watching it and interacting with it in fairly large numbers was unthinkable to me, because even when I’d had large numbers, as with the Barney video, people didn’t interact. Even though I’d had occasional offline conversations about my online life with people I knew, the idea the people watching me were real people didn’t translate in my head, especially since my subscriber count stayed in low double figures for the first two years of my channel’s existence.

I did a second run of HerbalCrackpot around the end of summer, beginning of autumn 2013, and I realised towards the end that I was basically done with it. As I’d gone to volunteer in community radio, ended up getting my full-time job, and people started reacting to me less with fear and more with “okay, this guy just needs a bit of understanding”, the jagged-edged personality that I displayed on YouTube was starting to feel a bit wrong and uncomfortable to me. Especially since people in my life were actually watching my videos now. I didn’t want to reinforce the person I was at university, of which HerbalCrackpot was basically an exaggerated caricature, so I retired the series. Though I wasn’t quite done in sanding off the edges to my personality that people found grating, so my tone online didn’t really shift for a while.

In the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, I started a series of five-to-ten-minute videos where I talked about my overall impressions of each Doctor’s era going from the first doctor, all the way up until the then-just announced twelfth doctor. People who’ve been watching me for a long time talk about these retrospectives as if they’re these lost masterpieces, which is funny to me, because they were all done in one draft, one take, and I’d bulk edit out the fluffed lines on a cheap little laptop on the train in to work in the mornings. These videos are mostly lost to time now because I started getting copyright claims on them and I got a strike on my channel. I didn’t fight these claims because I didn’t care enough, but I thought if I deleted them, it would get rid of the strike. Turns out it didn’t and now they’re gone forever. I’ve probably still got copies of them somewhere, and people are always asking after them for history’s sake, but given Doctor Who has this whole mystique surrounding its missing episodes, I actually think it’s more appropriate that these things exist as a story and nothing more.

I then posted a review of the 50th anniversary special, the Day of the Doctor, when it aired. I thought the episode was okay, but when I delivered the review with my usual cynical tone, it probably sounded like I disliked it more than I actually did.

Then, shit hit the fan.

People started actually watching my videos. And commenting. Suddenly my sixth doctor video was at about 2000 views, which was huge for me. My Day of the Doctor video was at about 1500 views and getting mostly dislikes and people telling me I was complaining for the sake of it.

You’ve got to understand: I was very thin-skinned because I had basically never had any attention up until then. I had had high view counts, but I only had about two to three people who commented occasionally, which was nice, and I thanked them regularly, but I didn’t think my work was anything special. But now that the YouTube bell was notifying me with a new comment every hour or so, I was terrified that I’d click it and someone would make me feel like shit again. But I’d have to click it. If there’s a number next to an icon that says ‘notification’: you HAVE to click it. It’s wired into our brains. We can’t just NOT click it.

You could say ‘well why don’t you turn comments off then?’ Well I didn’t want to disable comments because some people were nice and I’ve really enjoyed interacting with fans over the years. I also occasionally did actually learn something from some of the negative ones that were at least written in good faith. I didn’t want to stick myself in a bubble where I didn’t listen to critical voices, otherwise my content would never get better. That and given I was acting in a role as a critic, it would be incredibly hypocritical of me not to listen to feedback and see what I can learn from it.

…that said, I had serious self-esteem issues, and a common pattern in my life at the time was that when someone criticized me, I would take on that criticism as valid, regardless of whether the person making it had good reasoning for it.

Nowadays I get comments like this, and I just think “…its just a person inside a computer. One voice in many. I’m still here. Still making what I want to make. It’s just a comment on the internet. Listen or don’t. Who cares?”

A common refrain in these comments was “you think you’re so smart/superior/better”, which was incredibly annoying given my lack of confidence at the time. As said, my YouTube channel was the place I came to exorcise this bit of my personality that made it so my personal life was more manageable.

The assumption seems to be that you’d have to have an overinflated sense of self worth to think people wanted to hear what you have to say in the first place, but I was genuinely unaware of the possibility that anyone would ever listen to me. I don’t know what it is about the internet that makes people think they can see inside other people’s heads and see their high opinion of themselves. It really annoys me when YouTubers who I’ve become friends with get accused of being narcissists by randomers on Twitter who don’t know them at all. Talk to a YouTuber outside of the context of a stream or a video and you’ll often find that people are just people. Your perception of them is just that: a perception.

Anyway, I unlisted the Day of the Doctor review because it was doing my head in. I actually found a copy of it recently and watched it back and it actually shocked me how mild it was. Really? THIS caused all that drama? Maybe I’ll share it on my second channel with an introduction at some stage.

I carried on though. I decided to post an update vlog where I just sat there and talked about my channel. This one you can still find. Its called ‘Boring Update Video — end of 2013’. I kind of like this video because it’s a better record of what I was like as a person by the end of 2013. There’s no aggressive filter to my personality. I wasn’t exorcising a part of myself, I was just talking about how I felt about my content, and you can tell how depressed I was.

I took three months off from posting anything and bulk shot reviews of every chapter of the second Fifty Shades of Grey book. I went through the book and wrote the whole thing in one month, did all my drawings in the second month, shot it in the third month, then started editing and posting. I started getting a bit more ambitious with my “my copy of the book is possessed and forcing me to review it” framing device. I gathered some props: fake blood, prop gun, a hacksaw, some rope and filmed myself running around the woods near my house. It was nice to make something but not pressure myself to actually release it yet. I shot the epilogue in my parents’ house just before they sold it. Its nice to have this record of my childhood home.

Anyway, I returned to YouTube and started posting the Fifty Shades videos, in between some quick and easy random Doctor Who reviews. I did a wholly positive one about Fury from the Deep, which I often cite as my favourite episode, even though its probably more honest to say its The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. It was nice to discover that people still liked my videos even when I wasn’t doing comedy rants.

I still wasn’t getting much in the way of views or subscribers, but people showed up every now and then, and they were really kind and encouraging (and one of the main reasons I was managing to push through the self-doubt and continuing to hit publish).

I hit 200 subscribers at around this time. To celebrate, my girlfriend suggested I do a challenge.

She said, “Well you hit 200 subs, so how about you eat 200 subs at subway?”

“You just want subway for lunch, don’t you?” I responded.

She smiled and nodded.

So I went and bought subway (I didn’t buy 200 obviously, we just reused the same subs over and over again) and we made a short video together. It’s one of very few times she’s had any involvement in my channel. She’s suggested jokes occasionally, but she’s very shy. The 200 subs special is one of few videos from this period that I’m still proud of.

It was also at around this time that Richard B Brookes from FiveWhoFans got in touch. If you don’t know who FiveWhoFans are, they’re a collection of Doctor Who fans who make silly and sarcastic Doctor Who-related sketch content, and they were basically the top tier of this little community that I’d accidentally stumbled into. I really liked them. Their content was a lot friendlier and better produced than mine. I still remember watching Billy’s ‘A world without Doctor Who’ video for the first time. It’s still one of the best Doctor Who videos on YouTube in my opinion.

I was surprised that Richard said he liked my stuff and wanted to give my channel a shout-out. I got a bit embarrassed of my content because the technical quality and my aggressive tone was very different to what they were doing, but they gave me a plug on their social media feeds and started sending traffic my way, most of which were people who seemed to like what I was doing. I was a bit too intense for some people, but it was a positive, and it was nice having someone to talk to about YouTube who knew what I was going through. I first met up with Richard when we went to see Jurassic World together a couple of years later. I remember him saying, “I can see you getting up to several thousand subscribers eventually”. I had made strides in my mental health, but I didn’t believe I was good enough for anywhere beyond the 1000 I’d just reached a few weeks prior. Richard turned out to be right.

Autumn 2014, season 8 of Doctor Who started, and Peter Capaldi made his debut as the Doctor. I started going a bit more in-depth in my episode reviews, and people were receptive, but I still found myself having a hard time handling comments. I was also going through some other mental health related stuff at the time, but I seemed to have developed this expectation of myself to post the reviews as the episodes came out. Naturally, I ended up making a big mistake in one, and I deleted it and had a few weeks break. Obviously, the notification bell kept showing me comments on other videos asking after the deleted one, and regardless of the fact that, hey, these were people who cared about what I thought, I still got scared and felt this need to hide. Ever since this incident, I’ve taken away the expectation to publish content while its still relevant. If a video ends up being late, then its late. Its better that way for everyone.

I also started unlisiting a lot of old videos here because I hit the problem that if someone’s pointed out a mistake in a video I made a year or so ago and I’ve already acknowledged it, people don’t typically check if their reaction to a video has already been addressed. I just didn’t see it as helpful to have old content up so people could continue to point out mistakes that I had already learned from or challenging opinions that I had already changed my mind on in more recent content. That’s the problem with YouTube: its a static record of who you used to be, and people assume you’re the same person you were when you posted it. I got a comment recently on a 7 year old video that began with “I know this video’s old, but-” and then they continued onto their essay which I’m just not going to read because the person who made that video doesn’t exist anymore.

Anyway, it was around this time that I had my first attempt at talking therapy on the NHS. The therapist and I didn’t really click, but she did say one thing that was helpful. When I told her about the comment notifications and my terror at what it could be before reading it and my compulsion to click on it, she asked me “isn’t there a way to turn the notification off?”

It seems stupid now that I didn’t think of that. I found the way to turn off notifications for comments and said to myself that I would only read comments when I felt up to it.

And just like that, things got easier. I treated YouTube as the hobby it was and stepped away when I needed time away. I didn’t need to read EVERY comment.

As I continued to sand off the rougher edges of my online persona, I started making more positive content. The first one of these was the already mentioned video about Chris Morris’ Jam, which was a prototype for the sort of stuff I make these days. I found I enjoyed going in-depth in trying to understand WHY I enjoyed certain shows.

My content started to shift in tone around here. I made a video strand just called “Stubagful’s Voiceover TV Reviews” where I would post a mixture of reviews of recent high budget shows that I was interested in like Sherlock, classic shows that I was a fan of, and a sub-series called ‘TV Dissection’ where I would make joke-heavy videos analysing regular fixtures of the British TV schedules that people tend to just have on in the background without thinking too deeply about. Shows like the One Show, Coronation Street and EastEnders. I was a huge fan of Charlie Brooker, who you now know as the creator of Black Mirror, but back around this time was making a comedy review/documentary show called ScreenWipe about the innerworkings of the TV industry. I wanted to try and replicate his style of comedy. I still think some of these early TV Dissection videos work surprisingly well. I rewatched one called ‘The Truth about Calories’ recently, which was about a piece of brain-rotting ‘factual’ content and I was surprised to see that something I made that long ago still worked.

It was also around here that I started reviewing Big Finish on the He Who Moans strand. I know I keep reinforcing that I was making these videos for personal reasons, but the Doctor Who content was getting me the most amount of attention and I did still want some kind of attention, even if it was fairly minor, and I needed something to talk about between series. I’d been an on-again, off-again fan of Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio plays since I first heard one called ‘the Chimes of Midnight’ on BBC radio around Christmas 2005. I started making reviews of their content with my childish MS paint drawing style carried over from my Fifty Shades of Grey reviews, which I decided to retire because they were getting repetitive.

Then one day in 2015, I woke up and saw that one of the most popular Big Finish writers, Robert Shearman, had liked my Facebook page and left a comment on one of my videos where I talked about how much I loved his plays. We’ve kept in touch and become good friends. He even agreed to appear in a minor background role in my first short film in 2021. All thanks to my YouTube channel. This is the bit of the story that makes me feel the warmest.

My Big finish videos started to dribble out around 2018 and people nostalgic for them keep asking me why, so here’s the explanation: they were costing too much money, as Big Finish’s output is really expensive, and also, I didn’t want to keep doing the same thing. I made about fortysomething Big Finish videos between 2015 and 2018, and they did take a lot of time and I wanted space to explore my original content. Maybe I’ll return one day.

My favourite type of content to make has always been the original material. I was hugely influenced by Robert Shearman’s collections of short stories. He writes these incredibly emotionally powerful absurd pieces that play out almost like a joke taken seriously. I tried my hand at it. The first one I wrote was in late 2014.

In clearing out some old junk from the house, my girlfriend had accidentally gotten rid of a stuffed giraffe that I’d been given by her mother for some reason, and I felt sad about that. This was also the time that at work, our printer broke and had to be replaced. I combined these two incidents into a short story called ‘Be Brave, Printer old friend’ and made an adaptation for my channel in MS paint. The story is set in a world where appliances have consciousness, and a man who works in an office is tasked with throwing away a talking printer that doesn’t work anymore. Think Toy Story, but with a bleak ending. I showed it to several people, and my girlfriend actually cried at it, saying she felt a pit in her stomach. I found there was a lot of power in channelling my emotions into my writing.

Not long after that, the BBC announced there would be a new Doctor Who spinoff called ‘Class’ which would be set at the school in the show’s universe. I had an idea. Given all we had been told was that it was a show tangentially related to Doctor Who and it was about some kids that go to a school, it could literally be about anything at all. So I made a two-minute animated sketch about an IT lesson where a teacher made the kids transcribe the encyclopaedia on computers with spikes sticking out of their keyboards, and everyone’s hands get sliced up. There was no Doctor Who content in this cartoon anywhere, which was part of the joke. A sci-fi show about a school was all we knew about Class at the time. The idea made me laugh, and I had the idea to start posting my own Class cartoons to rival the BBC series and give my series the exact same name. Of course, animating the entire thing on my own was a daunting task, so making multiple episodes stretched out years, rather than the weekly basis when Class was airing on the BBC that I had envisioned. The Class cartoons were basically comedy/horror sketches drawing on my own memories of what growing up was like, exaggerated and using horror elements as metaphors. There was also a lot of influence from Pink Floyd’s The Wall movie, which my girlfriend had bought for me for a birthday at some stage. It actually makes me sad that the only time anyone on the internet talks about the Wall these days is in reference to the Nostalgia Critic episode on it because that film is so gorgeous and deserves better.

There is one of these Class videos that means more to me than any other video I’ve made.

‘The School Nurse’ is about a kid who goes to see a nurse about his teeth, and the nurse tells him that all his teeth are really bad and they’re all going to have to come out. She takes him to a classroom, pulls his teeth out in front of the class with a pair of pliers, and uses the teeth to teach the children maths.

I’ve made it sound over the course of the last few steps of the story that my mental health was improving, but this cartoon was actually made at my lowest point. I’m not going to go into details about what was going on because I don’t want to trauma-dump and its all in the past now, but I just felt I needed to take out all of the negative things I was feeling at the time in a cartoon. It was cathartic, and it actually spurred me into going back to the doctor and deciding to throw everything at sorting my mental health out.

After that, things started to get better. I used my analytical work with He Who Moans and my Voiceover TV reviews as a basis for my original cartoons and improving my writing in my endeavours outside of YouTube. My channel still trundled along with minor attention, but enough attention for me, and the fan support I’ve had has been more than worth it. Any major hits I’ve had have all been coincidences. They’re not why I’m here.

My biggest hit until last year was a video about inside no. 9, a British dark comedy anthology series. There was live special where they make it look like there’s something wrong with the broadcast. I made a video review where I made it look like the video’s stuck loading before cutting the broadcast with a scary clip of me in the dark. I like playing about with the review format so its not just me sitting and reading off what I thought about something. That video only ended up doing a lot better than I expected because a bigger channel made a similar video about it a few months after I posted mine.

And that’s basically how my channel has operated ever since. I wasn’t actually anticipating nearly as many views on a massive video essay I made last year about Friends where I go back through and justify the countless times I wasted afternoons watching reruns as a teenager by offering it a deep and complex reading. Inching towards half a million hits at time of writing. Pretty good for a channel with a story like mine.

I know I’ve never been commercial, but I haven’t really tried to be. That’s not what my channel’s for. I’ve always done what I feel like. If I think a video might be beneficial for me or the small group of loyal people who’ve enjoyed my content over the years, then I’ll make it. If I feel like its just being made for the sake of it, then I’ll abandon it, and I have abandoned a LOT of videos over the years.

I keep thinking maybe there’s going to come a point where I’ve run out of reasons to make these videos, but that’s probably not going to happen. Not while I have this need in me to put my voice out there. Over the first half of my channel’s lifetime, I was operating under the assumption that no one gave a shit about what I had to say, but I said it anyway. To an extent, that’s still true, but I’m no longer possessed by the lack of confidence in my voice. I’ll say what I have to say, and people will watch it, or not. Maybe no one’ll watch my next video. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I’ll say what I have to say. Maybe people will listen, but whether they do or not, I’m still here.