Reading Update: For The Record

When I was a kid, we had a Fisher Price record player. It was tan and beige and played 45’s, the record format of choice for singles back in the day. In my time, it was the choice medium for storybooks. The idea was that you read along while the record played. There would even be cue sounds to remind you when to turn the page. This usually wasn’t a problem except for the one we had for Star Wars. When it was time to turn the page, R2-D2 would chirp his iconic beeps and boops. Trouble is, they didn’t keep the R2 effects to just the page turns, which got very confusing. We had quite a few of these books, but I don’t remember all of them. The ones that stand out in my mind the most after all these years are Star Wars (both A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back), The Hobbit, and The Black Hole, which was probably my favorite out of all of them. It’s the one I remember reading the most.

After finishing my audiobook of Project Hail Mary, I decided to do something a little different for my next read, which was We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Apple Books has a collection of literary classics available at no cost, including audiobook versions for some of them. Two noteworthy examples of this are The Time Machine read by Kelsey Grammer and A Christmas Carol read by LeVar Burton. As it happens, Zamyatin’s We offers both a text and an audiobook version. So, using my iPhone for the audiobook (since I’ve got it paired with a nice Bluetooth speaker) and my iPad for the text version, I “read along” to We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

The purpose of the experiment was twofold apart from simple curiosity. The cognition behind reading along is rather fascinating to me. When we read books in school, I’m sure we all remember having one person read aloud while the rest of us read along until it was our turn to take over narration duties. Incidentally, history class was when I learned about a rather interesting job from the olden times of the Industrial Revolution. Cigar factories still employed human workers while everyone else was looking to mechanical automation. As such, even a large room full of people rolling cigars doesn’t produce nearly the same level of noise as a typical factory of the time. In order to break up the monotony and do something about the deafening silence, the workers would take turns reading aloud from a book while everyone worked. I just find the science behind reading aloud (and especially reading along) to be an intriguing exploration of our own cognition, how we process this information and retain it. After all, so far as we know, humans are the only animals that have writing at all, so the fact that there are dedicated regions of the brain for these funny symbols we assign either abstract or concrete meanings to is, no pun intended, mind blowing. Amazon offers a feature called “Read & Listen” or “immersion reading” available for Kindle and Audible that not only allows you to play both the audiobook and let you read at the same time, but even has an active cursor to highlight the words as you go along. However, it’s not available for all titles and the highlighting cursor doesn’t always cooperate. Apple Books has nothing like this, but I think that’s okay; the only problem to it was I had to be mindful of stopping the audiobook before closing out of the book on my iPad to help keep my place if I didn’t stop at the end of a chapter. It also inflated the running timer since, as far as the app was concerned, I was reading two books at once. Needless to say, I absolutely smashed my daily reading goal while breezing through We.

My other reason for reading along was to see if, by some objective measure, my reading speed had genuinely improved from when I was in school. As I said in an earlier entry, I never got the hang of speed reading, and the context of reading to study for class (and therefore a grade) didn’t exactly nurture the skill as far as I was concerned. It kind of broke me and that led to me being one of those book-a-year-at-best people, even though I still had a tenacious glimmer of that childhood giddiness about books that kept me coming back to the bookstores every now and again. Sure enough, and to my relief, there were more than a few instances when I got a little bit impatient with the audiobook. It was to the point I considered abandoning the read-along in favor of a kind of flip-flopping: audiobook in the car, text version at home, or some similar arrangement. I stuck with the original plan and simply learned to let the narrator do what narrators do best, and that’s sell you on the drama and believe in these characters. So, I consider the experiment a roaring success. I have found a small and practical spectrum of speeds between my default settings of Audiobook and Violent, Panicked Skimming.

As for We, it was all right. It was written in 1924 and really set the stage for the Dystopian Future genre, with all the typical tropes on tour. Everyone is identified by numbers, all are dressed in the same gray uniforms (leaving our protagonist, D-503, to take note of people’s facial features as abstract shapes to help him remember them), information is strictly controlled by an enigmatic governing body, and all surfaces are glass, the sole exception being for curtains that can be drawn when permission for “Makin’ Whoopee” is granted. The book is presented as a journal, though each entry is labeled as a “record” rather than a specific date, which is more typical of the Epistolary genre. At times, it reminded me a lot of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, in which the narrator blurs the line between reality and the imagination, leaving us to wonder what’s literal and what’s a complex metaphor about processing new information as their respective arcs develop. Ayn Rand’s Anthem, by contrast, is much more direct, even pithy in places, and cranks up the totalitarianism of We to 11, to the point that the very pronoun of “I” is completely unknown to the populace (instead using the collective “We”). Of course, Anthem is notably shorter than We; it almost reads more like an outline for a much longer work. I may have polished off Anthem in a single, casual weekend.

After We’s experiment concluded to victorious fanfare, the next in my queue was Memoirs Found In a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem. The last book by Lem I’d read was Eden, and there’s a common thread between the two of them I find rather funny. For starters, Memoirs Found In A Bathtub is set in the distant future, in which a spacefaring, solar system conquering humanity has suffered a terrible setback in their study of history thanks to a tenacious blight that has destroyed all paper. Lem wrote the book in 1961. At this time, Xerox was experimenting with the technology that would come to be known about 30-plus years later as E-Ink, and would ultimately be popularized by Amazon’s Kindle tablets a decade later. As I write this, word from many publishers is that mass market paperbacks are being phased out as digital sales of books go up (hardcovers, meanwhile, seem to be doing as well as ever). Obviously, prescience is at a premium even among the most studious of sci-fi writers, so I’m not knocking Lem for thinking that humanity would still be relying on paper that far into the future. In Eden, written in 1958 and set at an equally distant future date, the ship that crashes on the titular planet has a very well-stocked library, so well-stocked that the books get repurposed into a makeshift staircase due to the ship settling at an odd angle. If you know anything about space travel, weight carries a hefty cost, so a well-stocked library might come across as a little bit silly given how utilitarian the rest of the ship is. Finally, there’s the irony of me reading both of these books on a digital tablet more 50 years since Lem committed these works to paper from his trusty typewriter.

Lem died of heart failure in 2006, and I can’t find anything as to his opinion on the invention of E-Ink or the budding market of ebooks. Incidentally, Douglas Adams died of a heart attack in 2001 and had a very complex opinion of ebooks. In the posthumously published Salmon of Doubt, he had this to say:

“We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice books.”

Although Adams never made any mention of Lem as an influence on his work, the two have very similar sensibilities when it comes to the tone of their work. Lem is generally more serious than Adams, but one persistent theme of Lem’s work is the inability of the human mind to fully comprehend both the universe at large and the otherworldly denizens that may inhabit it along with us, something Adams also delved into in his work. Eden focused on our shipwrecked crew and their attempts to make contact with the planet’s odd inhabitants who largely ignore their new neighbors. As it turns out, they’ve got problems of their own. As for Memoirs Found In A Bathtub, Lem goes pure Kafkaesque comedy. Although set in the future (and flashing back to a less distant future via the titular memoirs), the sci-fi elements are at most a framing device and at least a few throwaway lines that blend into the rest of the existential metaphors that make up most of the dialogue. Set in a multilevel bunker in the Colorado mountains (referred to only as The Building and described by future scholars as a kind of back-up Pentagon), the government finds itself mired in paperwork as it tries to sort out its own shady operations of surveillance, code-breaking, and maintaining an illusion of order. Our narrator is an operative charged with a mission of such vital importance and such terrible secrecy that nobody can actually tell him what he’s supposed to be doing. The bulk of the prose has him going from level to level and room to room encountering other operatives who may or may not know more than they are letting on. Discussions with these oddballs range from the nature of decoding information to making triples and quadruples of un/known double agents to just how routine firefights and shootouts are in an effort to maintain the status quo of the facility. I kept picturing The Building as a kind of Cold War Retrofuturism blending of the War Room from Dr. Strangelove and the Wildfire facility from The Andromeda Strain, with deep red carpets, harsh overhead lights, white curving walls, and furniture placed in the middle of each room with lots of empty space around it.

In the end, I found the book overall rather average. It feels slapdash, like Lem didn’t quite know what to do with the memoirs in question and so tacked on this lengthy introduction about the paper plague. Frankly, I think one could just treat the introduction as a standalone short story and forgo the rest of the book and really lose nothing of value. That’s not to say the memoirs are bad, but once you get a feel for the joke of bureaucracy gone awry, it wears out its welcome and the only thing that kept me going was for some potential payoff that tied the introduction to the narrative proper. At the risk of spoilers, no such thing occurs. The memoirs end very abruptly and we’re left wondering if that’s all there is to it and just what it was that we read.

It’s hard to give the book a recommendation beyond my prescribed reading of the introduction and giving the rest a pass. If you’ve never read Lem and have any desire to, the best place to start is Solaris. The next book of his in my queue is A Perfect Vacuum, a collection of book reviews for books that don’t actually exist. It should be fun and I plan on doing a full write-up of its offerings (I've got plenty to say about the premise alone), though that won’t be for some time. Meanwhile, having just finished Memoirs earlier this morning, I am now halfway through C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. My impression thus far is one of not being terribly impressed. It’s another work of Epistolary literature, the letters being from a demon to his nephew as the latter tries to tempt a human patient away from the light. It feels more like the sort of thing Mark Twain would have written and spice up with his signature wit. Lewis, I think, takes himself a little too seriously and isn’t having that much fun with the subject matter. Once I’ve finished with it, I’m not entirely sure what’s next in my queue. Maybe I’ll randomize it, or at least take a break from fiction with some nonfiction I’ve got piled up, like a book about how Xerox effectively invented the personal computer as we know it, only to sit on it until Steve Jobs and Bill Gates saw the potential and pilfered what they could from their sanctioned tour.

Quite the history for a company known mostly for photocopiers. 

A Page-Turner for All Seasons

I have a complicated relationship with reading that I think a number of people can relate to. Simply put, I blame school and I blame movies. The latter is straightforward enough. I grew up in a golden age of cinema: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, The Princess Bride, Big, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ghostbusters, Short Circuit, The Goonies, Labyrinth, and too many others to name. These movies were every bit as deep and thematically complex as any book, and all I had to do was push Play on the VCR. As for school, bear in mind that I’m not mad, only frustrated. The biggest problem is on my end; I never got the hang of speed reading. I figured, if someone wrote all this, the least I can do is read all of this. When you’re reading on your own, who cares? With school, however, not only are you expected to read the book within a timeframe, you’re also going to be quizzed on it. Therein lay the problem, you want to get through the book quickly, but you’ve got to retain as much detail as possible, otherwise you won’t do so well on the assignment. It’s simply a skill I never got to develop properly. Some people got it. I didn’t.

In recent years, I feel I’ve gotten a little better at it, and have been able to polish off some books fairly quickly. There’s a caveat to this, however, that the book is between 200-300 pages or, according to its audiobook counterpart, able to be read in 8-10 hours maximum. Even if I only read on weekends, that’s a book a month at my slowest.

When I was gifted an audiobook of Project Hail Mary, I made an exception (and I'll probably make a few more exceptions that I'll talk about later). It’s 16 hours, but there’s a twist. The book switches between the present day plot and a past flashback. It’s rather like reading two books at the same time, which is a surprisingly good way to stay engaged with a plot that might otherwise drag. That may sound like the problem is with my attention span, and that’s fair. Some stories take more telling than others, and a tighter plot doesn’t necessarily make for a better book. 

Someone on social media (I can’t find where now) was talking about the state of television, specifically streaming shows, how there’s so few episodes per season and we have to wait sometimes several years for the next season. They went on to elaborate that sometimes a show would just have an episode in which nothing happens and that this is becoming a lost art. These are sometimes called Bottle Episodes, depending on who you ask. A more cynical person would call them Filler. Bottle Episodes are designed to be self-contained and usually intended to give audiences a breather between longer or more significant plot points. They’re typically confined to a single location and are often more dialogue-heavy than a standard episode. Reasons for a Bottle Episode will, once again, depend on who you ask. Writers like and will vehemently defend them because it's a chance to flesh out their characters. They're also typically born of necessity, like a show going over budget on an earlier or upcoming episode. 

Here’s the thing about streaming versus traditional television regarding filler: There are no time slots to fill anymore. I was thinking about this when finishing off season two of My Adventures with Superman. I never really got into any of the Superman comics growing up, but when it comes to the Man of Steel’s other media appearances, I’m always curious to see how it works out. With My Adventures with Superman, every episode was an absolute banger, not a single moment wasted, not one episode that could be written off as filler. Between the two seasons, the total number of episodes is 20, the first half in 2023 and the second half in 2024 (as of this writing, the third season is about two weeks away). That got me thinking about that old Lois and Clark series from the 90’s, the one with Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher. That was a show that felt like it was on forever. When I looked it up, I found it was only four seasons spanning 1993 to 1997, but each season was 22 episodes. Do you remember all of them? I sure don’t. Of course, it’s hardly fair to compare a live-action superhero show from the mid-90’s to a modern animated program nearly 30 years apart; animation is expensive and therefore doesn’t have time for filler. Still, when you’re bringing Superman to the small screen, maybe quality should take precedent over quantity. Sure, watching Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet, try to balance is his secret identity with his relationship with Lois is part of the mythos, but peppering in a few breakable sets and props isn’t exactly making the most of said mythos.

As for the time between seasons, I can’t help but suggest to these impatient viewers… maybe read some books. You’ve got time. 

Lofty Goals

In the wake of World War 2 and the spread of globalization, New York City found itself with an excess of large, empty lofts meant for manufacturing work. As a result, they had to lease these places for dirt cheap. This attracted a number of artists from painters to sculptors and everything in between to set up shop. The understanding was that these facilities were not to be residences. To that end, anything like air conditioning, running water, and even electricity in some places had to be installed at the renter’s expense. As might be expected, these artists did in fact make homes of these lofts, the landlords simply looking the other way most of the time since they were getting paid and even having utilities installed at no cost to them. Eventually, these landlords started to get tired of being taken advantage of, so they moved to evict these artists from their spaces so they could renovate them into upscale apartments. Some lobbying and political dealings later and the Loft Act was introduced in 1982. Officially called Article 7-C of the New York Multiple Dwelling Law, the long and short of this new lease on life for the artists was that they were allowed to maintain their spaces with rent control in full effect on the condition that they were in fact full-time artists making a living from their art. You were a professional or you were out. That was the deal. Many of these artists are still working to this day in the same space they leased all those decades ago. It’s a charming little piece of history. 

In 2013, I self-published a novella. At least, I call it a novella. According to some guidelines I read here and there, what I actually produced should be called a novelette. Frankly, I think discussions of book length are the very picture of pedantic. Rendezvous with Rama clocks in at a little less than 260 pages and Atlas Shrugged is over 1200, yet no one bats an eye at calling either of them novels. Fun fact: L. Ron Hubbard's posthumously published Mission Earth was originally a single, million-plus word novel broken up into ten separate volumes between 1985 and 1987. At the end of the day, some stories take more telling than others and the rest is simply publishers making sure they get their money’s worth from your work. Anyway, for my self-publishing, I used a service called Smashwords. They took on the task of formatting my document into an ePub format and then distributing it to all the notable ebook sellers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books, to name a few. Originally I put the book out there with a price tag, but decided to make it free after about two years time. I even posted it to my DeviantART page. The price was more of a statement than anything else; It was to prove that I was serious about my work, even if the book is immensely silly. I mean, the chapter titles are quotes from Return of the Jedi. Despite having no science fiction elements at all beyond the occasional defiance of physics, I was indebted to two figures who helped bring a faraway galaxy to our theaters: George Lucas and Sir Alec Guinness. 

I took writing advice from both of them. Lucas set aside a block of time each day to sit at his desk and write away on his legal pads. The deal was he stayed there for the whole time no matter what, whether he wrote a little or wrote a lot. That was my schedule on the book from November through early the next year. I’d come home from work, and apart from bathroom breaks and dinner, I stayed at that keyboard whether I wrote a sentence, a paragraph, a whole chapter, or nothing at all. As for the late and great Sir Guinness, he once told Don Swaim of BookBeat that the best way to keep yourself motivated in writing is not to get up or stop or otherwise take a break unless you know what the next thing you’re going to put down is. In other words, don’t take a break when you get stuck. This has a few positive effects, but I think the most prominent one is that it helps keep your vision fresh in your mind. It’s like challenging yourself to memorize a long string of numbers. The brain is a muscle and the more you use it, the better you’ll be at keeping thoughts fresh in your mind. 

I may not be a professional writer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t take what I do as seriously as one. 

Then I got an email yesterday. 

A few years earlier, Smashwords had been acquired by another self-publishing/on-demand entity called Draft2Digital. Nothing really changed in that time except the layout of the website. However, with this email, they announced a rather drastic change to what exactly they expected from their writers. 

In short, if your book sales fell below 100USD in a 12-month period, you had to pay a 12USD annual maintenance fee. That is, if your books weren’t selling, and Draft2Digital wasn’t getting their cut of the sales, you had to pay the rent out of pocket for the honor of having your books listed on their site. 

Oh, how I wish my sales had exceeded a full Benjamin at any point. That’s not entirely true; like I said, it was more a matter of principle that I charged for the book at first. Still, you never know what’s going to blow up, so better to hedge your bets. I completely understand why Draft2Digital wants to go this route. Their revenue is made from book sales, and servers aren’t free. There’s a reason they call it a maintenance fee. Digital real estate is still real estate and not every company is Google and can therefore afford to float a few freeloaders. I mean, I haven’t paid for this blog. Google keeps Blogger around more or less out of the goodness of its heart. 

Frankly, I don’t like the idea of paying 12 bucks a year for every year I don’t make 100 or more in selling my silly little stories, so I made a decision. I delisted everything I’d put up there, and I’m in the process of closing my account. There wasn’t actually a way to do that on their site, so I had to email them, which was prefaced with a warning on the web page that there was a massive influx of inquiries and so it may take some time to receive a response. 

I think it’s fair to presume a number of other people aren’t too keen on the maintenance fee. 

Anyway, according to my account, my fee wouldn’t even be charged until March of next year, so I’m not at all flustered about the time it may take to receive a response about closing my account. Who knows, maybe they’ll even walk this back in a few days or weeks given the sheer volume of people jumping ship. 

As I said, I don’t blame them for this move and I do honestly wish them success going forward. I’m clearly not cut out to be on their platform and there’s no point in my taking up their server space. As a result, the only way to read the book now is on my DeviantART page, and that will be the case for at least the next two years. 2028 will make the book 15 years old. On that anniversary, my plan is to re-release it, maybe with an introduction or some additional material. I’ve had a sequel in mind for some time, but I have no timeframe for when that’s going to be made a reality, so you’ll just have to settle for the original. Back when I published the book in 2013, I think I originally wrote it in Evernote and then used some other application to convert it into a Word document. In the years since then, I’ve learned that Apple’s word processor, Pages, has a neat little pipeline baked into it that lets you send your manuscript straight through to Apple Books. One single application and no annual maintenance fees. I can still export to an ePub and have it made available through other stores like Kindle, but I don’t really care so much about reach. As a wise and disembodied voice once said, “If you build it, they will come.” 

New York built lofts, and along came the artists. 

Update: Received a reply from Draft2Digital and they clarified that the maintenance fee will only be charged to accounts with books listed. You do not need to delete your account if you don't want to. In fact, if you do delete your account and decide to open one later, you are charged a one-time activation fee. To review, if you delist your books, you are not charged the maintenance fee. Deactivating your account is not necessary to avoid the fee. 

The Great UnGoogling Side Story: The Optimal Death of Prime

https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/

I've been invested in the Amazon ecosystem for many years. You might even say I was an early adopter, especially when they expanded their offerings from books to DVDs. It was simply the best place to get movies if you had particularly obscure tastes like I do. I mean, if Suncoast didn't have it, it might as well have never existed.

Hopefully, you don't need me to tell you about everything wrong with Amazon. If you do, let's just say their convenience comes at a steep price, and I don't just mean the flow of money. 

Speaking of money, I had a Prime membership for years. It seemed like a no-brainer; 2-day shipping, Prime Video, Music... You were paying for the streaming service but with a boatload of perks. 

As time has gone on, however, the perks have not increased in value. In fact, many features have ducked behind paywalls and has left my membership feeling rather anemic. 

First, there was Amazon Music. Instead of giving you unlimited plays of certain songs, everything went to a Spotify-like shuffle mode. The entire catalog was available, but you'd have to wait for it to randomly show up. The biggest problem with this was that it affected any singles or albums that you purchased. This was resolved eventually, but that it happened in the first place showed how much of a rushed solution this was to a cashflow problem. 

After that, they started putting ads on Prime Video. Here I was paying about 140 dollars a year, and they were still going to have me sit through ads while watching movies and shows. Rather than make a new, ad-supported tier to draw in new users (like HBOMax and Netflix), they changed the tier I was already in to the ad-supported one. Simply put, this is not what I signed up for, and I wasn't alone in feeling this way. Ironically, I wouldn't have minded if they simply upped the price of Prime as they've done in the past. I pay it annually because that is much more convenient than juggling monthly charges. However, getting rid of the ads on Prime Video requires a monthly charge of 3 dollars. There's no option for me to pay more annually. Bear in mind, I also pay for Kindle Unlimited and Audible, so this was turning into a mess. I can understand making those a separate charge, but now they're going to nickel and dime me on a service I already paid for in advance. 

Another service I'd paid for annually was Disney+. However, after that business with Jimmy Kimmel, an increase in their annual price, and now their current deal with OpenAI to flood Plus with slop, not only did I not renew my Disney+ subscription, but I'm not giving them any money for the next year at least, including going to their movies. I'm not paying for slop. If they want in bed with OpenAI, they can have each other.

Speaking of AI, Amazon made their own AI deal that served as the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I have an array of smart speakers around the house. They're very handy. I use them for kitchen timers while cooking, controlling lights, making grocery lists, playing music (if I don't mind the shuffle mode), and sometimes as an intercom with my roommate, among other things. Again, very handy. Alexa Plus, meanwhile, is only handy in the sense I want to put my hands around its neck and squeeze its damned life out of it. At first, it was offered as a beta program and an update to the Alexa app. In addition to the hassle of dealing with how everything was rearranged in the app, using the new Alexa Plus was equally tedious and even counterproductive. Without getting into the weeds of how virtual assistants work, they replaced Alexa's hard-coded routines with a chatbot that turns nearly everything you ask it to do into a big production. I almost wouldn't mind it except everything took slightly longer than it normally did. I swear the first time I tried adding something to the grocery list in the new app with Alexa Plus, it took about five minutes. Full disclosure, I've used AI chatbots before, and I hate them. I hate everything about them. It gets under my skin because chatbots are essentially what customer service jobs want you to sound like in a call center scenario. It's that mode of speech which tries to sound casual and friendly but is so forced as to be legitimately insulting. There's an uncanny valley aspect to it as well; it's trying to sound so human that it backfires. 

I tried to back out of the Beta program, and was successful, but only until the app update forced Alexa Plus onto me. If I kept my Prime membership, I was getting Alexa Plus whether I wanted it or not. 

This led me to look into my Prime membership and see just what exactly I was (and wasn't) getting for my money. One of my favorite aspects of Amazon is something called Subscribe and Save. At the risk of sounding like a sales pitch, you lump so many items together in a single shipment and set them to be dropped off at regular intervals, and this not only comes with free shipping, but discounts on the goods in question compared to one-time purchases. This is how I get my cat food, kitty litter, paper towels, bath tissue, and even my protein bars. Having boxes of paper towels and toilet paper dropped off on my front step instead of dealing with it during a Target trip is so convenient. It's pretty much like having a bulk store membership only you get everything delivered. I'm even using it for my roommate's colostomy supplies. I was convinced that all this was part of the Prime membership; it seemed like the next logical step from the 2-day free shipping that Prime offers. Looking into it, though, it turns out this is not tied to Prime. It's a completely separate service that anyone can sign up for. 

That was my a-ha moment. The only thing that my Prime membership was offering besides 2-day shipping on some items with no minimum total in the cart was Prime Video, and that was really not worth having the ads on it for what I was paying. If I really want to see something, it's easy enough to just wait for the whole series to drop, pay for a month (maybe even shell out the extra 2 or 3 dollars to watch without ads), and then binge the whole thing before the time goes up. My roommate's a little disappointed as she's a big Critical Role fan. Even though this membership won't lapse until June, that means future seasons of both Vox Machina and Mighty Nein will have to be consumed via the binge and run model.

I wonder how long before Amazon enacts an "x-months minimum" stipulation to their Prime Video memberships. 

The Correct Resolution of Paper

I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions, typically; I prefer CGPGrey’s idea of having themes. However, in 2025, almost as an afterthought, I vowed to go paperless for the year. This was partly spurred by having gotten some Mobiscribe e-ink tablets, one to use at work instead of notepads or composition books and one at home for reading (and a color one because it was a good deal and I was curious about the tech). I was planning on using them for Inktober, but decided against it as getting notes and drawings off of the devices is more than a little tedious for something I’m supposed to do daily 31 times in a row. In the end, with only about a half-dozen Post-It notes at work as the exception, I stuck to the resolution well beyond the 365 days. 

Reflecting on this, I had another thought of something I could do as a resolution for the year 2026. It occurred to me while playing a typing game called Glyphica. In the game, you occupy a central turret and fire at invaders coming at you from all sides. You select your target by typing the word that appears above them. The game is a lot of fun; reminds me of the quality time I spent with Typing of the Dead on Dreamcast, an  edutainment title that doubled my typing speed in the course of a few weeks. Though the games are very different in terms of presentation, the biggest difference is one of quality of life. In the decades between the two titles, we’ve gone from spellcheck being a luxury to the software going the extra step of not only correcting your errors without you asking, but even predicting what it is you’re trying to say in the first place. If I start typing a word like constitution, I only need to get about as far as “const” before the autocomplete shows me the rest of the word, at which point I need only press the tab key to finish what I started and move on to the next word. A hundred keystrokes can drop down to as low as sixty-five in this way. So, what, you may ask, is the problem? 

Between Glphyica and an online typing speed test called Monkeytype, it's occurred to me that I've amassed a sizable number of bad typing habits because autocorrect swoops in and fixes them, sometimes before I even notice. Don’t get me wrong, it’s convenient when it’s not trying to forcefully make me say an incorrect word, but I feel like this is offloading vital aspects of a skill I happen to be very proud of. Between that and autocomplete, the software is doing too much heavy lifting for my liking. 

My worst habit is something I like to call chording. It happens with especially short words such as "the", "to", and... well, "and." The problem is I hit all the keys at once and I end up with "teh", "ot", and "adn." I can't help but wonder if stenographers have this problem outside of the courtroom. Although chording has technically been with me since I first learned to type, autocorrect and autocomplete have made it substantially worse. Rather than typewriter keys jamming or the timing of my keystrokes being measured in imperceptible milliseconds, the software is able to work out that I'm writing "the" and not "teh" as "teh" isn't a word as far as I know, at least not one in English. 

If you've ever seen that brain teaser where the words in a paragraph all have their respective letters out of order (yet it's still readable because your brain unscrambles it from context clues), that's more or less what my typing feels like to me at this point. It's like I know words as clusters of letters rather than sequences of them. My muscle memory has contracted to the point where it's folded in on itself. My speed has been relatively consistent, but my accuracy has taken a massive hit, and that's no good to anybody ecepxt vrey wreid poelpe who lkie tshoe arfoneemtoiend barin tseaers. 

This has led me to the decision to disable autocorrect and autocomplete on my Mac. Spellcheck gets to stay, inadvertent brain teaser construction be damned. A red line appearing under a word I just typed doesn't bother me. That's instant feedback on a mistake I made and it's on me to fix it. It's gently saving me time, not doing the work for me. It's what The Oatmeal would call an administrative task and not a creative one. When I give what I've written a once-over, it's highlighted the areas that need my attention first. It's working ex post facto rather than trying to get ahead of me like far too many "smart features." Those assume what you're going to do next. Sometimes they're right, but other times I want to write construction or constriction or consternation or even constituent rather than constitution. 

As for my iPhone, predictive text (which is essentially autocomplete) remains enabled on my keyboard of choice, Microslop's SwiftKey, the only Microslop product I use willingly and with any consistency. The reason for keeping this feature enabled is simple. It's a small and cramped keyboard and I need all the help I can get. It's like Lewis Carroll's Nyctograph, a specific tool for a specific job. In his case, it was writing in the dark and without getting out of bed. In my case, it's when I need to write something and either can't get to one of my full-sized mechanical keyboards when I want to or, like Mr. Carroll, I can't be bothered to get out of bed or off the couch at the moment. 

The jury had been out on the iPad since it's a notable difference in screen real estate, but I don't always have one of my Bluetooth keyboards along with me and the on-screen keyboard still has all the same problems as the iPhone. 

As for the paper resolution, that has stuck around as far as taking notes at work goes, though Post-It notes will no longer give me pangs of guilt on the rare occasions I have to use them. For everything else, I do want to start doing more traditional art instead of my usual vector works. I'm even going to try using a fountain pen after either losing or breaking the first one I tried. I don't remember which fate befell it, which is why I'm happy to have discovered that disposable fountain pens exist. In fact, some artists recommend them over their more expensive brethren. 

Welcome to 2026, everybody. 

Last One Out, Hit The Lights

 I mentioned before that I'd been having issues with posting to Blogger due to an OS update that made WebKit not work so well on the desktop environment. The biggest problem was that when I would try to post an image using the menu bar, I got an error message that my Google account couldn't be accessed, albeit I'm here now writing this. 

This problem affected both Safari and DuckDuckGo. Other browsers don't seem to have this problem, but it's also confined to the desktop experience because I have no issue with my iPad. 

This was very frustrating as I haven't had to rely on workarounds for a very long time when it comes to updating Blogger. There have been several OS updates since this problem started, but none of them have fixed the issue... or have they? 

When I made my previous entry, I wrote it on my Mac with the intention that I would finish it using my iPad to add all the images. On a whim, though, I decided to try the old drag and drop method. I resized the window, clicked on the image file on my desktop, and dragged it over the body of the text. 

Success. 

It's a small victory and rather cumbersome, but it's better than trying to use the
version of Safari to fill this out. This interface is really best suited for desktops and notebooks. Sadly, there's no more Blogger app like there is for WordPress, which perfectly adapts the blogging experience for tablets. 

See you all next year. 

Bleep You, Got Mine (and I'm sorry)

Probably the biggest mistake you can make when it comes to building a PC is believing it will save you money. Of course, there’s the obvious time sink of researching just what it is you’ll be doing in the first place, learning why some parts will or will not go together, sourcing all the parts in the first place, and the omnipresent possibility of something going horribly, horribly wrong and there being no recourse beyond opening your wallet again. What you might save in money, you’ll lose in time… and possibly a little sleep. 

I’ve built PCs, and I don’t miss it. At this point in my life, I’d rather pay for the peace of mind via professional assemblies than the satisfaction of building something with my own two hands (and having to be my own technical support). It was certainly a learning experience, and I’ll always be grateful for that. In terms of cost, I didn’t really pay as much attention as I should have, but I know at least once or twice I had to basically start over and source a new part because something was amiss, including swapping out an entire motherboard because I plugged something in wrong. To be fair, when I was assembling PCs, it was circa 2010-2015, which meant I had it easy. There’s no shortage of tutorials on PC assembly, and the way PCs are built in this era to begin with is a much different animal than it would have been 20 or even 10 years ago. To put it in perspective, I didn’t learn to solder until 2016 for my job. None of the PCs I built required any soldering, but this was most certainly not the case 20 or 30 years earlier. 

In food terms, you’re assembling a sandwich. The bread is the case, the lettuce is the motherboard, the pickles are the RAM, the meat is the CPU, the mayo is the thermal paste… it’s not a perfect metaphor, but you get the idea. You’ve got individual components that just snap together to eventually form a fully working personal computer workstation. In other words, in terms of time, I actually had it pretty easy. 

Now, about those pickles…

Without getting into a long-winded rundown of just what RAM (Random Access Memory) is, think of it this way: The hard drive is your long term memory. It’s your name, your family’s faces, the streets you grew up on, and anything else you don’t want to forget. The more of it you have, the more you can remember without having to forget something first. RAM is your short term memory plus your ability to multitask. The more of it you have, the more you can do at once. It’s also probably the simplest and most straightforward upgrade you can perform on your computer. I like to tell people that if you can change a diaper, you are overqualified to swap out the RAM in a computer. Even if you need someone to talk you through it the first time, after your first go, you’ll be showing it off at parties.

In my personal experience, RAM has always been very costly. I’ve easily spent more on RAM than I have on motherboards (spontaneous failures notwithstanding). There have been many reasons for this. Games tend to be a bit RAM hungry, especially considering online games in which you’re often running at least two or three other applications at the same time, one of which is doubtless a web browser with two-dozen tabs open. During the pandemic, when we were all stuck at home and relying on our computers to check in at work, start that live-streaming channel, or virtually send our kids to school, RAM prices went up. That old desktop you bought a few years earlier wasn’t going to cut it, but you couldn’t afford to replace the whole thing, so you swapped out a few parts. 

I’m sorry to tell you, but you were over a barrel. We all were. 

There was a demand, so the cost of the supply went up. It’s simple economics. Ironically, something that should have been the cheapest upgrade (sticks of RAM don’t nearly have nearly as much meat on their bones as a motherboard, a CPU, or a hard drive) became a hot commodity. 

One company has understood this better than anybody: Apple. Actually, that’s a slight lie; Apple understands the economics, but ultimately plays by its own rules. As a rule, once you’ve purchased an Apple product like a MacBook or an iMac, you cannot swap out or upgrade the RAM, no matter how many diapers you’ve changed nor how much sleep you're willing to lose. When you make that purchase, you’d better be thinking of how it will impact the next seven generations. Otherwise, you’re going to be left wanting down the road. So, do you splurge now and hopefully be content for the next few years, or do you settle and upgrade more often? Apple technically wins in either case. 

I talked before about the pandemic driving up the price of RAM. Well, now the newest plague to befall mankind is artificial intelligence. 

Without getting into a long-winded rundown of Generative AI and Large Language Models, the important thing to understand is that these chatbots and image generators need a lot of processing power and a lot of short term memory. The tech companies behind these AI tools are building more and larger data centers all over the country and even around the world. The demand for RAM is so out of control that Micron, one of the largest manufacturers of RAM decided to no longer sell to consumers and focus on its corporate clients, the ones building the datacenters.

What this means for consumers is that if you thought the RAM prices during the pandemic were bad (and possibly before that) then you haven’t seen anything yet, and the only thing that’s going to stop it is this whole AI bubble finally collapsing on itself because no amount of Sam Altman saying, “Trust me, Bro!” Is going to make this so-called business model sustainable.

This is the part where I humbly brag. As an actor friend of mine once said, “Save your rotten fruit for the parking lot. I’ll have more places to hide.” 

Back in 2020, shortly after I bought my house at the start of the lockdowns, I purchased a Mac mini as a housewarming gift to myself. I’d wanted one since they debuted back around 2005, but the planets never quite aligned just right for me to make the decision. 15 years later, the alignment netted me a 2018 Intel-based model with 8 Gigabytes of RAM. I could have sworn I opted for 16, but I think I talked myself down since I was going to use it mostly for writing, drawing, and at most some 3D modeling in SketchUp. Anyway, despite the low hardware specs, the little gray box I nicknamed Gray Rock served me very well for the next five years. Even after Apple changed their processors from Intel to a homegrown lineup known as Apple Silicon, the little Gray Rock that could was holding up just fine and dandy. 

I knew I couldn’t keep this up forever, though. While the hardware would probably last many more years, software is another problem. With the change in processors, applications were leaving the old processing architecture behind and were being optimized for the new kid on the block. This sort of hardware upgrade/software optimization leap frog happens regardless of paradigm shifts in processor types, but Apple’s new in-house strategy lit a fire under developers to get with the times. 

There was, of course, a new version of the Mac mini, but I have to say I wasn’t too impressed with it. I mean, sure, it’s nice and compact, but it presented a problem for me. While I like Apple’s hardware offerings such as the Mac mini and the iPads, I’m less keen on Apple’s accessories. I don’t like their keyboards, I don’t like their mice, and while their monitors are nice, you can do a lot better for a lot less. As for the mice and keyboards, Apple cares more about form than function in this regard, and that means favoring wireless over having cables crisscrossing what’s supposed to be a sleek, minimalist setup. In other words, my mouse and keyboard needed to be plugged in, and the new Mac mini would have required me to use an adapter. This is a pain, so I searched other options. I guess I’d simply turned into too much of a Prosumer for the Mac mini’s casual demographic. This led me to the Mac Studio, a higher-end desktop with a similar-ish form factor to Gray Rock, the notable difference being the Studio’s doubled height to accommodate a massive heatsink and cooling fan. Needless to say, it had a lot more horses under the bonnet than my model that rolled off the assembly line 7 years ago. It also had more RAM out of the gate, with the minimum being 36 gigabytes. This was starting to look like the perfect upgrade; it had over 4 times the RAM, a new processor, and I could plug in all my favorite accessories without some clumsy adapter. Throw in a special discount that doubled the hard drive space for the same price, and I took it as a sign.

In the first week of August of this year, my new Mac Studio arrived and Gray Rock was shipped back to be recycled. In its honor, the new Studio was given a similar nickname Grimlock (after a Transformer), and it’s been a great upgrade for only taking up so much more room than its predecessor. I may not be pushing its specs with my typical workload, but I’m going for a slow burn rather than anything fast and furious. Even when I’m using a 3D modeling program like Blender, I’m only really using it to make perspective and shadow reference models for drawing. 

I’ve been thinking about the timing of my purchase in relation to the spikes in RAM prices. I was under the impression, since Apple’s processors were being made in-house and their RAM works a little differently from the Intel-based models, that Apple was safe from the increased demand. After all, they already charge a premium for RAM when you’re configuring your initial purchase, so I was kind of ahead of the game in that regard. At least, I thought that was the case. Turns out Apple does still rely on these RAM manufacturers for their own machines, and it’s only a matter of time before the price spikes affect Apple’s own price tags (which already have a reputation). 

For whatever it’s worth to you out there thinking of buying a new PC or taking on the risk of building one, I absolutely hate that this is happening. There is no smug look on my face as I sit at my Studio typing this out. I hate the reason for it happening most of all. I hate this far off pipe dream of promise of some kind of computer generated hive mind and all we need for it is to build more power- and water-hungry data centers and for you to keep asking Gemini to make you images of Mickey Mouse cleaning an assault rifle while writing your college term papers for you. 

Apple Intelligence is available on both Grimlock and Sapphire (my iPad). It has not been enabled. I have no desire to enable it. Few things in this universe would please me more than for the parts of their processors dedicated to AI features to be used for something else.

Tweet Back

It's recently been announced that a small startup called Operation Bluebird is trying to relaunch classic Twitter, arguing that the Elongated Muskrat has allowed the name and logo to lapse. I'm no legal expert, but there may be something of a leg to stand on. As a rule, a trademark is only enforceable so long as the company in question keeps using the mark consistently. That is, if a company rebrands, giving itself a new name and logo, they lose all rights to its previous assets. This is intended to encourage competition rather than allowing companies to essentially sit on their rights. There’s a lot more to this sort of move, but those are the broad strokes. 

As for the new Twitter, it’s set to launch in early 2026 and is currently letting people reserve usernames and handles for when it finally launches. As of this writing, it’s at a little over 150,000 applicants. 

I don’t intend to be one of them. 

I can respect the effort on display here, and there’s clearly a love and affection for what Twitter once was, but I don’t think there’s any chance of catching the same lightning in a bottle. Twitter’s acquisition by Musk fractured a big part of the social media landscape, and I think things are all the better for it. 

Once upon a time, I called Twitter my favorite social networking site, warts and all. It’s hard to describe what exactly I loved about it, but if I had to put it into a single coherent thought, it had an immediacy and a conciseness to it that you didn’t really get out of other platforms. It took the status update aspect from the likes of MySpace and Facebook and made that the entire site. It was also very accessible. I’m old enough to remember when you could use text messaging to post Tweets, back in the days of flip phones and T9 predictive text. That may seem rather quaint now with smartphones, but this was kind of a big deal back in the day. You weren’t bound to a swivel chair in front of a desktop, you weren’t lugging a laptop, and you didn’t have to break the bank buying one of those new fangled smart devices that HTC was making. If you had a phone and a good connection, you could submit a small message to a public square. I remember once reading an article about some activist tweeting only one word: Arrested. I don’t know the exact circumstances, but you certainly couldn’t have made such a quick and concise post to such a wide audience while seated at your desktop as the SWAT team kicked your door in. 

Over time, the site evolved to include a few quality of life features, such as the ability to post images, the ability to post links in a way that didn’t count against your character limit, and eventually a doubling of the character limit from around 120 to 240. On a side note, I love the reason this upgrade happened. The story goes that Twitter wasn’t very big in Japan until a massive earthquake hit the nation. Suddenly, people all over Japan were signing up for Twitter to keep in touch during the crisis. That may not seem like a big deal, but you have to consider that the Japanese language is built different from us European/Latin-based types. To a Japanese person, that 120 character limit may as well have been a 120 word limit since a single character in Japanese can be either a letter, a word, or even a short phrase depending on the usage. Microblogging was the chocolate to Kanji’s peanut butter. As word of these longer-than-normal tweets spread, people around the world wanted in. Obviously, you can’t change a language overnight and emojis can only get you so far, so Twitter opted to double the character limit. The platform’s biggest paradigm shift was done out of jealousy for the Japanese language. 

Despite all this, Twitter grew with the times by sticking to a very practical model. This drew in a lot of new users and eventually Twitter became the go-to place for news organizations to seek out statements from famous people who had now graced the platform with their presence. There would be an incident or scandal or some other controversy, the offending parties would release statements to Twitter (as opposed to directly to the press) and you’d see a screenshot of that tweet on the news, be it on the TV or on the website or anywhere else you’d get your news. There was a direct line between a person of importance and the general masses. Of course, this was a bit of an illusion as it was just as easy for a celebrity to post a Tweet themselves as it would be for them to hire a full-time social media manager to post on their behalf. Still, it came with a sense of authenticity. Barring any hacking, there wasn’t anything on that feed that a user wouldn’t want there. 

However, this wasn’t going to last. Nothing does. Something at sometime was going to come along and disrupt the whole operation. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, and Twitter was no exception.

The fall came in the form of a buyout by a narcissistic billionaire who felt that Twitter wasn’t being as transparent and honest as it should be with what kind of content was and wasn’t allowed on their site. One of the events preceding this takeover was Twitter banning a number of high profile users for violating terms of service, including Alex Jones and Donald Trump. This was viewed by Musk as Twitter not being a platform supporting free speech despite its insistence on being the digital village’s public square. Musk seems to have trouble grasping the fact that free speech does not extend to things like slander and libel or hate speech or calls for violence and harassment. His view seemed to be that people would get to say whatever they want and that the consequences of these actions would just somehow magically work themselves out. Ironically, he’d go back on this promise of totally free speech as he’d start cracking down on satire accounts or impersonations of people and organizations. 

As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. 

So, what’s happened since Twitter imploded? We’ve seen a number of other social sites step up to fill the gap. The centralized source of direct information is now decentralized. It’s no longer “So and so Tweeted yesterday…” but now “The blah blah blah posted on Substack that…” or “What’s his name wrote on Medium...” or “… the company announced on its Threads account.” Among many other new names and faces to the scene. Sure, some of them have been around for some time, but now they’ve found a new purpose serving as a place of refuge for those fleeing the Muskrat. There’s no longer one name in the directory. The monopoly that Twitter built for itself through raw determination crumbled under its own weight and now it’s no longer top dog in the social media scene. 

In the end, people don’t need a new Twitter because they’ve already found one, whether it’s Bluesky or Threads or Substack or Medium or WordPress. While Operation Bluebird is more than welcome to prove me wrong, I don’t think they’re going to achieve what they set out to do because it’s physically impossible to replicate the success of Twitter. Even if they were to, what safeguards do they have against history repeating itself? 

In the interest of full disclosure, I left my Twitter account abandoned on the very day of my 15th anniversary of signing up. I keep it around for a few reasons, partly because it's costing Musk money to keep it up and running, but mostly because there's a number of very talented artists there who have yet to jump ship because they don't want to lose the audience they've built up over the years. 

18 DEC 25 THU Update: Well, this hit a snag earlier than I thought it would. 

My Slop Could Beat Your Slop

Photo by Fruggo

Let me tell you about someone on Quora, someone we’re going to call J. J had requested my answer to a question regarding YouTube videos. Here is the question verbatim: 

My YouTube channel talks about self development, I currently use stock videos from Vecteezy (I give attribution as instructed), motion graphics and Ai voice over narration to make videos. Will my channel get monetized?

I see questions like this all the time. They’re all worded slightly different, and they don't all involve using AI, but my brain hears it the same way every time:  I want to participate in the Boston Marathon, but I’m really, really slow. If I show up on a dirt bike, will I be allowed to race? 

We can probably have a very deep and thoughtful conversation about the future of AI and how it could potentially be used as a productive tool that aids people in their chosen endeavor. I don’t doubt that. We could probably also have a similar discussion about steroids, albeit the public attitude about those seems pretty clear. Remember when we stopped calling them steroids and simply referred to them by the blanket term Performance Enhancing Drugs? That wasn’t to broaden the definition to include other drugs so much as it was a way for those using said drugs to not sound like they were taking the easy way out. After all, it’s only ENHANCING their performance. They’re still working out and training, they just need that little extra edge because they’ve plateaued in their routine. Is that really so bad? 

Of course, doubtless at least one of you has raised a hand in objection and pointed out that content creation for social media platforms is not a competition like it is with athletics. To that I can only say, “Fair, but when monetization is involved and stated as a goal, you’ve made it into one.” We can’t all be Jimmy Donaldson any more than we can all touch the FIFA trophy. Even if we take monetization out of the equation, you’re trying to gain an audience, and that audience only has so much time in the day to consume content. As a wise man said, time is money. It’s even called the attention economy. 

Before I could answer J’s question, I needed a little context, just to see if I was possibly missing something fundamental. I asked why he couldn’t narrate the videos himself. Maybe there’s a good reason. I mean, I don’t like the sound of my voice, so who am I to judge? Maybe he doesn’t feel it would be a good fit for the subject matter. Maybe he’s got a really thick accent and is difficult to understand. 

J answered in two separate replies, the first being, 

“But with the ai voice over is it monetizable?”

J, I asked you why you couldn’t do the narration yourself so I could understand your circumstances that are leading you to ask about the AI voiceover. I asked as a comment on your question so I’d have more information upon which to base my answer. Repeating the question to me isn’t very helpful. The second was, 

“Usually my voice over produces unclear audio”

This doesn’t really answer the question, either. “Unclear” isn’t terribly specific. In hopes of coaxing a little more detail out of him, I offered the following advice, “That’s an easy fix. Even voice notes on an iPhone can produce clear audio. If your emphasis is on self-development, you need to demonstrate that you’re developed enough to share your message more directly rather than hiding behind a machine voice. It’s all about authenticity. Visuals are one thing, but audio is what can really make or break a video.” There was no response from J to this. What’s “unclear” remains unclear. 

Going back to the response about monetization, this was when I decided to check out J’s profile. There was only this one question on his profile, and he had given only one answer to another question. 

Here is that other question verbatim: 

If I use an AI generated image in my video and add voiceover to the video and upload it on my YouTube channel, will it get monetized?

Here is J’s answer to that question: 

“It is best if you go through YouTube's monetization policy.
From your question, your videos might fall under -LOW EFFORT”

So, for those playing at home, we’ve got one content creator that is using stock videos and wants to use an AI for narration, and another content creator that is using AI generated images and a potentially non-AI voiceover (that’s important). The daylight appears to be measurable in seconds, doesn’t it? Curious if J has actually gone through YouTube’s monetization policy to know that this particular combination of sound and vision is ineligible. 

When I brought this up to J, this was his response, 

“Yes but there was a significant difference in our content type
That person said they wanted to use still images+ai voiceover only in their videos
But my videos use videoclips, edits and motion graphics+ai voiceover
Our content type is totally different”

Actually, J, that person didn’t say their narration would be rendered by AI. They said they’d “add voiceover to the video” after mentioning using AI-generated images. You made an assumption and tried to insist that using stock assets was more effort-intensive than using AI-generated ones, which is a healthy enough discussion we could have. After all, you’re both using something you didn’t personally create. Someone else did the work and offered it willingly to be used for other people’s videos. The AI-generated assets are a product of data scraping the work of others, regardless of their choice in the matter, but those results are also tailored to a specific input prompt. We could split hairs over who’s putting more effort into the visual portion of their videos until doomsday, but it’s certainly fair to say they’re both low effort compared to people who produce their own visual content, from the humble vlog to the elaborate and collaborative animated story time video. 

I should point out that there are many content creators who integrate stock assets into their videos along with their own video and audio content. The important distinction to make here is that the stock footage is not being used as a crutch, much less a foundation. It is supplemental to the original portions of the content. The same goes for something like music from YouTube’s audio library or other stock music resources. These are parts of larger works and their contributions are ultimately secondary to what the content creator brings to the table. 

The problem with what you’re doing, J, is that you want the backup band to be more than backup. You’re trying to pile up enough supplemental material that there’s no longer any primary content from you beyond possibly the barest bones of a script and overall vision. Given that, this is why I point out there’s barely any daylight between what you’re trying to do and what you called out that other content creator for asking. 

The point I’ve been trying to make to you is that you need to put more of YOU in what YOU are producing for YOUTube. It’s all about authenticity. The reason you’ll hear so many people complain about AI Slop content is that it’s all so impersonal and lacking in heart. It’s designed to chase a trend and feed an ever-changing algorithm, not actually appeal to anyone. It’s junk food, and it’s not even good junk food. The flavor’s gone in an instant and if the calories were any emptier, they’d collapse in on themselves and form little black holes. If that’s the best you can bring to the table, then all you’re doing is getting yourself lost in the noise. Why should anyone give your work attention if you’re not going to give it your own attention and leave a machine to do nearly all of your heavy lifting. 

My advice to you is that if you can’t take that step to make your content more personal, then don’t make your content. If you can’t be yourself, why should anyone care about you?