Hey, this is going to be an epic update, a half-year special so to speak. I’m going to go back and take a look at the targets I made at the start of the year and see how I’m doing with them.
With regards to the Fitness Targets – I’ve done nothing. I don’t know why. Can I not be bothered? Or do I feel like I should be doing something else? I think I feel like I should be drawing or recording videogame footage, but then, I don’t really spend enough time doing those things either, so I have no idea. I reckon I should draw up a timetable, allocate my time. It would illustrate that I have more time than I think I have. But then again, now I’ve said that I’ll put off drawing it up and won’t change until I’ve drawn it up. And a plan like that is ridiculous to think about now seeing as something that I never imagined would happen at the start of the year is happening…
Jane and I are having a baby. As I write this, they are due in eleven weeks. That may seem like a long way off right now, but Flipper will be here before we know it, and any and all plans I make now will most probably be thrown out of the window. Not that I hold anything against the little tyke – I totally understand that I will organise my spare time around their needs. I figure they’ll spend a lot of time asleep, so I can draw things in the same room as I’m watching over them. I’m just not sticking to those resolutions at all, of drawing more, of reading more, and of drawing more of what I read about.
I did start making my own lunches, but I do think I need to review portion sizes. Either that or lift some fucking weights before lunch. I tend to be quite stiff and achy in the morning (I did go to the Doctors and he thought it was acid build up and gave me some tablets and it got better for a while but it’s developed into a whole new feeling which isn’t what it initially was, it kinda feels like a bad back now), and it’s relieved after a poo and a shower. But most of the time I have my lunch before my shower to avoid the lunch-time rush, and I can’t lift until I feel physically able to and… Oh man.
There were a bunch of other targets on this page, some of which I am following through on. Putting the forum inside the community site – still not done, but it’s on it’s way. I’ve still not had anymore tattoos – I’m not going to get anymore until I lose some of this weight I don’t think. Self-conscious. Adverts are up on RF.co.uk now, not that they’re making much money, but it’s something, you know? I may look at moving hosting services at some point, weigh up some options. And then there’s YouTube. I’m thinking of starting a new channel on there – I saw how easy it was for Lewis to start one up and upload short little vlogs in a matter of minutes – and that is a far cry from the videogame videos. A typical Dark Souls episode took maybe four hours worth of gameplay, boiled down to an hour. The filesizes of the gameplay footage videos were quite large, and then there was the audio commentary, recorded separately to the video files as the software/capture card doesn’t record that, only the videogame footage. They were recorded initially onto my laptop, then transferred over to the desktop, which took time as well. Then all the video/audio (or more accurately, the videogame footage/my voice) had to be merged together and saved as a new file, which took time. Then it had to be edited down to an hour and saved again. Then it was uploaded to YouTube, which took time because of the HD visuals. So – you can see why recording 5 minutes of me talking about something and uploading it in around 10 minutes seemed so attractive. And I can monetize it too, as it’ll be my content, just me talking. If I do start it then I won’t share the details for a while yet, it’s going to be about my weight gain/weight loss journey, and showing “before” pictures before there are any “after” pictures is just wrong.
As you can tell from the above paragraph – YouTube is a big time-sink. Not that I’m complaining, it’s great fun, but as I said, time-sink. And time is the currency I seem to be spending my life wishing I had more of right now. More so than real currency, which is probably stupid, considering how expensive babies are. I just feel like I am unable to do the things I want to do because we didn’t have enough space to keep my rowing machine, because the Xbox is in the bedroom and I can’t play it when Jane’s asleep, because I have to stop doing things at pre-determined intervals to have cups of tea. I get annoyed when we’re turfed out of a room because someone has given a child permission to play on an Xbox that is connected to the TV we’re watching without even consulting us. I feel hard done by because one person has the biggest bedroom, and even though she went looking for wardrobes, the topic was forgotten, not mentioned for a while. Or was it? Was it decided without me even being involved in the discussion? That’s how it feels. It went from being a definite thing that was happening to it just not being mentioned again. Even though we’re gaining an extra person, we haven’t actually got any more space because of it. Having the Moses Basket in our room for six months is going to be a joke – we’ve barely enough room to swing a cat in there, let alone a baby. I honestly can’t see people putting up with CBeebies being on TV all day long. Actually, my PC being down in the garage is better for me now, as it’s a much tidier environment, and I’ve pretty much eliminated the mistakes I made when we first set things up in the now-nursery. I felt like the study upstairs was always an in-progress type thing, like one day these things won’t be there, or that stuff will go up in the loft, or that PC will be downstairs, you know. But it never happened, and just got cluttered. This down here is nice and tidy now. Very nice.
On the one hand, living here is not ideal. But then again on the other hand, living here is enabling me to do all these amazing things like YouTube and the digital art in the first place. I realise this. If we didn’t live here and have the financial infrastructure that exists here then I would have to work 50 hours a week, trying to get promoted to management, but failing because I can’t tell people what to do. I was never good at being a manager, I was good at being a hard worker. When I was a manager at Game I was pretty lucky I got a team that all knew what they were doing and were pretty much happy to be there – they made me look like a good manager. I’m flaky and unfocused, and not authoritative at all. Anyway, I don’t think that without all these safety nets we would be able to have a child, so I should be grateful. I am grateful. I love my wife and I love my unborn child, and every day I thank my lucky stars we are in a position to have a baby. We couldn’t do it if we weren’t in this situation, so I grin and bear it, and only let loose like this once in a blue moon. It’s either this or a breakdown.
Well, I certainly didn’t think I’d write this much, or be this candid, but there you go!
