2025-06-13 - Getting Video Wrong

Gang, big one for yas:

I think I've been getting video wrong this whole time. SEE, I saw it as this archival medium. Point a phone at it and you have memories forever. Videos on Youtube became how you kept track of my current mental state.

But, when I'm on Youtube and watching stuff, I'm usually watching more ephemeral stuff. Shitposts, if you will. I'm out of love with video essays as a genre and the vlog has become a year-long project condensed into a tv episode. I don't have the patience for either.

That's the thought process for video as an archive though- documentary and commentary. What you've done, not the final product itself. It's made me really want to reflect on my thinking, especially around TikTok and social media spaces, that it's so much more about having something there for now, instead of forever.

Google has seemingly been happy to play the perpetual host for all sorts of videos, and will more than happily hold on to your unlisted videos for now, so I wanna use that to my advantage. Shit's getting unlisted, and it's getting unlisted fast. I think I'm not gonna leave any video up for more than a month or so now. All the content will then get dumped into my Ko-Fi, so you have to go out of your way for it.

Honestly, this disability has been trying my assumptions about a lot of things. You can't "build" a YouTube channel. You are given one. You can build an audience- you can build an audience on YouTube, even! But that is not the same task as making video or creating... anything.

I don't need any kind of success anymore. I'm getting paid out by the government because I can't work. Right now I can't even make a sandwich. That is how it is! So if the urge strikes to put up a video, it should be weird, sloppy, and speak to the exact moment in time it's uploaded. The metric for good art is art that you like and you're glad you made. That's all I wanna do!

Ok byeeeee,
Haley

P.S. Happy One Year Anniversary to my beloved Hart <3 For now and forever uwu