Hello I’m Rogan and welcome to the last post of 2020! Before I do anything else, I want to give a big thank you to all of my Patrons – those who have been a Patron for a while, and those who signed up recently – for supporting me, despite this year being what it was. I really appreciate you all, and I always want to improve what I give to you, so if you ever have any ideas, please let me know! Alright, let’s get into it!
Today is going to be a review of my year on YouTube, not in general because, [zoom in] you know, 2020 that. In 2020, I made 56 videos, including this one. So that’s slightly more than one video a week. Remember this for later in the post. Anything I mention from now on will obviously be linked down below, and some will be in the cards. First, I want to go over some videos I’m pretty proud of and some videos I would like to do differently.
A couple of my favorites are my ASL translations of two songs, Poor Unfortunate Souls and Commander in Chief. For the first one, I planned for a while, practiced my translation, and obviously did make up and costuming for that. For Commander, I literally translated it the night it came out, my video was up a few hours later. I did discuss a couple of lines and got feedback from people I trust. I’m still pretty pleased with the end result! If I had the equipment, I would have done it in front of a black background, rather than my room but *shrug* I still like it. Another video I’m pretty proud of is the interview I did with Jules about the improv class that her business, Hypernovas, taught and I took. That was a fun interview, and definitely something I’d recommend you watch, even if you’re not interested in improv.
Looking over my videos, I realized that I’m actually pretty happy with how most of them turned out. The only things that I wanted to do differently were in terms of set-up, like I mentioned for Commander in Chief. I want to have a better set-up for whenever I do something like that again. A great example is my ASL Storytimes. I used Zoom for their virtual background, which worked for the most part. I was just really bothered by the inconsistent background whenever I moved a certain way. It was definitely not designed with signing in mind! I won’t be re-doing them, but that’s one thing I want to do better for future ASL Storytimes. And that’s it for this portion of the post, really. I’m satisfied with my videos overall.
Now, I don’t do resolutions, but goals are a different thing. Let’s talk about my goals for 2021. I’m keeping it fairly broad, no specific numbers or anything. I would recommend you watch CGP Grey’s video about themes, this is where I’m taking most of my inspiration from. He basically says don’t make specific goals like reading x number of books or running x number of miles every day. Choose a theme for the year, like Year of Reading, Year of Health, etc. That way, what the theme means can change as you go throughout the year and things change. Just go watch it. My theme for 2021 is consistency. I have two lists of goals, one is more general, and the other is book stuff and that one doesn’t really fall under the theme, but we’re just going with it okay?
Consistency is something I’ve always struggled with, and want to improve. Remember earlier I mentioned 56 videos, slightly more than one a week? That’s great, but if you look at it month to month, it’s all over the place. Of course, some of that is normal because of Vlogmas and I typically do a bunch of videos in June for Pride month, which is fine! I just would like to have the amount of videos I make a little more even throughout the year. So one of my goals is to make at least one video a week. I’m not doing a specific day, just a video per week. And if I do more, great! Another goal I have is doing more videos regularly for series like ASL Ponderings and Regional Signs. I do have lists of ideas and signs, I just need to actually work on doing those. I also want to continue my new series, Rogue with Rogan, so be sure to drop some ideas for what I can do! Like I mentioned, some of my favorite videos of 2020 were ASL translations of songs and storytimes. I definitely want to do more of those next year.
Regarding Patreon, I currently do weekly vlogs for the $8 and up tier, but I admittedly haven’t been the best at doing those. Part of it is I don’t know what to talk about every week since there’s not much going on, so I’m still figuring that out. Consistency comes in again, I want to actually do these every week. I also want to post more stuff for the other tiers, like behind the scenes which is $5, but I’m not sure what that would be. Again, I need to figure it out. Overall, I want to give my Patrons more, because they are giving me their dollars which I appreciate a lot.
Moving onto book goals! My biggest one is to reduce how many unread books I have on my shelves. [scratches neck] It’s a lot. I counted them, and I have 64, 65 books on the shelf. I’ve had some of these books for a while, and I do want to read them, I just prioritize other books over them. I’d like to cut down on how many books are sitting there. No number or anything, just less. One of the ways I’m going to do that is participating in the Read Yo’ Shelves readathon, which happens in January. It’s a readathon dedicated to getting you to read books on your shelves, which is great. I’m not going to make a formal TBR for it, but I will be using the challenges to guide my picks a bit. A BookTube goal I have is to do more individual book reviews for specific books. In all this time that I’ve been making book videos, I’ve done ONE individual review. Soooo yeah, I would like to do more. Mainly for books that hit my specific identities, like deaf and queer. One book I’ve been wanting to do this with is This Is Kind of an Epic Love Story, and I will finally do it in 2021 at some point. Another thing that I’d like to do is a re-read of a series, but I’m still not sure what format I want to do for that. The series I want to do is Young Wizards by Diane Duane, and it’s currently eleven books long. So I don’t know if I want to do one video of reading the whole thing, or video per book, or what? Let me know what you think.
Side note, I’m really not looking forward to figuring out my December book wrap up, because I read a total of 16 things. Luckily, five of those were from the Queer Lit Readathon, so I won’t have to do those again but still, eleven things! [big sigh]
Alright, I think that covers everything I wanted to talk about before closing out 2020! Let me know what you think of all this. Am I being too ambitious? [chuckle] I want to be clear, I’m definitely not looking at any of this as hard and fast goals. If I don’t achieve these, that’s okay. Like I said, consistency is just a ~theme~ and if I do even a little to push myself in the direction I want to go, I’ll be happy with that. Are you doing resolutions, goals, or a theme? Comment below! Stay safe and healthy, I’ll see you in 2021.
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