Hello, I’m Rogan and… Well. It’s been a while! Welcome back. To those people who still follow me, and still support me, I appreciate y’all SO much!! Today, I wanted to talk a little about behind the scenes, both in terms of YouTube and personal life, just to update you on what’s been going on with me.
By the way, if you’re a Patron, you will already have all of this info, with more details too. Just so you know, link below!
First, I want to repeat something I’ve said before on this channel. I’ve gotten a couple comments here and there, either public or in private messages, saying in a rude way, “Hey, why don’t you post anymore?” Or “You should post more/less of this or that.” To be blunt, I owe my audience nothing. This is my platform, and I will do what I want with it. I will post what content I want to make, when I want to or am able to. I want to be clear, I do appreciate when people say they like this particular content and would like to see more, or give me some ideas, but when it’s said in a way that demands I do more or less, no. I do try to be conscious of whether I’m posting a lot of one type of content, but sometimes that’s just how it happens. You are not required to watch all of my content, just what you’re interested in. If you don’t like what I’m doing, you don’t have to watch or subscribe. That’s all. Moving on.
You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much this year, it’s been pretty busy work wise and personally. At the start of the year, my partner and I celebrated our one-year anniversary at Tillamook. I was involved in a Short Play Festival, and it’s supposed to be streaming at some point. I’ll share that once it’s available! Then there was some quiet before traveling a lot for work, that was TIRING but a lot of fun. My partner’s family came visiting for a while at the start of summer, and I met them for the first time. It went well, I think! Interpreting work has been fairly quiet, but that feels pretty typical for the summer, and it should start picking up again once people are done with vacations and such. In July, I had something happening every weekend, and most of it was the whole weekend! July was also my birthday month, so I was just enjoying that before leaving my twenties. I went camping twice in one month, which was enjoyable but whew. Both trips were with large groups, which was fun but not exactly fully relaxing. I think I need to do a camping trip where it’s like MAX five people or something. I also participated in two online streams for D&D – a charity stream in March with Games for Change, and a one-shot in July with Role D5 for Disability Pride Month. Both were with great groups, and fantastic interpreters! They’re both available online to watch, I will add the links at the end of this post. Another big thing that you may have noticed if you’re a long-time follower, I have a sleeve tattoo now! I realized that even though I started it in April, it wasn’t visible in my last video yet because my shirt sleeve covered it. I will make a video giving you a tour of this sleeve, and show the other two I have. Speaking of making videos…
Let’s talk YouTube. This year so far, I’ve posted only three videos – a big book wrap up, an overview of the OGL and some RPGs, and an announcement/TBR for the Queer Lit Readathon. They’ll all be linked below. I’ve obviously fallen very behind on my book wrap ups, and I’m figuring out how to best approach it because trying to wrap up all of the books I’ve read so far this year is just asking for trouble. I might just do my favorites, and list the rest. Let me know if you have any thoughts on that.
Generally speaking, I’m not entirely sure why I’ve haven’t been posting videos. Sure, I’ve been busy, but I’ve also had plenty of time to work on videos. My first thought goes to motivation, because sometimes I think about the process of making a video and go, ooh, I don’t know if I have the mental energy for that. I will say part of that is I script most of my videos now, so that’s an extra step I do before turning on a camera. The reason for that is in the end, scripts take out a lot of mental load when I’m editing the final video, and doing captions. When I’m editing, I know which take I was happy with and I can just jump to and cut that take. I won’t have to watch everything and piece together what I was happy with, and figure out what was “bad.” Then when I go into captioning, I only have to do minor tweaks to the English, rather than translating from scratch. This may sound odd, but I do somewhat think in both ASL and English when I type my scripts. If I type a sentence in English, my brain will be also thinking about how I sign it, and if it’s clunky in either language, it gets cut or edited. If I’m doing a list, I’ll be visualizing it in ASL first, and figuring out how I would write it to be clear in English. So yeah, it might be a little extra work upfront, but when it all comes together, I feel like that makes it easier for my workflow. It’s just getting over that first hurdle of having a script to use!
Another thing I think I sometimes get stuck on is what to make next, because I do have a whole list of ideas! Some of them are just a long process, so I put them off. Some of them are the same category as a recent video, so I save it to spread out a bit. Then I just end up with things that I do want to do, just not right now or don’t have the right material for. Eh, the life of a content creator. I will say that I have been doing this for nine years now, as of this month. Not consistently, obviously, but I started in 2014 while in college, and it’s certainly changed a lot since! It’ll definitely keep changing. I started this out as a vlog style channel, then it slowly transitioned into educational content. Now it’s mostly books and geeky things, with a sprinkling of education. I am always open to hearing what people would like to see me talk about, it is helpful! Of course, there’s no guarantee I will make a video, and if that’s the case, I might reply to the comment instead. It all depends.
Alright, I think that’s all I wanted to talk about today. I just wanted to say hey and give you some idea of where I’ve been this past year, and some insight into what YouTube is like for me right now. Let me know if you have any questions or just want to chat about something in the comments! Thank you for still being here, I appreciate y’all. Bye.
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Links mentioned
D&D Streams – Games for Change Part 1: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1769163705?collection=faNaO1ajTRd0Ag
Part 2: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1769164208?collection=faNaO1ajTRd0Ag
Role D5: https://youtu.be/N_aROuIRNFk
YouTube videos this year
Second half of 2022 books: https://youtu.be/B-1YucJOvsk
OGL and alternative RPGS: https://youtu.be/9lHqUgFIFok
Queer Lit Readathon Announcement/TBR: https://youtu.be/CuLGwoWRTG4