Saturday, June 9, 2018

Why Battery Life Sucks: Video and notes

I actually put down, in writing, right after the last video went up that I was hoping there would be no needless delays for this one. That... didn't happen. There were a lot of needless delays, but better late than never.


So, miscellaneous notes time:


  • This video started so long ago that I wasn't even thinking this could be a video - I think it was some sort of article, but I never went that far down that line before I started working on it in the context of a video
  • Weird special thanks to Red Velvet - I looped their songs more times than I can count while working on this script. No, I'm not looking it up in Google Play to give you the answer - I listen to them so much anyway I wouldn't have a clue how to start calculating. 
  • The audio on this was a nightmare - had the wrong gain on the microphone and was unable to re-record, so I did my best. Apologies if it's a bit of a mess. 
  • I wrote "Good luck selling that flagship phone", referring to selling a slower phone for the sake of battery, well before the public Apple fiasco with slowing down old phones for the sake of the battery. Not one to pass up a perfect opportunity, I changed it to "Good luck selling that iPhone", which sounds better. And by the time I actually got the video done, it was a story everyone had long forgotten. Funny how all that works. 
  • I thought of the clock illustration of these concepts way too late in the process of working on the video. If I had the chance to do the whole animation over, I would have made that first, so the narration would be timed to the animation, rather than the other way around. 

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

The Winter of Consistency

I’m a big follower of CGPGrey, which should be obvious if you compare our style of videos (I’m searching to find what makes my voice different, I promise).

The most recent episode of his podcast Cortex talks about “themes” for the year, which made something click in my head:

I’ve been looking for this and didn’t know that I needed it.

I’m going for a season (vague as it is) rather than a year because a year is a long time to go.

I’m going for the Winter of Consistency.

My problem is I’m far too likely to be lazy or tired or something, causing me to fall behind and feel bad, which starts a feedback loop that causes a lot of damage.

So, I’m taking three ideas that I’ve had in mind and making them concrete. These aren’t just personal things: this is going to have an effect on you if you’re reading this, even if the effects are indirect. It may not show up right away, but it’ll be there eventually.

Where I’m looking for consistency:

1) Health. My main goal is just to get enough steps every day. If I get that, I’ll consider it done. This will have an indirect effect, since hopefully better health will correspond to more energy, which is help I’ll need when I get to #3.
2) Reading. The more I read, the more ideas I have in my head that I can combine in ways to make something worth writing about. I’m trying to do more than just scrolling through Reddit and Twitter. I already get a lot of information from podcasts and audiobooks, but more reading with my eyes rather than ears can be a good thing. The goal is an hour a day, either books or articles pulled out specifically for research purposes.
3) Working. The biggest problem is that I just don’t spend enough time doing focused work. I can have all the ideas in the world, but they’re worthless if I don’t spend time executing on the idea. All I’m looking for is at least an hour a day actively moving a project forward; usually that will be writing, but it can be many different things, so long as I’m closer to completion at the end than I was at the beginning.

So, help me be accountable for this. I’m looking to do this every day - not the end of the world if I miss one, but I’m going to make every reasonable effort to do so. Turning these vague ideas of what I should be doing into habits, hopefully to turn what would otherwise be lazy or useless days into at least something. There may not be an immediate increase in output, but the point is just to get going.

You have to start somewhere.