I’m at the station waiting for the first train to my first lecture of the second semester.
Since I have some time, I might as well discuss some of my plans for this year.
I think I’m going to start blogging again. I know writing about my life like this might not have much point, but there are a few people who do it, and I enjoy reading their blogs. I’m recording this now in an audio app and will transcribe it later for a blog post.
My plans are to work on all my assignments from the very start and to act in a way that I can write about honestly and publicly on a blog. I’ll probably host it on WordPress because a lot of self-hosted blogs end up getting shut down when their owners stop paying for hosting.
But enough about that. I’ve been watching a lot of Digibro videos, so I think I’m going to take the plunge and try to become another YouTube essayist. I also want to keep writing fiction. Balancing both will be difficult because, as an inexperienced writer and critic, I’ll likely make the same mistakes in my creative writing that I might point out in my criticism.
Basically, I want to start making money through writing this year. I’ll probably start making video essays, and since I can’t do video editing, maybe I’ll use still images and just record myself talking. Unlike last time, when I made unscripted videos, this time I’ll write everything down first, record the audio, and maybe even pay someone from my part-time job earnings to do the editing.
So that’s the plan. The main takeaway is that I want to write every day, starting today. During the first semester, I tried to make friends, but it felt very boring. So instead, I’m going to focus on writing—both fiction and non-fiction—every day. Hopefully, that will keep me from getting bored, as I’ve always ended up bored when I tried writing only one type before.
I’ll be writing about everything. I know it will be hard to find an audience without a specific focus, but since I’m planning to post on YouTube, I think it’s fine. I might even take parts of my blog posts and turn them into short videos.
If I could make about £600 a month, that would be more than enough.
The station is getting busier, so talking to myself like this feels a bit weird. But even if I weren’t speaking aloud, I’d be talking to myself in my head and then forgetting everything I thought about. Maybe that’s why I want to write—to keep a record of my thoughts.
I’m taking the 12:20 train and will be in the city where my uni is at 12:49, which means I’ll probably be late. Actually, just on time, so I won’t have much time to talk with the few people I already know.
I already have a WordPress blog on anime, so I wonder if I should focus on that rather than starting yet another website. I’ve started so many sites and abandoned them as soon as they started getting views. I should just write, write, write. Stop planning and just write. Recording audio isn’t that hard; maybe I could record everything on StreamYard. I don’t know if it works on mobile, but it probably does.
I also shouldn’t start a new YouTube channel or a new blog. It’s very tempting, especially since when blogging and making websites, I often waste time changing how the site looks when people really just care about the content.
[Customer information announcement: Please be advised that ScotRail operates a no-smoking policy in all station areas. This includes the use of…]
I feel very nostalgic for how websites looked around 2013, especially WordPress sites. I had a Neocities site that got a lot of views—probably the most views of anything I’ve made. So I’m wondering if I should post my stuff there as well. Posting in multiple places is a pain, but I think I’ve found a way: I’m going to use a program called Scrivener to manage all my writing, both fiction and non-fiction. It’s a closed-source program with a one-time fee, not a subscription, which is good. It’s relatively stable, with updates mostly being security fixes. I don’t like it when software changes its interface just to attract new users, throwing loyal users under the bus.
Scrivener can convert posts into HTML, so maybe that’s a low-effort way to repost stuff on Neocities. I think it’s easier to get views on Neocities compared to a self-hosted blog or WordPress.com. WordPress.com puts ads on your site, which doesn’t affect me because I use an ad blocker, but readers will see them. I’ll still see a banner at the top saying “Create a new website with WordPress.”
Two trains are arriving at the same time. It’s so noisy. I’m going to be writing and publishing. I do wonder, though, if it would be better to just write about Otaku-related stuff. I especially want to avoid talking about politics, but even saying you want to avoid politics is political, which is annoying. It’s just that I feel it’s useless, and I don’t want to get angry over things I can’t change. I feel like the ruling class keeps us under control partly by making us think about them constantly—it’s a kind of reverse “bread and circuses.” I’ll probably end up talking about politics anyway because I can’t spend my life writing about just one topic.
So, my plan for non-fiction is to just write whatever I feel like in the first person. I want to become a new “human content machine.” You know, before AI, there was the human content machine called Digibro. I’m fully aware of the downsides of writing about whatever I want, but I don’t think I can maintain a good image by keeping my mouth shut and focusing solely on art or something. You don’t usually hear serious artists, light novelists, or anime creators talking about their politics, and when they do, it doesn’t end well—look at what happened to Chiaki Konata when he started talking about actually believing in conspiracies instead of just writing about them in fiction.
I don’t think it’s avoidable for me to make enemies because when I criticise different artworks and people, it’s going to hurt them, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve tried to shut up, but I think it’s better not to pretend to agree when we really don’t. Even if that means giving uneducated opinions, sometimes I just shut up and accept what others say because I feel they know more. But that’s not good because I haven’t really changed my opinion. I know it’s unrealistic to expect to get away with saying and doing whatever you want, like characters in fiction, but I’m going to be more low-inhibition and reveal a lot about myself, no doubt embarrassing myself in the process. There’s no other way to move forward. Writing for me means writing about myself, both in fiction and non-fiction.
I’m also going to try to be more proactive in discussions and maybe invite more people to my YouTube channel because it’s gotten a bit boring since I played it too safe. It’s not about getting more views or attention; it’s just boring to talk about the same things with the same people I already agree with, and it kind of ruins the friendships I’ve built. Of course, this means I’ll have to develop my own opinions in more detail, which I’ll do through writing.
I think there has to be something connecting all the things I talk and write about, and that won’t be easy. I don’t want to become like the “Academic Agent,” who I feel just jumps from book to book, opinion to opinion. Of course, people change over time, and I shouldn’t be surprised when YouTubers I watch change. But I don’t want to be the kind of person who reads a book, forgets about it, and just moves on to the next shiny intellectual thing. I understand how having the same opinions can get boring, but I want to build up a coherent set of opinions rather than just jumping from one thing to another.
I feel like a lot of the anime discussions I’ve had lately just move from one anime to the next. I need to level up my knowledge about anime. I think last year, or even the year before, I created this dichotomy between people who create art and people who criticise it, putting creators above critics because many critics become critics after failing to create art. I haven’t changed my opinion about that—if you could make a good movie, you’d just make it rather than criticising others’ movies. But I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive, especially for a writer, since both criticism and fiction involve writing. So that’s what I’m going to do: write every day and post stuff every day. There’s no point in waiting.
For my fiction, I’m going to work on my long-form story and also write a bunch of short stories, starting with a 1,000-word story, then 2,000 words, and so on. I don’t want to be one of those writers who work on one thing their whole life—though I do want to have a long series that I keep adding to. But I also want to write stories that end because I think there’s a lot to be said for stories with endings. I don’t like how light novels and web novels these days trend toward 40-volume series or 1,000-chapter stories that could have ended much sooner. I feel the romantic comedy boom in light novels died partly because of this. If you drag a romantic comedy like Oregairu on for too long, people get annoyed—they want to see the main couple get together, not have it go on forever.
Anyway, my train has arrived, so I’ll talk more about my life, student life, and other stuff later, after classes.
