Technical difficulties . . . please stand by

It’s been a stressful rough couple of weeks for me. 

For starters: I had 2 vacations planned back to back (not my idea or the original plan) and I had to take my car in for an oil change (overdue) and other general upkeep and maintenance.  Somehow that turned into a $1,200 bill.  Now that’s a lot of money.  My car is an older car (2001) and I’ve been thinking about getting a new one, but I wanted to be debt free (except for my house) before I got a new one.  That bill has pushed that thought back a couple of months or more.

Next: I bought a new mattress and box springs and had the delivery date changed on me 6 times before I finally got them to deliver the goods.  Of course I had to threaten them that I would cancel my order and take my business elsewhere if they weren’t delivered by a specific date.  They were but I only had 3 nights sleeping on that wonder soft fluffy cloud of heaven before I had to head out on vacation.

Vacation #1: My first vacation was stressful because I was traveling to a place I’ve never been and I was responsible for all the expenses.  It was a bit relaxing (almost to the point of boredom) even if I didn’t really get out of the heat.  It was nice to get away from the rat race, but also nice to get home again.

Vacation #2: I was only home for 3 days before I left again on a family reunion.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love my family but being trapped with all of them in one house (there were 16 of us which wasn’t everybody) for 3 days is not the relaxing vacation I like.  There was chaos, crying children, glasses broken, coyotes barking, howling and killing in the middle of the night and my brother snoring like a lumber jack and keeping me up all night.  It’s hard to go from my quiet, peaceful existence to something that resembles more of disaster movie than my idyllic life.  Like I said, I love my family but I’m not use to being around so many temperamental kids.  And don’t even get me started on being trapped in the very small back seat of a pickup truck for almost 6 hours going and almost 8 hours coming back (stupid construction delays). 

When I got home I was very excited to film some more videos and edit them for my channel.  I did.  And then I tried to edit them.

When I went on my first vacation there wasn’t going to be anyone home so I took all those valuables that I didn’t want stolen and secured them elsewhere so they’d be safe while I was gone and house was empty.  Unfortunately, when stashing my audio mixer, the settings got messed up.  For some reason I didn’t check them too carefully (I only checked the volume setting) and went and recorded a couple of videos.  I don’t know why I didn’t even do a mic check before recording.  I guess being on vacation really fried my brain.

When I listened to the audio recording while syncing up the files I realized how bad it was.  Oh shit!  I didn’t know what went wrong and I didn’t know how to fix it.  I did a lot of research trying to find a way to minimize the damage (there was no way I would be able to fix it completely) and I learned a lot . . . and learned that there is still a LOT more that I don’t know.  All of the videos I posted this week had bad audio.  Hopefully I know enough now to fix the problem with the things that I want to film this weekend.  If not, well I’ll have to think of something else.

Spring must be the season of technical difficulties.  I was having issue with the audio and gameplay tracks getting out of sync the longer the video was.  Then there was the gameplay audio was getting out of sync from the gameplay video even though they were on the same track.  None of these problems were evident while playing, but only were noticeable once I was editing.  It made things very frustrating.  I even changed up my posting schedule to give myself more time to editing some of the more difficult files.  I learned a lot then too.

To fix those problems I had to end up uninstalling both Audacity and Elgato and reinstalling them.  Once I did that, things were back to normal.  And that was when I went on vacation and I came back to another set of issues.  It is so frustrating because there are so many things I want to do with my YouTube channel and other things that I just don’t have time for because I’m dealing with all this crap.  I’ve been posting videos for 2 years now and it really doesn’t seem that long, but I also think I should be further along in my plan than where I am at now at this point. 

It also doesn’t help that I don’t have any support in what I’m doing.  My family thinks it’s a waste of my time and just don’t understand that I enjoying do things like this.  My friends just want to play games and aren’t interesting in making content with me.  It doesn’t really matter though because I’m going to continue to keep doing what I love whether anyone supports me or watches my videos.  The whole point of this was to finish games and have fun.  While I am finishing games (I’m almost done with 2 more that might be done before the end of the month), I’m really not having a lot of fun right now.  Things will get better.  Whatever else goes wrong I’ll figure out how to fix and I will move on.  So if you watch my channel and notice technical difficulties . . . please stand by.