Saturday, October 16, 2021
7:45 a.m. Green Guest House
Mae Sot, Thailand
My idea to pick up my vaccine certificate on a later date and therefore leave for Kamphaeng Phet on a later date is looking more and more like genius. My original plan was to leave this morning; to leave right now in fact. But guess what is happening right now? Guess what has been happening for the entire night? Rain, of course. I was awake several times during the night, as usual, and each time, I woke up to the sound of rain. It has been non-stop for the entire night, and it is still raining now. This is not the kind of day for enjoying a scooter ride through the Thai countryside. This is the type of day to be inside, drinking coffee, absorbed in technology, as I am once again.
Yesterday, I finally finished editing the second video of my scooter trip to Tak City. I couldn’t believe how long it took me to do that. Of course, it was partially or largely my own fault. I couldn’t help myself, and I decided to make editing that video the subject of a series of Kinemaster Learning Curve videos. I ended up making three one-hour tutorial videos about that process. And that absorbed much more of my time than I expected or planned. And even when the final edit of the video was complete, I was unable to export it because I didn’t have enough available memory on my phone. I had to copy a bunch of old files from my phone to an external hard drive, and that took an astonishingly long time. The final export also took much longer than expected. One of my many technical puzzles is that the video export process pauses and stops every time the phone screen times out. So, I can’t just export the video and then leave the phone for two hours to finish the job. Every ten minutes, the phone goes to sleep and locks. And that automatically stops the video export. So I have to monitor the phone for the entire two hours and constantly touch the screen to keep it awake. And I’ve looked and I’ve looked and I’ve looked, and I can’t find any way to stop the phone from going to sleep. I can set the timeout period to a maximum of ten minutes. And that’s it. There is no “Always On” setting. There is no “Never” setting for the phone shutdown to occur. I assume I’m being a dummy and I’m missing something obvious. But right now, the video export ends up taking far longer than it should because it pauses every time the phone screen turns off. I can’t just let the phone quietly work in the background while I do something else.
It ended up taking most of yesterday evening just to do that. And then I had to upload the file to YouTube. I started that process when I went to sleep, and when I woke up this morning it STILL wasn’t done. It just finished a few minutes ago, and now I have to create the thumbnail and write the description and the tags and do all those other things. Editing, exporting, and uploading a YouTube video is a long process.
I still have several videos from my Tak City trip that I haven’t even begun to edit. I shot a video of a walk to the pedestrian bridge. I also shot a kind of talking video over breakfast the next morning at the hotel’s restaurant. I tried to shoot a vlog in the Tak City night market that night, but that was a disaster and I gave up on it. Then I shot a video about my ride from Tak City back to Mae Sot. That might have to be divided into two videos – one breakfast setup video and one actual journey video. We’ll see. So, I still have at least three videos to complete from that trip that actually ended long ago. Apparently, I still have not mastered an efficient video-editing system.
I’d love to zoom through all three videos and finish them all today, but I know THAT isn’t going to happen. I’d also like to edit a couple of Learning Curve videos for the Pocket 2. I have the raw video for the buttons video and now the gimbal mode video. Though I might redo the gimbal video just by reading the script above. I like how I organized my thoughts when I wrote them down. It sounds better to me than what I ended up saying on camera yesterday.
I had another kind of funny video experience yesterday. My friend Brett Hall sent me a special gadget to be used with my Pocket 2 camera. And it came in the mail late yesterday afternoon. I was exhausted by that point in the day, but I wanted to open this package on camera and perhaps make an unboxing video about the exciting gadget it contained. I was pretty excited about this gadget, so I wanted to do it.
So, I set up a camera here inside my guest house room. And I went through a big buildup about how excited I was about the gadget in the envelope. And then when I finally got around to opening the package, I realized, to my dismay, that the sellers had sent the wrong item. Some of it was right. But the item I was most excited about was a small Pocket 2 mount. But the Lazada senders sent a smartphone mount instead. That was so funny, and so disappointing. I certainly lost my interest in editing that video. Without the star item being in the envelope, there wasn’t much point.
At some point yesterday while I was waiting for my final video to be exported, I watched the latest episode of Foundation. This was episode five. It was a bit disappointing, to be honest. The show had to back up and pick up where it left off with the story of the main character it had introduced right at the beginning. And they decided to do that by refreshing our memory and retelling her origin story. And they didn’t really need to do that. I had all this information from the first episode already. And it had been told so well. Now they retold that story but from a different perspective, and it felt unnecessary. It was still well-done, but I didn’t need it. It didn’t push the story forward. It was just telling me things and showing me things I already knew and felt I had already seen. There was also nothing about Empire, Brother Dawn, Brother Day, Brother Dusk, and the android Demerzel. Their story fascinates me the most, and they did not appear in this episode at all. Instead, the Empire was represented by a single ship that had been sent to investigate events on Terminus. And that disappointed me because the characters on that ship were presented as arrogant and entitled and careless and overconfident. I had developed a sense of quiet awe at the power of the Empire and its technology. And in this episode, it was represented by this rather ordinary crew and vulnerable ship. It brought them down from godlike to simply flawed human. But I still enjoyed the episode. It felt like a bridge episode. It was just getting us from the first part of the story to the next. But it still was enjoyable, and I’m sure to watch it again.
I also watched the first episode of a new series called Chucky. I won’t make any grandiose claims about this show. If anyone has seen the trailer or if anyone has seen any of the movies, they know exactly what it is. But I actually found the trailer for the series quite fun. I love a good revenge story. And it appeared that our main character in the show was the typical passive victim of high school bullying and abusive relatives. And then Chucky comes into his life, and Chucky is only too willing to fight back on his behalf and carve up some bullies. I love that setup. You know that Chucky is evil and is the bad guy. In the movies, they approach the story as a pretty basic supernatural slasher. Chucky is evil and needs to be stopped or killed. But this TV show tosses in a twist with the idea that Chucky helps out this kid by fighting back against the bullies. So then you are left wondering how to feel about Chucky. Sure, you don’t want an evil doll to kill a bunch of people, but you also cheer when the bullies get their comeuppance.
And I honestly got a huge kick out of the first episode. It was a lot of fun. They leaned hard into the comedy and camp AND into the horror. The acting was good. I love the characters. It’s not taking itself too seriously. Production values are extremely high, I thought. The show looked great. I’ll definitely be tuning in to see later episodes. The first episode set a high bar for me, so we’ll see if they can keep it up.
Once again, I can feel that it is time to start my day. Time to set the events of yesterday aside and begin the events of today. It’s still raining outside, so I feel pretty good about how things turned out with rescheduling my trip to Kamphaeng Phet. I’ve been doing some more reading about the city, the historical park, and Thai history in general, so I’m getting excited. I got some gas yesterday at one point, so the scooter is fully gassed up and ready to go. I’ll aim for Monday or Tuesday morning for my departure. And I think I am going to be super casual about it and just ride to Tak and spend the night there. I could spend another day in Tak, or I could then just take a slow and leisurely ride to Kamphaeng Phet. In an odd coincidence, Brett Hall just posted a video on his YouTube channel (Brett and Sam, Thailand) chronicling his visit to the waterfalls in Kamphaeng Phet Province. I don’t know if he mentioned it in his video, but I think he drove there in his car, and he did the trip in one day. He drove from Sam Ngao to the waterfalls and then drove all the way home again covering something like 330 kilometers. I know that specifically because he included a Relive map of his trip.
There appear to be two competing low budget guest houses in Kamphaeng Phet. A place called P Resort gets mentioned a lot. It is listed on Google Maps as a 2-star informal hotel with free breakfast. They might as well have just called it “Perfect for Doug Guest House.” The other one is called Three J Guesthouse. It is also listed as 2-star, and Google Maps proclaims it to be a “low-key budget hotel with bike rentals.” Nothing wrong with that either. Considering my past life, a hotel having any star rating at all is something special. My usual accommodation from the past would not rise to the level of even a single star.
However, I have noticed a trend lately that the extreme low budget end of accommodation might not be the best value anymore. You have to consider what you get with your room. The SOHO Boutique Hotel in Tak, for example, is more expensive than the low budget Dome Thong Residence Hotel in Tak. The Dome Thong (in addition to its awesome name) costs only $8 US per night. The SOHO Boutique might cost $25 per night. But at the SOHO, you would get so much more, including an amazing breakfast at the Awake Owl cafe. A meal like that can get me through an entire day without having to eat again. So, sometimes, mid-range is better value than low budget. Then again, I’m so out-of-touch that I still think of $8/night as expensive. My brain is still stuck in the days of Ethiopia and Ecuador when my rooms cost $1 a night and stuck in other places when the maximum I’d pay was about $5/night.
Anyway, the point is that there appear to be lots of great options in Kamphaeng Phet for a place to stay. In addition to those low budget offerings, there are many other more expensive places.
I had one last thought to record before I move on to start my day. And that is that I had this perhaps crazy idea to start yet another YouTube channel. And, among other things, I would post this journal to that channel. The idea would be to keep a written journal like this, as I always do anyway. But rather than have all these thoughts and ideas go to waste, I could then sit down in front of a camera and read the journal aloud. I was thinking of calling this channel “Planet Doug Behind the Scenes”.
I might go on a scooter trip to a place like Kamphaeng Phet. And I might record the basic events of that trip on video. And I would post those videos to Planet Doug. But there is so much more going on during a trip like that. There is all the “Behind the Scenes” activity. I think of it a bit like how it used to be common for movies to have a “making of” featurette to go along with the movie. I’d watch the movie and enjoy it. And then I’d watch the documentary feature of how they made the movie. Reading from my journal would give the behind-the-scenes perspective on that trip with much more detail.
Long ago, I played around for a while with recording a type of journal on video in the morning. But that didn’t work in the end. It takes too long to physically record a journal on video, and the end product isn’t satisfying. I enjoy writing a journal more. But why not combine them? I could write a journal entry as I always do, and then read it aloud on video later on. I like the idea.
One last, last thought: While editing the Planet Doug video yesterday, I came across a section where I mentioned the song “Take Me to the River” by Talking Heads. And that, of course, sent me directly to YouTube, and I spent a solid two hours lost in enjoying videos of their live performances and listening to their songs. I have Talking Heads playing right now as I type this. For me, Talking Heads is one of those bands that makes me wonder why the world needs any more music. I’ve got Talking Heads and all the other bands from the eighties and nineties. So, personally, I’m good. I don’t even need more music in my life. It wouldn’t matter to me if no new music was ever made.