Sunday, November 21, 2021
5:55 a.m. Green Guest House
Mae Sot, Thailand
The clock is ticking. The countdown is underway to the moment I hop on the scooter and ride away from Mae Sot. Of course, I will be coming back to Mae Sot one more time. It could be just to drop off the scooter. It could be to get yet another visa extension. But the plan is to definitely give up this room at the Green Guest House for the month of December. And to that end, I’ve been very busy the last couple of days getting organized. I seem to have the habit of making everything much more complicated than it needs to be. And that habit has been in full force this past week. The simplest things, such as clearing out the memory of a hard drive and transferring the contents to a different drive turns into a project that lasts two days. I’m still not even done with that task. Right now, the final video backups on that hard drive are being copied over to my phone. And then I still have to recopy those video files from the phone over to another hard drive. To be fair, it’s not entirely my fault. The problem here is that the MacBook won’t read the first hard drive. This is the 500 GB physical hard drive that came out of my old broken laptop. I bought a simple enclosure for it, and it will connect to my phones without an issue. But it won’t connect to the MacBook. I just get a message saying it can’t be read by the Mac. So I am copying all the contents onto a different portable drive. Then I will reformat this drive on the Mac and see if that fixes the problem. But I have to do this through my phone. And that’s why this project has taken so long. Copying anything to my phone takes a long time. Copying to the memory card in my phone can take hours. Copying to the phone’s internal memory is significantly faster, but I didn’t have much memory available there to use. The phone has 256 GB of internal memory, but I had somehow filled most of that up. Therefore, the project of copying files from the old portable drive led to the related project of clearing up memory on the phone. And that meant finding new homes for all the stuff that was on the phone. A lot of the memory was taken up with photographs and screenshots and other YouTube-related items from the last year. I don’t have a final number, but I think I had over ten thousand photographs to deal with. I probably didn’t need to save all of them. I think I already have copies of them uploaded to both SmugMug and Flickr online. But I like to be thorough, and so I thought that I might as well just create a couple of big galleries on SmugMug and upload them all there for safekeeping. You never know when I might decide I want to use this or that photograph. So I’m leery of ever deleting anything. And as usual, my decision-making brain assumed that I could just hit a couple of buttons and upload those thousands of pictures in big chunks and I’d be done in no time. And, as usual, my decision-making brain was wrong. It took all of yesterday and some of the day before that. My phone has been working like crazy uploading all those photographs. And then issues always crop up. The Internet will go down and the upload job will be cancelled and then I have to figure out what has been uploaded and what hasn’t and then restart the whole thing again and again. And that puts a big strain on your brain. And so, as usual, I’m exhausted and my poor brain is worn out. I feel like I’ve been working very hard for a very long time. And yet, I couldn’t really say what exactly I’ve accomplished that is of any importance at all. A funny thing is that I’ve been doing this my entire life. And I always think the same thing. I always think that this crazy project is something that I just have to do once. I just have to do this one silly thing that will take hours or days or weeks or even months, and THEN I will be fully organized. And from THAT point and for the rest of my life, I will be fully organized, and I will never have to do it again. My life will be smooth, efficient sailing from that point forward. I’ll KNOW that this project is silly and ridiculous, but I’ll do it anyway because I tell myself it is a one-off project. I just have to do this one thing and then I’ll be organized and things will get better. Yet, after I finish that insanely time-consuming project, I find myself embarking on the next one. And the next. I’m also pretty sure that no one else ever does the crazy things that I do. Yet, it feels like I have to do them. Something weird is going on here. Why do I always have these crazy projects that I feel I MUST do when no one else ever seems to feel the need to do them?
Part of the problem for me is that my technology is often not quite right. In this case, I’m futzing around with a 500-GB portable drive that I salvaged out of a cheap, broken laptop. I should have just tossed the thing and bought a brand new one. BUT at the time that hard drive still contained a ton of important files from my old laptop. I wasn’t able to save any of those files because the laptop died suddenly. And then when I removed the hard drive, it turned out to be corrupted in some odd way. I’m sure everyone else on the planet would just copy all the old files from their laptop’s old drive and then be finished. But it never works out like that for me. MY laptop’s hard drive was corrupted. Of course it was. And despite visiting computer shops in Mae Sot a dozen times, no one was ever able to fix it. And I had to find my own way to repair it by endless research online and by testing every possible piece of repair software and new type of cable.
Anyway, I guess I’m just saying that it isn’t 100% always my fault. I do have a habit of making things difficult for myself. But the universe also has a hand in it, and circumstances always seem to be such that nothing ever works the way it is supposed to. None of this work would have been necessary if I could have just plugged the hard drive into this Mac and copied the files. But the Mac can’t read this particular hard drive. It can read all my other hard drives. But, for whatever reason, it can’t read this one. And I’ll never know why or why not.
I’m also continuing to sort through my gear. In a way, my most recent trips have already taken care of much of that. On my trips to Sam Ngao, Tak City, Kamphaeng Phet and Sukhothai, I packed my backpack such that I had absolutely everything with me that I needed. If circumstances had been that I wasn’t able to return to Mae Sot and to this room at the guest house, I would have been just fine. I had everything with me that I technically needed. So, those trips got me pre-packing, and I’ve already done most of the hard work. The only difference is that I have a bunch of stuff in this room that won’t be coming with me permanently. And I have a couple of things to add to my backpack, such as the Panasonic G85, its two lenses, and its various filters and accessories. That will add considerable bulk and weight to my backpack, but it should be fine for the scooter. However, I don’t really even need to take it with me for the trip to the north. I’m putting together (as I always do) a box of stuff that I will be leaving behind in Mae Sot. I could put the G85 in that box and leave it here and pick it up when I come back in five or six weeks. But I would like to take it with me, I think. Despite its flaws, it is a good camera. It’s a solid workhorse, and I like to have it with me.
It sounds like all of this organizing is the only thing I’ve been doing, but, in fact, the majority of my time has been spent working on videos about my trips to Kamphaeng Phet and Sukhothai. As usual, I’m not making as much progress with that as I’d like. I’m way behind. And I guess that is understandable. I still treated my YouTube videos as a kind of daily journal during those trips. And sometimes I would even take that daily journal and divide it up into several separate video experiences. And if each video is an hour long, it’s no surprise that I haven’t been able to find the time to edit and post them. No one could. There just aren’t enough hours in a normal day. Even if I did nothing but make YouTube videos and I never slept, I couldn’t do it. No one could. So I don’t even know why I’m even trying. I just can’t seem to help myself, I guess.
In any event, I currently find myself working on videos from my very first days in Kamphaeng Phet. And that trip took place a month ago. And I have a set of raw videos for every single day since then. I have a massive backlog of videos that I want to complete. My decision-making brain assumes, again, that I can just wake up on any particular day and knock off five of these videos. And then if I do that three days in a row, I’ll be all caught up. But then in real life, I will work for the entire day on just one video and still not be finished. Editing one video takes a full two days to complete. And that’s with doing nothing else. I’m not sure that I’ve even been outside this room since I returned to Mae Sot. I’m like a ghost or vampire. I rarely see the outside world. And even with all that work, I still make no progress. And if I happened to be travelling every day and having new experiences, as I hope to be doing ten days from now, there is no way I can keep up. Something has to change.
On the positive side, I don’t really mind. I really enjoy working on the videos and doing all this stuff. It would just be nice to be a bit faster and more efficient. Of course, it would also be nice if I ended up making videos that were actually entertaining and that people wanted to watch. That’s another trick I haven’t quite mastered yet either. I noticed the other day that Paddy Doyle recently visited both Kamphaeng Phet and Sukhothai and posted videos about them. I haven’t had the time to watch any YouTube videos from anyone lately, so I haven’t watched them. I’m actually very interested to see Paddy Doyle’s videos about those places. I’m quite familiar with both places now, and it will be fun to see them through his eyes and his camera lens. But I’m going to wait until I’m finished with all my videos, and then I will watch his. The funny thing is that he made just one video about Kamphaeng Phet, and that video is eighteen minutes long. By the time the dust settles on my Kamphaeng Phet experience, I will have made at least ten YouTube videos. And the total time will probably be around seven or eight hours. On top of that, I have all the Relive videos – another ten of those. And that’s just Kamphaeng Phet. I shot four full videos about just GOING to Kamphaeng Phet. Clearly, the insanity runs deep in my veins.
Paddy Doyle’s experience of Sukhothai also amounts to just one eighteen-minute video. I haven’t even gotten close to editing any of my Sukhothai video. But, just going over it in my head, I see that I will have five hour-long videos from my Sukhothai trip plus all the Relive videos. And I’ve been keeping up with my little project to record video readings of this journal. Those videos don’t take nearly as long to edit and post, but they still require time. Anyway, my video experience of historical Kamphaeng Phet and Sukhothai will end up being remarkably different from Paddy Doyle’s. His total video record of his experience will amount to a bit more than thirty minutes total. Mine will approach fifteen hours. It will be fun to finally finish all my videos and then watch his videos to see how it is supposed to be done. People actually watch and enjoy Paddy Doyle’s videos. Not so much with mine.
In the same vein, I’ve been watching daily vlog videos from a Swedish guy named Peter Lindgren. He is a successful tech reviewer on YouTube. He has over half a million subscribers on his tech channel, and he is quite professional and has high production values. I heard him say at one point that he makes about $3,500 US per month from his tech channel. Then he decided to start a vlog channel. He started the vlog channel about a year ago, but then he got serious about it perhaps five months ago, and then he really started focusing on it about two months ago. He has nearly 8,000 subscribers on the vlog channel, and he says he makes about $450 US a month with the vlogs.
He talks a lot in his vlogs about the actual process of making a vlog. And he freely admits to copying Casey Neistat. In fact, his videos struck me as exact duplicates of Casey Neistat vlogs long before I heard him talk about that. He does all the same things: opens with a timelapse; includes drone shots; uses the same type of music; puts together quick cuts of opening doors, getting coffee, getting in the car, packing bags; focuses heavily on his studio; always builds things in the studio with lots of video of the tools; films lots of organizing in the studio; includes occasional shots of his cute kid; talks to the camera in the same way; sets up the camera and leaves it there and then does things as if someone is filming him and then goes back and retrieves the camera; uses clickbait titles; opens boxes roughly. He does all the things that Casey Neistat did except that he doesn’t wear dark sunglasses all the time. And he freely admits that he does all these things because they work. The vlogs end up fun and easygoing and entertaining. And he gets lots of viewers, and these viewers watch most of the video. It’s a formula that works. It has a proven track record.
As I said, I have been watching his vlogs, and I enjoy them. They’re well done. Very professional. Yet, I do have some thoughts. Just as with Casey Neistat vlogs, after I’ve watched one, I’m not sure I can even say what they were about. It’s just a bunch of rapid jump-cut clips with a time-lapse, some beautiful drone footage, some music, and a few moments when he pops into frame and says something. And he works out a lot. He used to be a bodybuilder, and he still works out all the time and films it a lot. And he sometimes seems to try way too hard. He’s got this thing going on with Nerf guns and Nerf gun battles, and it feels awkward to me, like he is trying to inject some fun into his vlogs, but it feels fake and artificial. It doesn’t seem to come from the heart.
Anyway, I end up watching his vlogs, and I start thinking that THAT is what I should be doing. He clearly approaches the video as a video, for example. He is thinking the entire time about shooting a video that will be fun for someone to watch. I don’t do that at all. I think in terms of just doing whatever I want to do while capturing the experience on video as a kind of journal. I don’t even think of it as a visual thing most of the time. His vlogs are all about the visual. And that’s a good thing, since video is a visual medium. And the videos he makes are fun to watch. Yet, when he talks about the process, I can’t help but feel like it’s all fake. He does all these things in a certain way because it would look cool on the video, not because that’s how he wanted to do it. He made one video talking about how he edits his videos. And he demonstrated this by crushing some boxes. And he showed how he would set up the shots beforehand. He showed where he would put the camera and how he would step on the box. And then he’d move the camera to a new spot and step on another box. Then he’d move the camera again. And again. I was exhausted just watching him go through the process. Yes, the few seconds of video of him crushing boxes was well-edited and entertaining to watch. But it wasn’t real in any way. It was not a video of him crushing boxes in his normal life. It was a little Pixar short – a scripted film about someone crushing boxes. I don’t say that as a criticism. I’m just saying that because even though I feel like I should emulate these techniques, I instantly realize that I can’t. I don’t approach video in that way. My natural perspective is not to do something that will look good on video. My natural perspective is to just have a camera running while I do whatever I would normally do in exactly the way I would normally do it. And that’s how I end up with hour-long videos about my days.
In pop culture news, I watched the new movie Dune. I’m a little bit torn about what to say about it. It’s a pretty popular film and it has been largely well-received by critics and by viewers. And when I read the positive reviews and watch the glowing reviews on YouTube, I can understand what they’re saying. Yet, overall, I wasn’t impressed. It’s not a movie I would strongly recommend to anyone. If you want to watch it, go ahead. You’ll probably enjoy it. But I don’t think it is essential viewing. It looks cool. There’s no question about that. The visuals and cinematography are great. Yet, even that felt lacking to me in an odd way. The thing is that I’m currently absorbed in the TV series Foundation. For Dune to truly impress me as a movie, it would have to be superior to a TV series like Foundation. But, for me, it is the opposite. The visuals and the technology and the world-building in Foundation has blown me away. My mind is blown. And Dune looks kind of meh and old-fashioned by comparison.
Another problem is that I’m so familiar with the story in Dune. I’ve read the book multiple times. And I’ve seen the 1984 version of Dune multiple times. And I love them both. The scenes in both the book and the 1984 film are burned deep into my brain. And as I watched the 2021 Dune, I was kind of just anticipating each of these scenes. I knew exactly which scene was coming next. I knew exactly what would happen in each scene. And I ended up watching the movie just as a series of moments that I know better than I know the events of my own life. And in the 2021 film, I was kind of underwhelmed by them. As I watched it, I just kept thinking about how I’d much rather be rewatching the 1984 version. I know it has flaws, even glaring flaws. But the movie made such a big impression on me, and I love it to this day.
The 2021 film also suffers because it is just a part of the story. It is Part One. And the point they chose at which to end this film felt weird. It felt unsatisfying. It felt like the story wasn’t over. The whole movie felt slow to me and it felt rushed at the same time. I had this sense of the struggle the filmmakers faced to take that huge story and all the set pieces and jam it all into a movie. I never had that feeling about the 1984 version. It felt somewhat complete. Of course, the 1984 version isn’t nearly as polished or professional or cinematic as the 2021 version. It is campy and cartoony in a way. But it works for me. And the 2021 version just didn’t work. I knew what was important about each character and what was important about each scene, but it didn’t feel like the movie was telling me any of that. I just knew it already from the book and previous film. And the 2021 film just seemed to be a pale imitation of the story that was there. Anyway, I wasn’t that impressed. These days, I think the bar is set very low for blockbusters. I think I have become accustomed to blockbusters being quite bad. They make tons of money and are very popular around the world because of their epic scale, but they’re generally bad movies. And so, for a blockbuster to get high praise from critics, it really just has to NOT be terrible. If it’s not actually terrible, it gets praised like it is a masterpiece. Expectations are low for blockbusters these days.
I’m also watching the newest season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I didn’t even know there was a new season until I started seeing clips popping up on YouTube. And I’ve seen every episode of Curb and every clip on YouTube, so I was puzzled as to how I was seeing clips that felt new. Then I realized that these clips were from episodes that were airing right now. I’m enjoying them, of course. It’s a good show, and I can relate strongly to Larry David’s epic struggles with the modern world. I do have a problem with a couple of things. One problem is the same as with all the seasons of Curb. I’ve never liked the improv nature of it. The actors are clearly not given a script. They are just told what the situation is, and then they start talking. And they usually end up screaming at Larry in anger, and the two of them start shouting back and forth. And I get it. That’s the show. But it often feels wrong to me. The anger comes too quickly. It’s too much, too fast. And it’s weird. I would be happier if they took the time to write out a full script and get the scene right. Then they could add improv to the polished script. But to do full improv never feels right to me.
The other problem I have is that in later seasons, like this one, the situations Larry finds himself in get too big. I like the earlier episodes when Larry got in trouble for some small thing he did, some foible, some honest statement he made. And, of course, Larry is always right. That’s what was great about the show and the storyline. I always agree with Larry. He didn’t really do anything wrong or say anything wrong. But everyone around him gets upset.
But in later seasons, and in this season, the situations get so big that it starts to feel detached from reality. It doesn’t feel grounded anymore. There is an ongoing storyline, for example, in which Larry is being blackmailed into casting a terrible actor in a lead role in his new show. And the blackmail is based on the opening scene in the series when Larry discovers a dead body floating in his pool. And it just feels over the top. It’s too much. It’s not realistic in any way. Larry and his manager, Jeff, just give in to the blackmail without a struggle. And I suppose that leads to funny moments as they try to get away with casting this lunatic and terrible actor in the lead role, but it’s just not believable.
In one episode, for example, there was one small subplot in which Larry got in trouble because he closed doors behind him too loudly. He just leaves the room, and, as Larry does, he isn’t really thinking about social niceties, and he just shuts the door without thinking. And he shuts it just loudly enough that the people left behind think he slammed it out of anger. And that leads to misunderstandings and complications. And that is the kind of storyline that I prefer. There’s another moment when Larry goes to see a dentist, and the office has a system where patients have to sign in when they arrive. And on the sign-in sheet, they are expected to write down their appointment time AND the time they arrived. And Larry, being Larry, instead of just following the rules, he points out to the receptionist that this is weird. He tells her, honestly, that even if he was late, he wouldn’t write that down. He’d lie and write down a fake time pretending that he had arrived early. So, what is the point of the system? And the receptionist just ends up being exasperated with him. And I like that storyline. I like those small events. They feel grounded and realistic. The big stories they come up with often feel wrong. They throw me out of the story because I don’t believe them.
Oddly enough, there is a type of big, unrealistic story that works. I’m thinking of the season when Larry has a fatwa issued against him. That was pure slapstick from beginning to end. But they played it as slapstick, and it worked. It was very funny. I think that was the season when the Muslim investigator interviewed a whole bunch of people to learn about Larry’s interaction with them. And he always concludes that Larry was in the right, and he starts to see Larry as a great man. I loved that sequence. It was one of my favorites in the whole series. And it is also completely unrealistic. But it works.
I’m also still watching the program Invasion. I’m still enjoying it. I’m somewhat invested in the storylines of each of the characters. It is only the story in Japan that doesn’t work for me. But I never mind going back to that story because I love the sound of Japanese and the quirky nature of Japanese culture and society. And it doesn’t hurt that the lead actress is so beautiful. She’s absolutely stunning in the show, and I could simply gaze at her for the entire hour of each episode. I’m not quite sure what is going on with her story or what she is doing, but I just get lost in her eyes and everything about her.
The critics are being very hard on Invasion. And I can see that their criticisms are valid. Yet, I’m enjoying it. Even if there is no payoff in the end, I would be okay with that. The show works for me. I particularly like the realism in that none of the characters really know what is going on. Nobody knows. Even the show doesn’t know. And as viewers, we certainly don’t know. And that’s how things would really work. In a disaster, you only know what you can see around you. You never have the big picture. How could you? And in most movies, there is always some kind of perspective where everything is known. Certain characters might be in the dark and not know anything. Maybe even most characters. But there will usually be someone who has the full picture. And through that character’s story or through narration or flashbacks, we the viewers also get the full picture. But Invasion is being quite disciplined about that. Every character has total tunnel vision and only knows and sees what is directly in front of them. And that means they don’t have a clue what is going on. As viewers, we know a bit more than they do. We get to see the story of every character. But at no point does the show introduce someone like the President of a country who knows exactly what is happening and has the full picture. We never get that eagle-eye view. And I find that realism refreshing. Plus, the characters deal with real life issues. In many or even most disaster and alien invasion movies, the main characters are simply action figures. They just do stuff non-stop. They never get dirty. They never get tired. They never have to eat. They never have to sleep. They never have to go to the bathroom. They never have to worry about buying a bus ticket. But in Invasion, every character is fully grounded in the problems of real life. They worry about finding food and water. They need shelter. They need information. They need transportation. And, sure, some kind of super-powerful alien species is practically wiping out the entire human race, and we need to deal with that. But we also have to stop and cook a burger once in a while. We have to exist in the day and in the reality all around us right now. We can’t be fighting the aliens all the time. And, in this case, we can’t fight the aliens at all. Most of the characters don’t even know that an alien invasion is happening. It takes many episodes for most of them to even suspect that this is happening. And almost no one ever sees an alien. And if they do, they have no idea what it is or what it means. There is information chaos everywhere. And I am enjoying this grounded storytelling. I can relate to it.
On top of all that, I like how the aliens are presented. Or not presented. They are truly alien. Most alien invasion stories cast the aliens as looking different and having superior technology, but they are basically like us and have the same motivations. They are an invading army like any other invading army. But the aliens in Invasion are so foreign as to be incomprehensible. And that makes sense. There is no reason that a species from another galaxy would be similar to us in any way. They can be so foreign in nature that we can’t even understand what they are. Their type of intelligence might even be an intelligence that means nothing to us. We might not even be able to think about how they think. I’m not sure exactly what the final form of these aliens might be. The show has given us hints, and I have some ideas, but they are still largely mysterious. And terrifying in the way that only the truly unknown can be terrifying.