Monday, December 20, 2021
8:26 a.m. Room 5 (the Dungeon)
PS Riverview Guest House
Mae Sariang, Thailand
I had a rough night last night for some reason. I had trouble turning my brain off and going to sleep. And that’s why I’m starting my day so late this morning. Luckily, I was able to drop off to sleep at a later point, and I woke up just a half hour ago. So I feel okay considering how bad the night was.
I blame the rough night on YouTube. I was having a lot of trouble working through some video editing issues. As always, it is simply taking far too long to edit and upload the videos. And I can feel that I’m falling farther and farther behind. So far on this trip, I’ve barely been able to produce videos of what I’m doing now. And that means I haven’t even begun to work on the backlog of content from Sukhothai. And that means I still have no available memory for new video. I returned to the IT store yesterday to take a second look at their expensive Western Digital My Passport external drive. I didn’t want to pay their high price, but I was thinking I really needed to do it. But this time, I took a closer look at the packaging, and I didn’t like anything that I saw. For one thing, it was bare of information. It looked like an old, old box, and it didn’t even say whether the drive used a USB 2.0 or 3.0 or 3.2 connection. Plus, there seemed to be some kind of an issue with connecting it to a MacBook. You had to download a special driver to your computer to get it to work with a MacBook, and that seemed weird to me. Finally, there appeared to be a label from the Advice computer store on the bottom, and this label looked like it had been cut open and then the box resealed. Basically, the drive seemed quite old and possibly a reject from Advice or stolen from Advice. Who knows? In any event, I didn’t trust it at all, and of course I didn’t buy it.
I think I will have to take a chance and delete all the video files from my MicroSD cards so I can start fresh with those. That will mean I will have only one copy of the Sukhothai videos on my external drive and no backup at all. That’s risky, but I don’t have a choice if I want to keep recording any video of this trip. I can’t think of any other solution.
I finally uploaded another video from this trip. I uploaded the video about my trip to the river and to the Mae Usu Cave. I actually had two videos ready that came previous to this one. I still have the video in which I interviewed the owner of the Retro Twin Home hotel. And I have the video about my budget room at the Tha Song Yang resort and changing rooms. But so much time had passed that those two videos felt inconsequential. I had posted the video about my scooter ride from Mae Sot to Tha Song Yang, and that trip was mildly adventurous. It felt weird to follow that up with one of my dumb videos about random topics. It felt like the next video should be another real video about experiences on the trip, such as the Mae Usu Cave experience.
I had trouble with the final details of that video. As always, I didn’t know what to call the video or what kind of thumbnail to make. I know that in terms of YouTube culture I’m supposed to put my own face in the thumbnail and write some crazy clickbait stuff like, “I almost drowned in the cave!” or “Meat Smugglers from Myanmar!!” But I just used a nice picture of the river scenery with a simple description of what the video was about. And the result was about what you’d expect. Nobody watched it. As with all my videos, it’s too long and too boring and not catchy enough. Essentially, it’s not YouTube enough.
More evidence that YouTube is not my world comes from my experience of watching travel videos from other people. The most recent video from “30 and a WakeUp” is a good example. Kevin posted this video yesterday. It’s a tour of his condo in Chiang Mai, which he has rented for 63 days. The video is mainly about why this condo is a good deal. It costs the equivalent of $420 US a month plus maybe $100 for electricity, and he talked about how this included maid service once a week. In my world and from my point of view, there’s nothing of interest here. The condo he rented is just that – a condo. It’s spartan and empty and clean. It looks like any modern condo in any city in the world. It has all the modern conveniences, of course. And he pointed out the TV and the living room and the kitchen and the air conditioner and the large fridge and the balcony and nice bathroom.
Yet, last I checked, there were hundreds of comments on that video telling him how amazing that condo was and what a great deal it was and stuff like that. And I just don’t get it. I don’t understand why people would be so fascinated with this video or why they would care about the condo. I’m pretty sure that if I posted a video like that, there would be criticism. People would tell me that the condo was boring and the furniture was bland. And people would tell me it was too expensive. And they’d tell me that it was dumb to stay on the upper floor of a modern condo building in Thailand. They’d tell me that I was isolating myself from Thailand. And they’d tell me that I was staying in the wrong neighborhood. And they’d tell me that it didn’t make any sense to rent this place for 63 days when this was the perfect time of year to travel around Thailand. Right now is the best time by far to be on the road on a scooter trip in terms of the weather. This is the key time. So why waste that time by sitting in a bland condo in Chiang Mai? He just bought his own brand new scooter and got it fully licensed. He should be out exploring while the weather is good. Two months from now, the weather will start to get extremely hot again and then it will rain for another six months. Renting this condo for two months right now is the worst timing, people would tell me. But no one told Kevin that in the comments.
And it’s the same thing for his trip from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. He did the whole trip in just a few days, and he spent nearly the entire time on major highway systems. He didn’t stop to see anything or do anything. He mentioned a couple of times that the reason he did so little was the accident. He spent two or three days in that town recovering from his injuries. Yet, even with those extra couple of days, I don’t get the impression that he would have done anything different. His plan all along was simply to drive to Chiang Mai by the most direct route. He had the time deadline of moving into his condo on a particular day.
I was interested to see that he stayed in Tak City overnight at the SOHO hotel. I was curious if he would then take that gorgeous mountain highway to Mae Sot. But he didn’t. He could also have taken the roads by the Ping River up towards Chiang Mai. But he didn’t. He just woke up in the morning and hopped on the major highway again and rode all the way to Chiang Mai in one day. And the video was nothing but shots of the highway and traffic ahead of him. Yet, people loved the video. It has nearly five thousand views plus two hundred and seventeen comments about how amazing it is. I really don’t get it. Then again, I’ve never understood the world, so this is nothing new.