Friday, May 6, 2022
6:36 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
My trip to the vaccination clinic on Tuesday was successful. When I went to the orange building at the hospital last time, I was able to talk to some women that were sitting at desks behind a set of sliding windows. They were quite friendly and helpful, and they told me that I needed to return on May 3rd. There was some kind of vaccination activity happening on that day, they told me, between one and three in the afternoon. And then I got a message from someone saying that they had searched for information in Thai, and they found out that in Mae Sot, a vaccination clinic takes place at that hospital on every first and third Tuesday of the month in the afternoon. I was happy to hear that, especially since that information lined up with the information I’d gotten myself. I was told to return on May 3rd, and May 3rd was the first Tuesday of the month.
I brought my GoPros with me to film the trip, and when I started recording, I mentioned the English phrase “Three times the charm” or “Three times a charm.” (I’m not sure if the proper expression uses a or the.) This was my third trip to that hospital, the clinic was taking place on the 3rd, it ran until 3 o’clock, and one of the days this clinic was operational was the third Tuesday. And with all of those lucky 3s, I felt the chances were high that I would manage to get the booster.
As I walked along with my GoPro, I started off talking about the route that I was going to follow as I walked to the hospital. The last time I made this walk, I followed a brand new street that ran parallel to the main street where the Phannu is located. In the video, I made a big deal about how I’d never walked down this street before, and I pointed out all the new sights I encountered along the way. In this new video, I talked about how I was going to do the same thing but with a different road that ran parallel to the main one. However, when I started editing the video, I decided to cut all of that out. My experience with the Premieres has impressed on me (rightly or wrongly) the need to speed up the events of my videos and reduce the amount of time I’m talking about what I’m GOING to do. Now when I edit a video, I have a clear image in my mind of me sitting in front of my laptop and watching it (painfully) while other people watch the same thing as a Premiere. And if I go off on one of these long tangents, I can feel the stress and pain as I imagine all these people sitting there enduring it and wishing I’d stop talking and just start doing things. From that perspective, doing Premieres has been extremely helpful. I’ve been able to view my own videos through the eyes of other people, and I think I can see them more clearly and make better decisions about what to film and what NOT to film.
In this case, I really was babbling on and on about this new street, where it was located, and how I was going to get there. I had to go to this intersection, I said, and then walk down this street and pass two streets and then turn left and go one block. And then I had to do a dogleg to get down to the point where this new street started. And as I made this walk, I then gave a play-by-play of the actual moments of this trip that I had just described in words: “Here’s the intersection where I turn left” and “This is the street that I have to follow to get to the start of the other street”. An interesting thing is that when I listen to myself by myself during these episodes, I find it fascinating. But I have this new ability to picture other people listening to these sections, and I’ve decided that they are really boring and completely unnecessary. Nobody knows these streets in Mae Sot. Nobody cares about them. No one needs to hear me talk for two minutes about the streets I’m going to take and then talk for more minutes as I actually get to these streets. People can listen to Google Maps giving them verbal directions if they want that.
There was one small problem with deleting all of this, and that is there was an abrupt cut. The video jumped unnaturally from me walking down the main street to me on a small side street just about to get a drink from a little cafe. And there is no suggestion of how I got there. There is no connection between the previous scene and this one in the video. I just suddenly appear there, and I’m talking about some random thing that is not connected in any way to what came before. But I decided to just leave it that way. It wasn’t great, but including ten minutes of me describing my route would have been worse.
The result is that my video is much faster paced than normal. I talked about going to the vaccination clinic, and in a relatively short time, I was arriving at the hospital and walking up to the orange building. It had very little of the rambling that usually shows up in between. I was pleased with the result, and I think it was the right choice to delete all of that stuff. (But more about that decision later.)
I was a bit taken aback when I arrived at the orange building to see that it was MORE dead than last time. I thought that since the vaccination clinic was taking place that afternoon, the place would be busier and more open. But instead of it being more open with more people, it was more shut down, more barricaded, and emptier. On all my previous visits, there had at least been someone there.
And you know what is crazy? I just realized that this wasn’t my third trip to the hospital. It was my fourth! I’d completely forgotten about all the times I’d gone there. On my first trip, I’d gone up to the sixth floor and found that the clinic was gone. And then I was sent wandering all over the city looking for an Islamic Health Center. That was trip one. On the second trip, I found a couple of men from Pakistan or Bangladesh sitting at a table outside the building, and one of these men brought me inside to an office, and a woman there told me to return after the Sonkgran holidays were over. That was the trip when I ended up standing at a window for a long time and was completely ignored by the women inside. On my third trip, after Songkran, I found a bunch of women sitting at a different set of office windows on the inside of the building. And they told me to return on May 3rd. And now this trip was the fourth one! So all my talk about the third time being the charm was completely wrong. This was my fourth visit to the hospital. That’s crazy.
What I was saying is that on all three previous trips there had at least been someone there. There was someone sitting at a table, someone in an office, or someone behind a window. But on this fourth trip, the day when the vaccination clinic was scheduled to take place, there wasn’t a single person. There was nobody there at all. On the day when I would have expected a lot of people and activity, I found no one and no activity at all. In fact, on this fourth trip, there was even less access. The entrance that I had gone through on all my other visits was now blocked with a set of ropes. So it was even less accessible than before. Luckily, there was still a sidewalk that ran right beside the building, and I was able to follow that and go inside.
I didn’t have a lot of faith at this point that anything was going to happen. The entire area was empty. I didn’t see a single hospital employee anywhere – not in an office, not behind a window, not walking around and setting up the clinic. And I saw no changes. I thought that perhaps all the big graphics from the original clinic would be here. I thought there would be the selfie station with all the giant props you could hold for your vaccination selfie. But there wasn’t a single sign or graphic or poster or notice about any kind of vaccination clinic taking place.
However, there WAS one small table sitting in the middle of nowhere. And on this table, I found a plastic basket, and inside this basket was a stack of small forms that I had never seen before. This form was in Thai, but across the top, there was a list of checkboxes, each with the name of a covid-19 vaccine beside it. This was my one and only clue that I could be in the right spot and that a vaccination clinic COULD actually be taking place. I sat down in a chair all by myself in this place to look over the form, and then in a few minutes, things started to happen. Another foreigner that I know came in. And he was also there for the vaccination clinic. And then more people started to arrive. And a hospital staff member who spoke English came up to the two of us and then helped us fill out the form. I tried to use Google Translate on the form so that I could fill it out myself, but that didn’t work at all. Filling out the form was much easier with the help of this clerk. The clerk could translate the form. But the clerk could also tell us which parts of the form we could safely ignore. That’s always the problem when you deal with official forms by yourself. You reasonably assume that you need to fill out the whole form. And there will always be sections that you struggle with. You don’t have the information the form is asking for, or it doesn’t apply to you, or you don’t understand what it is asking for. And then, after a long period of time struggling on your own, you bring the form over to someone official so you can ask them questions, and this official will often just wave away all those troublesome sections and say you don’t have to worry about them. All you need to do is write down your name and passport number and phone number. And they dismiss all the other stuff.
And that turned out to be true in this case. There were sections of the form that I didn’t understand, and the clerk simply said that I didn’t have to worry about it. I just had to fill out the basic information and then the sections related to health, such as blood pressure and temperature and height and weight. Basically, by myself, the form would have been a problem. But once the clerk got involved, I had it filled out quickly. The most important part by far was my Thai ID number. This number was given to me when I got my original injections, and this 13-digit number is connected to my online vaccination records in the government database, which, in turn, powers my Mor Prom app. I made sure to write that number down correctly. The whole system seemed to depend on that number being accurate and legible. I kind of wished there was a more official way of doing that. I had the Mor Prom app, after all. And it is stuffed with information and scannable QR codes. I thought the system could be a bit more automated and that they could have checked me into the clinic by simply scanning the QR code. That would have pulled up all my records automatically. But they were using this paper method, and the best I could do was try to control my terrible handwriting and write down this number as clearly as I could.
At the beginning of this process, I was handed a number. At the table, they had two booklets. One booklet, I found out, was for Pfizer. And the other was for Moderna. They reminded me of raffle tickets, to be honest. And when the clerk first came to help out me and the other foreigner, we were given numbers from the Pfizer booklet. The other foreigner got number five and I got number six. Therefore, we were early in the system and would likely get our injections quickly.
At this point, it still wasn’t completely clear what would happen next. I had filled out the form and I had a number, but I wasn’t sure about where the vaccinations would take place in this area or if I had to go to a new room, a new section of the building, or even a different building. Nor did I know how I could know when and if my number was called. But I stood around for a while and recorded some stuff on my GoPro. And then another clerk came up to me, and she helpfully stapled my number to my form, and then she pointed in a direction and said I needed to go over there. I stood there for a minute just looking in that direction and trying to figure out what she meant. I saw nothing that indicated a special area. Was I supposed to go outside, leave this building, and go to a new building? But I saw nothing like that out there. Was I supposed to go to a new room? But I saw no doorways leading to new rooms. All I saw were some chairs and a set of windows. I really didn’t know if I was doing the right thing, but I went to where the clerk had pointed and sat down in one of the chairs. I noticed a monk sitting in a nearby chair (properly socially distanced with an empty chair between us) and this monk was holding the same form with the same type of numbered slip stapled to it. And his number was number seven. So it seemed I was in the right spot. Much later, as more and more people gathered in this area, I noticed a piece of paper with the word Pfizer handwritten on it and attached to a desk with scotch tape. I hadn’t seen this before. But I guessed that this is what the clerk was referring to. This side of the room and these chairs were for people getting the Pfizer vaccine. The other side of the room and the chairs there were for people getting Moderna. As more and more foreigners started to arrive, someone jokingly referred to us as the Pfizer Gang, and I liked that idea and adopted it.
I was enjoying myself at this clinic. It was a fun and new experience to be among so many foreigners. And I enjoyed just sitting back and taking in all the activity around me. I noticed that the Moderna vaccines were being administered first. They started there shortly after one p.m. And then around twenty after one, a tray containing syringes was wheeled from a back room and up to the desk near the Pfizer Gang. They quickly started giving the injections, and since I had number five, it was soon my turn. At the last minute, I decided to leave my GoPro Hero 9 clamped to my chair, so it could film the whole scene from a distance. I had the Hero 7 on the chest mount, and I thought it could capture more up-close views. The way it turned out, the Hero 7 didn’t take much useful video. It was pointing in the wrong direction. And I had my back turned to the Hero 9, and the monk got up and stood directly in front of the Hero 9 and blocked its view. So I didn’t get any clear video of the injection process itself. But I still got the wide shot of the whole scene, which is better than nothing.
Afterward, there was some confusion and discussion among the members of the Pfizer Gang as we talked about how we had no proof that we’d gotten the booster. We had filled out one small form and then handed that in. But we had gotten nothing in return. So we were walking out with empty hands. We had no copies, no receipts, and no documents of any kind to show or prove that we had been vaccinated with our third dose. I remember that this was how it worked when I got my first two doses. And it puzzled me at that time, too. The best I could do was use my phone to take pictures of all the forms before I handed them in. And I did the same at this new booster clinic. Members of the Pfizer Gang went to speak with the English-speaking clerk, and I tagged along just to overhear what was said. I had already spoken to this clerk about this very topic, but I wanted to get confirmation of what I had been told. And what I’d been told was that they didn’t update the vaccine passport here. They would update our online records. And when our Mor Prom app was updated, we could then return to the hospital and go to window #2 on the main floor. And at that window, they would take care of updating our passport. I don’t know if this will be done on-the-spot. I kind of doubt it, because this will require the signature of a doctor. And the doctor won’t be sitting there at window 2 waiting to do this. I assume they will have to take my vaccine passport booklet, and I will have to return at some point once it is updated. I guess I will do that today. I can do it today because my Mor Prom app has already been updated. The clerk said it might take two weeks. But today is only three days after I got the booster, and the records have already been updated. I’m happy about that. I don’t know if I will make a video about this, but I might.
Speaking of videos, I have another Premiere scheduled for tonight at seven in the evening here in Thailand. This video is about my return visit to the Nam Lod Cave near Pang Mapha. A funny thing is that with my painful experiences of the first Premieres, I’m now going back and re-editing my videos in the Mae Hong Son Loop series. All these videos are done and already uploaded to YouTube and ready to go, but I’ve decided that they are too long and that they contain too much of me babbling about nothing. I decided that it was a good idea to streamline them. That has ended up being a lot of work, but I was lucky in that all the source video was still on my phone. Like a smart person, I hadn’t deleted any of it. Therefore, I was able to load the original video project and simply rewatch it and then delete all the sections that slow the video down.
It’s very interesting to have this idea of the Premiere as a kind of touchstone for deciding how to edit videos and even how to shoot them. Thinking about the Premieres forces me to see the video from the point of view of someone else. It gives me a reference point for deciding what is best to keep and what is best to delete. I end up physically closing my eyes and imagining myself sitting at my laptop as this video plays as a Premiere. And if I sense myself feeling embarrassed and stressed out at the mental image of people suffering through this section, I delete it. This Nam Lod Cave video is a good example of this process because at that point in my trip, I was still switching over from the GoPro to the Panasonic G85. And I talked about that a LOT on video. But I realized how boring and unimportant that stuff is for other people. And I removed nearly all of it.
In doing these Premieres, I’ve also realized I have a strong tendency to talk like a guidebook. Instead of taking video of the experience, I give information that you would normally find in a guidebook: opening hours; ticket prices; directions to get there; etc. And not only do I give all this information about how to go to a place and what to do when you get there, I then talk at length about my own plans: how I’M going to go there and what I’M going to do. I do that a LOT. And it’s super boring and unnecessary. With this new perspective, every time I hear myself going into guidebook mode or future plans mode or technology mode, I delete it. Instead of using video of me talking about what I plan to do, I just jump ahead to me doing it. And without the experience of these Premieres, I might not have figured this out.
I don’t know for sure that I’m doing the right thing. I have my own voice and my own style, and some people say that they like that style. By fighting all these tendencies, I might be destroying the things that make my videos different and perhaps special. But at least by removing all these sections, sitting through the Premiere might not be so painful for me. The video is supposed to be about visiting the Nam Lod Cave. Therefore, I would feel better if the majority of the video really was about the cave experience. I don’t want to sit there watching the Premiere as I go on and on about the differences between the GoPro and the G85. Nobody cares about that but me. Delete that and get back to the cave. Just use the G85. Don’t talk about using it.
And that guidebook tendency is so strong. I like to help people. I feel good when I help people. And I often shoot these videos as if I’m talking to someone and giving them advice about how to go to the place that I’m going to. So my Nam Lod Cave video is 50% about how the cave is structured and how you buy a ticket and then how you get a guide and where you go first and the best ways to do this or do that. In the end, the video would be useful, perhaps, for someone planning to visit the Nam Lod Cave themselves. Or it would be useful for the owners and organizers of the Nam Lod Cave. They can add my video to their website as an instructional how-to guide for visitors. But that audience is, obviously, small to non-existent. Nobody watching my cave video is planning on visiting that cave themselves. So they don’t need that avalanche of practical information. It doesn’t matter whether they fully understand how many caverns are inside the Nam Lod Cave and in what order you visit them. They don’t need to know where the trail to the mouth of the cave starts and where it ends and whether it climbs up and down or stays on flat ground. They don’t need to know any of these things. They sat down in front of a YouTube video to be entertained and see beautiful or interesting things. They’re not planning for their own trip to the cave. Therefore, I decided to go back and edit these videos again and remove all of those sections. Luckily, since this is my second visit to the Nam Lod Cave, there was less guidebook content than you might expect. All my guidebook instincts ended up in the first video. So there wasn’t a large amount to delete, but it was significant. More prevalent were sections where I was talking about what I was going to do and sections where I was talking about the cameras. And I deleted nearly all of that stuff. I kept one or two references to the camera, since that really was an important part of the story. In fact, one of the main reasons I returned to the Nam Lod Cave was the feeling that my GoPro hadn’t worked very well on my first trip. I wanted to go back and film the interior of the cave with a camera that handled low light conditions better. So I felt I had to mention that at the beginning. And I had to refer back to it at least once to offer up an opinion about whether the G85 was performing as well as I had hoped. But there was a very long section of the original video in which I talked about the camera as I walked along the trail. That went on for a very long time. And I deleted all of it.
I went on to do the same thing with my first video of the Chiang Dao Cave, and I ended up shortening the video by twenty-five minutes. I deleted a full twenty-five minutes of me being a human guidebook. And I’m hoping the video is much improved because of that. I plan on doing the same thing with the second Chiang Dao Cave video. And I’m hoping that this influence of the Premieres will trickle down to the actual shooting of the video. Instead of deleting all the human guidebook sections, I hope to just stop recording them. There’s no point recording these sections if I’m not going to use them. So, perhaps before I set off with my cameras, I can already see the future video playing as a Premiere, and I can make my choices accordingly. Would I be proud of this section of the video as it plays during a Premiere? Or would I be cringing and moaning in embarrassment and wishing it were over?
And I learned something new about how Premieres work. I used the Redirect feature before when I had two Premieres on the same night. And I was surprised to see that it didn’t actually work. It appeared that a redirect doesn’t physically bring viewers from one video to the next. However, I’ve since learned that it WILL do that, but the person has to have YouTube Autoplay turned on. The redirect feature depends on Autoplay to load up the new video that you want to direct people to. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone has Autoplay on. The only people who have Autoplay turned on are the people who couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. It’s a very annoying feature and the vast majority of people have it turned off. I certainly do.
I was thinking about this and doing some research because I plan to do two Premieres at the same time again. My first video in Chiang Dao is simply about me going to the Pronto Coffee shop. And at the moment, it is about seventeen minutes long. I’ll probably re-edit it and shorten it, too. Since it is about little more than a coffee shop, it doesn’t really qualify for the Premiere treatment. But the next video is about visiting Zone 1 of the cave. And THAT video will definitely be a Premiere. My original idea was to simply post the Pronto Coffee video as a regular video. But I realized that I could use it as a prelude to the main video. So that is what I will do. And then I will set up a Redirect to the main video. All that means is that for most people with Autoplay turned off, they will just get a big thumbnail of the next video that they can click on. But it’s better than nothing.
Over the last few days, I’ve continued to think about Patreon and do some research. I’ve mainly been looking at established and successful Patreon pages to see how other people structure their tiers and what perks they offer. I’m just making long lists of all the ideas that people have had whether they actually match my content or not. And then I’ve been trying to organize these ideas into categories so that I can get an overall sense of the big picture.
I guess there are two basic sets of information here when it comes to perks. One set is the nature of the perk itself. And the other set is access to a perk. For example, a perk can be something that a patron gets but no one else gets. It’s exclusive to them. Perhaps a YouTuber films a special video once a month just for patrons. That’s an exclusive perk. But a perk can also consist of early access to that video. The perk isn’t the video itself, since everyone will eventually be able to watch the video. The perk is that the patron gets to watch the video BEFORE non-patrons.
As I think I noted before, this idea of early access seems to apply nicely to my idea of using these journal entries and other behind-the-scenes content as a perk. At first, I didn’t like the idea of using this content as a perk. I’ve already started posting them to the Planet Doug website, and they are fully visible for everyone. But if I turn them into a perk and post them only to Patreon, then only patrons can see them or read them. And I don’t like that. And this is where early access comes into play. I can still treat these journal entries as a perk. I would post them to my Patreon feed right away. And patrons would be able to read them instantly. And then a week later, I’d post them to the website. Therefore, it’s kind of a best-of-both-worlds situation with both patrons and non-patrons being able to read my journal entries. It’s just that the patrons get to read them a bit earlier. (Assuming, of course, that anyone wants to read all this as I babble on and on.)
Another big idea I’ve had is that perhaps it’s best to have only one tier. The more I think about this, the more I like the idea. Until recently, I’ve been assuming that I would do what most people do and set up a variety of tiers. I was trying to decide how many tiers to create, what to charge for each tier, and even what to name the tiers. I was playing around with fun naming systems based on elements, for example, like this:
Iron Tier
Bronze Tier
Silver Tier
Gold Tier
Platinum Tier
I also had this idea to use types of planets, to go along with the Planet Doug theme:
Desert Planet (It’s EXOTIC!!!)
Ice Planet (It’s COOL!!!)
Ocean Planet (It’s REFRESHING!!!)
Lava Planet (It’s HOT!!!)
And I had the idea to base tiers on types of luggage from smallest to largest:
Knapsack Tier
Backpack Tier
Suitcase Tier
Camper Van Tier
And I was busy trying to figure out how to organize perks and pricing across these various tiers. But then I realized that I wasn’t happy about this. And my unhappiness came from two directions. One is that this is complicated. I already have enough to think about. And with four or five separate tiers with different perks for every tier, I have to think about this all the time. I have to make sure that the perks for each tier are being fulfilled. I get tired just thinking about it. Creating and fulfilling the perks is enough work. And now I have to keep track of all the tiers and who gets what and set access levels? It’s a lot.
And then I realized that by establishing a Patreon, I’ve effectively divided my YouTube audience into two groups: a privileged group and a not-so-privileged group. And that doesn’t feel great. I listen to some podcasts that have exclusive content for Patreon, and it always annoys me to hear them talk about how this or that story is going into their Patreon podcast. It won’t be for regular listeners. I always end up feeling left out.
And if you have four or five tiers inside Patreon, you’ve now created an entire society of different classes based on privilege. Those with more money are getting more access and more content. And that doesn’t feel great either. And what happens when I’m interacting with someone in the YouTube comments or through Facebook? These people will know different things based on whether they joined Patreon or not and based on which tier they joined. I can see that getting complicated. Someone won’t know something, because I posted that information to the Gold Tier but they are a member of the Bronze Tier. It is a lot to keep straight in my head.
And after considering this for a while and after struggling with the idea of how to price the various tiers, I started to wonder if it might be best to have just one tier. Keep it as egalitarian as possible and as simple as possible. I actually had this idea originally because I was wondering if I could develop the Patreon over time. Instead of launching with four fully-formed tiers ready to go, I was wondering if I could launch with just one tier. I could use this tier to test the waters, figure out how things work, and then over time, I could slowly add tiers. I could start with a middle tier and see how that goes. And then I could add tiers below it and above it. Or I could start with the lowest tier. And then I could add a tier above it. And then another. As I thought about that, I wondered if perhaps I’d have just this one tier and then never bother to add more. And the more I pictured that, the more I liked it.
The thing is that I’ve started to think of the Patreon page as a website. And it really is a type of social media platform, like a blog. I can post long journal entries there. I can post short updates. I can post photographs. I can post embedded videos. People can leave comments to those posts. I can reply to those comments. And I like that feeling. But I like it better when I think of it as one place and one place only. When I think of that Patreon website being subdivided into tiers with every patron having a different experience, I’m not as happy with it. It’s just too much to think about. Too complicated.
And finally, there is the idea that if I choose this one-tier model, it will always be possible to change and add more. Perhaps the one-tier model doesn’t work. And then I can adjust and change. But if I start with four tiers right out of the gate, it would be much more difficult and perhaps impossible to reduce down to having just one tier. I think if I began with multiple tiers, I would be stuck with those tiers forever.
So, I’m leaning towards having just one tier. All the Patreon perks I would come up with would be all in that one tier. It wouldn’t even be a tier. It would just be the Planet Doug Patreon. You can join the Patreon or not join. That’s the only question. I like that idea. It feels right. The multiple-tier model feels too much like marketing trickery, because you are essentially trying to structure your perks to upsell people. You want them to join a higher tier, so you carefully distribute your perks to make people want to pay more. It just feels mercenary. Of course, this all begs the question of the price to attach to this one tier in Patreon. $1/month is the minimum that Patreon sets. And then after that, you can set whatever price you want. $2? $3? $5? $10?
There is definitely the idea that you don’t want to sell yourself short. Patreon is going to be a lot of work no matter what. You don’t want to set such a low price that it isn’t worth all the work that goes into it. But you don’t want to go too high either. As I noted the other day, saying $5 per month is one thing. But that translates to $60 per year. And that is real money. It’s a lot for regular people.
I have a lot more ideas about Patreon that I want to record today, but I also want to go to the hospital and deal with this vaccination passport issue. And time is passing. I think I’m going to shut down now and get ready to go to the hospital. I’ll pick up this story later.