Monday, February 20, 2023
6:01 a.m. Room 607 Nan Yeang Hotel
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
I now find myself wishing I was staying in Kuala Lumpur a bit longer, even a week longer. I’m flying back to Sumatra tomorrow, and it feels like that is too soon. I could use some more time here to reorganize, meet with people, edit video, and rest. As is often the case recently, I feel like I have been in bed for a long time, and yet I feel exhausted this morning. A funny thing is that my worsening eyesight does lead to a bit of loss of sleep. I was tossing and turning this morning, feeling like I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, and when I looked at my watch, I saw that it was six o’clock. So I figured I might as well just get out of bed. But once I had done so and turned on all the lights and started showering and shaving and making coffee, I realized that I had misread the watch face. It was actually five o’clock. I can’t easily distinguish between a five and a six anymore.
My sleep pattern graph from Samsung Health seems to give some evidence that I did not have as restful a night as one would want:
Awake: 16%
REM: 18%
Light Sleep: 50%
Deep Sleep: 16%
Total: 5 hours and 25 minutes of sleep
And, according to the app, I woke up twenty times during the night, eight times fully and twelve times partially. That is my personal experience or memory of sleep. All I remember is lying in bed awake for hour after hour, trying to get to sleep. The sleep app graph also indicates that I wake up before and after I enter REM sleep. And that also matches my memory of the night. I seem to always wake up when a dream ends. I find myself lying in bed remembering the dream I just had and thinking about it. I don’t dream and then slide into deeper sleep. I wake up after each dream.
I didn’t realize this, but the app also indicates what might be a normal sleep pattern or a normal amount for each of these types of sleep. And to my surprise, the 16% of deep sleep that I got is considered more than the average. I would have thought that I got much less deep sleep than the average. That’s what I feel I am lacking. But it appears I get more than the norm. I also experience quite a bit more time being awake than is normal. I expected to see that. And I get much less REM sleep and even less light sleep than the average person. I find all of this fascinating.
I didn’t do anything of note yesterday. I worked on some videos and I went out once to get lunch and do a bit of shopping. And that was my whole day. During lunch, I watched another episode of the Spanish TV series Garcia. I’ve had the first season of this show on my tablet for a long time now. I tried to watch it once before, but I wasn’t sucked in by the first episode, and I set it aside. But I thought I would give it more of a chance, and I forced myself to sit through the entire first episode recently and then start the second. I still didn’t like it very much, but at least by the end of the first episode, the plot started to come together. And the basic plot elements seem like it would be something that I would enjoy. However, I still can’t get into it. It’s a weird show for me.
My biggest problem with it is probably the main actress. She is supremely annoying. I dislike her intensely. She is supposed to be our window into this world and this story. We are supposed to go along with her on her adventures. Yet, I can’t stand her. Everything about her bothers me. I don’t know if this was a deliberate choice by the writer, director, and actress. Perhaps this character is supposed to be this way. Or it could be that the actress just plays her in a way that bothers me. She seems to be acting in her own separate movie, which is an amalgam of a Woody Allen farce, an episode of the Three Stooges, and a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
It could also be that the tone of life and people in Spain is simply foreign to me. There is a great deal of evidence for that last point. The show’s story is steeped in Spanish history to do with the civil war and Franco and Republicans and Nationalists and Communists. Who talks about communists or is worried about them anymore these days? Apparently, Spaniards do. And the show is all about modern politics, which seems to keep the schisms of the civil war alive and well. And I don’t get any of that. I’ll keep watching the show to the end, but it would be a difficult show to recommend to anyone.
I also watched the latest YouTube videos from Itchy Boots. I was curious to see where her latest trip is going to take her. And I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she is embarking on a trip across Africa. She is starting in Morocco and then riding down into West Africa and then across into East Africa. So far, she has posted a couple videos about taking her motorcycle apart and then rebuilding it for this new trip. That was done in Anchorage when her last trip ended. And then she had the bike shipped to her starting point in southern Spain. From there, she took the ferry across to Morocco, spent the first night in a hotel near the port. And then she posted a video about her first real day in Morocco. She rode about 120 kilometers to the town of Chefchaouen, which is known for the blue paint used on the buildings in the old part of town. It’s quite scenic.
Of course, I took a particular interest in the gear that she is using for this trip. Unfortunately, she seems to have little interest in camera gear. She records a lot of video about her motorcycle and its components and maintenance, but she never mentions her cameras or features them in any way. She shot an entire video about rebuilding the motorcycle. But there wasn’t a single mention of camera equipment. I have to figure things out for myself just from clues in the video. She appears to be using three cameras. She has a GoPro Hero 11 mounted on the chin of her helmet, a GoPro 11 Mini mounted on the left side of the handlebars, and an Insta360 X3 mounted on the right. I have no idea what kind of microphone setup she has. Overall, I find her camera use and her video editing to be simplistic to the point of being unambitious. She really doesn’t do anything. She never moves the cameras to a new location on the motorcycle. She never changes the perspective of the cameras or the direction that they’re pointing. The two cameras on her handlebars always point back at her. Her chin-mounted GoPro always points forward. And that’s it. Nothing ever changes. I can tell, of course, when the video switches from one camera to the other, but there doesn’t seem to be much point to her even having the 360 camera. She does nothing with it. She uses it in the same way she would use a GoPro. My guess is that she uses it in single-lens mode only. I don’t think that she shoots any 360 video and edits that. So it’s basically just another GoPro but with poorer video quality. She could have two GoPros on the handlebars, one on the left side and one on the right, and it would look almost exactly the same.
And I find even the basic camera placement to be unappealing. They’re fairly low and often tilted. Both cameras end up slanted upwards and pointing mainly at her and the sky. I know from experience that it isn’t easy to raise a camera up high from the handlebars and get them at eye level so that they show a more natural view of your surroundings and the road behind you. So I understand simply putting your camera on the handlebars on a low mount and leaving it there. It’s the easiest and simplest thing to do. And I understand not stopping to move cameras around to capture more interesting angles. And I understand not editing the video to show what is going on around you. All of that takes energy and time. In fact, it takes a huge amount of energy and time. But considering how immensely popular her videos are, I keep expecting them to be more sophisticated.
This first video on this Africa trip was particularly disappointing for me. I got the impression that on this trip she is even less interested in the video side of things than ever before. Perhaps she is tired of it. I can understand that. Simply riding a motorcycle through Africa is challenging and time- and energy-consuming enough for any person to attempt. To fold shooting, editing, and uploading video into that experience can be overwhelming. It’s understandable to take a simple approach. But, again, when her videos get millions of views, I somehow expect more. I expect to be wowed and blown away. Yet, that video was simply ordinary.
There was also the usual Itchy Boots clickbait in the thumbnail and title. The thumbnail is of some police officers looking unfriendly, with a police car in the background and the giant words in the sky MOROCCAN POLICE. And the video title reads “I need their help.” When I saw that, I naturally assumed that she was robbed or attacked and went to the police for help. Or maybe she had a bad accident. And it turns out that nothing happened at all. She was just trying to take her motorcycle onto a toll highway, and the automatic machine wouldn’t issue a ticket for her. She had to ask around for anyone that could help her figure out how to get the machine working, and some nearby police helped her. The feature attraction of this video was clearly the historic town of Chefchaouen. A thumbnail of that town’s unique appearance would have been a more natural and honest thumbnail. But I guess she calculates that a thumbnail hinting at some great police or crime drama will draw more attention.
The music also struck me as odd. In all the previous “seasons” of Itchy Boots, I found the music to be too sweeping and majestic and orchestral. It felt weird and out of place to me, like it was meant for a big and dramatic show on television, a BBC production, not a simple YouTube vlog. In the intro to this most recent video, she uses similar grand sweeping orchestral music, but then it switches to some flute music or something like that. It feels quite odd to my ears. And during the video of her rebuilding her motorcycle, she stuck in some time lapses with some very strange music. I understand what leads to a person choosing strange or inappropriate music. I do it all the time myself. I’m hopeless when it comes to music. And I’m usually so tired and stressed out by the time I’m choosing music that I just grab the first thing I come across and stick it in. But her channel and her videos are so massively popular that I instinctively expect to find the best o
f everything: the best video editing, the best video quality, the best audio quality, the best music. Yet, just as with my poorly-done and relatively very unpopular videos, the music in her videos seems weird. I’ve also never liked her opening sentence for her videos: “Good morning, Internet.” It seems impersonal and off putting. I don’t want to be lumped in with a faceless and nameless thing called the Internet.
Finally, when she was walking around the streets of Chefchaouen, she seemed to have the GoPro set to one of the Ultra-Wide fields of view. It seemed far too wide to me. The video was quite distorted. I was surprised she did that. And, of course, she didn’t include any of the logistical or practical information that I like to see in a travel video. There was, in fact, very little content in the video at all. There was nothing about Morocco and its history and languages and culture and religions. There was nothing about tourist visas – their cost and validity period. There was nothing about prices of food or hotel rooms. It was, as I said, a very simple video. She shot video of her motorcycle ride to this town and showed the room at her hotel, walked around the beautiful streets, and had a meal. And that was about the whole thing. But it’s already been viewed over 600,000 times.
Switching topics, last night I realized that I had had some thoughts about picking up a couple of GoPro and Insta360 mounting accessories while I was in Kuala Lumpur. And I had completely forgotten about that. I’ve been so busy and distracted since I got here. Therefore, I’m going to go to some camera stores today to try to find a couple of items that might be useful. I had this idea that I could use a GoPro Handlebar Mount or two. I might even be able to use them to mount cameras on the stick that I have attached to the bike frame. Therefore, shopping is going to be a big part of today.