Tuesday, November 5, 2024
9:39 a.m. Room 19, Hotel Malahayati
Tanjung Balai, Sumatra, Indonesia
(1,308 words)
I had a rough night last night for some reason. I think I had too much on my mind with too many things going on, and I got no sleep at all. I ended up unable to concentrate on any one thing. I had no idea what to do next. I defaulted to just editing video. That at least feels like you are getting something useful done. Unfortunately, the raw video I shot on my shopping day here in Tanjung Balai came together at nearly 2 hours. That’s because I shot 20 minutes of video inside my hotel room before I even stepped outside. And then I talked on camera as I rode my bicycle to the Telkomsel Grapari office. And then I kept talking and telling the SIM card and IMEI story as I rode my bicycle downtown to shop for a kettle. I shot video of the entire sequence of going from store to store looking for a kettle. And then I recorded video inside an ice cream parlor as I talked about the kettle. I kept shooting video and talking as I rode my bicycle back to the hotel. Finally, I recorded a 20-minute sequence of actually using the kettle. THAT is a lot of kettle talk and kettle content. Now I don’t know what to do with it.
As I was editing the video, I actually found it interesting. There is a lot going on around me on the streets of Tanjung Balai. It seems fun to me. I also find the story about fixing up and rearranging my hotel room to be interesting. That’s part of the low budget lifestyle. But people on YouTube don’t seem to appreciate that lifestyle. They respond to people staying in fancy resorts and nice hotels. They want to be able to ooh and aah about how nice a place is. They don’t seem to relate to this low budget lifestyle. The old-school backpacker lifestyle seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. I feel like I’m the only one still hanging on in that world.
Anyway, I found everything in the video to be interesting. But that could be because I am watching myself. To an outsider, it’s just some dude buying a cheap kettle. Why would that be of interest to a stranger? A YouTube audience is yearning for adventure and beautiful drone footage, not the struggles of daily life. So I don’t know what to do with this video now.
I was thinking that I could keep the 20-minute hotel room section and just make it a BTS video for Patreon. I could do the same thing with the 20-minute section of using and testing the kettle back in my room. And I could keep the actual cycling through Tanjung Balai part as a Planet Doug video. That makes some sense. But it does get confusing in my brain because it’s like all the video I shoot qualifies as BTS content. Once I take all the video that is BTS in tone and move it to Patreon or a BTS channel, there is nothing left for the regular channel. We’ll see what I end up doing with it.
I’ve also been doing something new and different. I’ve been shooting random video clips with my smartphone and with a GoPro Hero 9 around my neck without a microphone. These video clips aren’t connected to any bigger story. I was just doing it for fun and thinking that these random clips could be fun to post as a YouTube short or to Instagram or to Patreon. But yesterday, I took all of them and strung them together in one video. I ended up with about one hour of these clips. I kind of enjoy the video. It’s random and jumpy and all over the place. I make no attempt to connect one clip with the next one. Anyone watching the video would have no idea what day it was or what came before or what comes after. So perhaps it is a perfect kind of bonus video for Patreon. I’ll work on it more today and see how I feel about it.
I’ve also been having an issue with the tax side of my YouTube channel. A couple of years ago, YouTube announced this new policy whereby everyone in the world has to pay taxes in the United States. It doesn’t matter where you are from or where you shoot your videos, you have to register with the IRS (tax agency) in the United States. I guess technically it doesn’t matter if you actually register or not. It’s not like YouTube or the IRS is going to track down every single YouTuber in the world and charge them with tax evasion if they don’t register. That’s because everyone still pays tax no matter what. YouTube simply deducts the tax automatically and hands it over the US government. But I assume they do this at the absolute highest tax bracket. They’ll just take as much as they can. And I also assume that if you register properly, then you are taxed at a lower rate.
I went through the registration process at the time and it was a confusing nightmare, as these things always tend to be. I have no idea how it worked or what I was supposed to do. I just followed the steps that they presented and filled out the online forms they put in front of me until it was over. And I just crossed my fingers that I had done it properly. It was exhausting and stressful, and once again I wondered how it is that nobody else seemed to have been bothered by it or found it difficult or confusing. What is it about me that makes everything so hard?
In any event, this tax form (as they call it) expires. And mine expires this year, and I’ve been bombarded with messages and emails from YouTube telling me that there is a problem with my Adsense account, and I need to resubmit the tax form. I haven’t gotten around to doing it yet. I just couldn’t face it. And since I didn’t have reliable WiFi in Port Dickson and I don’t have reliable WiFi in Sumatra yet, I’ve been putting it off. I don’t want to be halfway through the process and then suddenly have the WiFi cut out. I did check into it yesterday, and I went to the place where I am supposed to fix this problem. And right from the start, it was confusing, and I was facing errors and issues that nobody else encounters. For one thing, there was an error message saying that I had to submit a GST tax number. The GST is a Canadian Goods and Services Tax. Of course, I don’t have a GST tax number. I don’t know what they are, whether I need one, or even where to get one. I checked with some friend YouTubers, and they said they have never been asked for this number. And their only explanation is that somehow YouTube thinks I’m a business that has tax-exempt status, like a charity. Obviously, I’m not. And I have no explanation for why I’m getting this error message and no one else is. I’m scared to death of clicking on the “Submit New Form” button. I’m positive about a thousand things will go wrong when I try to do it. People I know have done it and said it was no problem at all. They just did it. But I’m pretty sure it won’t be so straightforward for me.
I didn’t do a lot that involved being in Sumatra yesterday. I spent the entire day just editing videos and doing other YouTube-related things.