Monday, November 11, 2024
7:49 a.m. Room 19, Hotel Malahayati
Tanjung Balai, Sumatra, Indonesia
(3,842 words)
The world seems a much better place this morning, and that is entirely because I managed to sleep a bit more. That always strikes me as amusing. When we aren’t feeling great, we tend to look for big reasons for that and contemplate big changes we need to make in our lives. Yet, my life has not changed at all in the last few hours. It is exactly the same as it was when I went to bed yesterday. I’m exactly the same person I was yesterday. I haven’t changed at all. I didn’t suddenly become rich or handsome or younger. I didn’t fall in love. I didn’t achieve great success. There is nothing in the outside world or in me that has changed. Yet, I feel great. Happy and positive and full of energy. And the only reason for that is that at about four a.m. this morning, I put in earplugs and forced myself to stay in bed, and by some miracle, I fell asleep and I slept well for an additional three hours until just after seven a.m. The key to happiness? Earplugs and turning your body off for an extra three hours. I managed to NOT exist for an extra three hours, and that changed my mood completely.
I spent yesterday as well working on Patreon, and that is probably the main subject I could talk about this morning. Nothing else happened of note that I can remember. When I’ve gone out for meals, I haven’t had big adventures. I’ve just gone to simple local places and had simple local meals. I discovered a mie ayam bakso stall right across the street from my hotel, and that has made my life simpler. I used to go for a rather challenging and somewhat long walk down the main street to go to my favorite mie ayam bakso restaurant. But I don’t need to deal with the busy traffic on that road anymore. I can get my mie ayam bakso right here. I just have to time things right for when they’re open. The only challenge with this place is that there tend to be a lot of mosquitoes. I get bitten a lot. So I can’t sit there for very long. When the meal is done, I get up and leave.
One disappointment for me is that the nice store across the street that I liked to frequent hasn’t been open for a long time. I started to get annoyed with the place because they had such unreliable opening hours. I would have my heart set on getting a cold soy milk from them and taking it back to my room to enjoy. But when I got there, they’d be closed. I could get a cold drink or some ice cream from AlfaMart, before this store, but that was always risky. The AlfaMart is just far enough away that there was a risk that your drink would be warm and your ice cream would be melted by the time you were ready to enjoy it. The thing is that in the short walk from AlfaMart to this hotel, I’m almost guaranteed to meet some people that want to talk to me. And as I stand there and chat with them, it’s like I’ve got ants in my pants. I was so excited to get the cold drinks, and I was rushing back to my hotel room, anticipating the moment when I could crack one open. But then I would end up stopping for a couple of long conversations and to take pictures with people in my neighborhood. And my drinks would warm up. The store right across the road solved that problem. So I would walk past the AlfaMart. I would skip the sure thing. And I was happy to do that because AlfaMart is famous for slow service. It’s incredible how slow they are. In fact, on three occasions recently that I can remember, I was standing in line with my purchases for so long that I just gave up. I’d be getting a cold drink and perhaps a small tub of ice cream, and I was already calculating the dash I was about to make to get back to my hotel room. And then the cashier would take so long that the drink would warm up and the ice cream would start to melt before I even managed to pay for them. It’s crazy how bad their service is. I even walked out one time when I was trying to buy instant coffee. There is no ticking clock associated with instant coffee. I could stand in line for thirty minutes and it wouldn’t affect the coffee. However, I just put the coffee back on the shelf and left. I was in that lineup for so long that I just couldn’t take it anymore. And I did it on principle. I didn’t want to give my business to an outfit that has such inefficient service. On previous trips to Sumatra I made an absolute point of ALWAYS going to an Indomaret if I had the choice. I’d always look for an Indomaret near me, I’d walk or ride my bike twice the distance to go to an Indomaret over an AlfaMart that was closer. Standing in line at an AlfaMart is a comedy. The things that go on just blow your mind. However, when I walked out of the AlfaMart or skipped it completely with the idea that I can just go to the local store across from my hotel, I’d often find that the local store was closed. I’ve often thought that it’s inevitable that local mom and pop shops get run out of business when an Indomaret or even an AlfaMart moves in next door. And you can think how terrible it is that big chains put local shops out of business. But at least with the big chains, you know when they are open. You can rely on them being open. For local shops to compete, they have to at least be open. That’s the minimum requirement for a business, isn’t it? You can’t make any money at all if your doors are constantly closed and locked. Even dedicated customers like me will eventually just give up on you and go elsewhere.
So that was the situation with my local neighborhood shop, and then at some point, they seemed to just shutter their doors permanently. They haven’t been open at all for a very long time. And I think what happened is that someone in the family passed away. I don’t know exactly who owns the shop, but the building is attached to a family house, and that house was the site of a very large funeral that went on for three days. So I think the family is in mourning, and that is why the store has been closed for so long. I don’t know if or when they will ever open again.
I’ll have to stop and think for a moment to remember what I learned and what I accomplished with Patreon yesterday. That’s pretty much all I did all day, so I must have achieved something, but I’m not entirely sure what it was. It was the day before that I really sunk my teeth into the Collections feature. And I know that yesterday I continued with that. I changed some of the thumbnails and I created a couple of new Collections, and I had to make the thumbnails for those. And I gave some thought to new types of content that I could add to Patreon. One idea I had is a feature I called “Time Capsule”. This would be a picture, a video, or a piece of writing from the past. I have a bunch of old stuff uploaded to various places around the Internet. I have a lot of photos from my life before YouTube. And I even have a lot of stuff on WordPress blogs. I still have my old Cycling Canadian website, and I’ve been thinking of migrating all of that over to my new Planet Doug website. And in the process, I could copy and paste some of that into a Patreon post. It would be a blast from the past. A little glimpse into something I did long before YouTube even existed.
With this in mind, I visited my old Cycling Canadian blog just to confirm that it still existed. I keep expecting to go back there one day and find that it had been destroyed or hacked or had simply disintegrated on its own. I don’t maintain it. I don’t update anything. And the theme and plugins and overall structure is a disaster waiting to happen. I would fix it, but I don’t have the time and I don’t know how. My idea is to simply let it die. But maybe I can find the time to copy and paste the occasional section over to Planet Doug. And along the way, I could post a chunk or two to Patreon as a Time Capsule post.
When I visited my old blog yesterday, I came across a journal entry from a very long time ago. And I learned something fascinating: I learned the exact date and year that I first went to South Korea. And I had completely forgotten about that. People often ask me how long I’ve been in this part of the world, and this period of my life essentially begins when I first flew to South Korea to look for a job teaching English. And I always tell people this was in 1995. That date was stuck in my mind for some reason. And I think it was because this journal entry was dated January 2, 1995. And the journal entry was about going to South Korea to teach English. Therefore, I always say I first came to southeast asia in 1995 and therefore I’ve been sort of based here for nearly thirty years.
However, I read that entire journal entry yesterday, and at the very end I wrote about the exact date of that flight. And it wasn’t in 1995. It was in 1991. I WROTE that journal entry in 1995, but I was writing about something that happened on February 19th, 1991. That’s when I left Canada and came to Asia as a youngish adventurer. I do not have a head for dates, so I can’t remember when anything happened or even how old I was. But, I just asked an AI, and I was informed that I was 27 years old when I flew to South Korea. And that was nearly 34 years ago. My brain struggles to comprehend how long it has been and how much has happened since then. I have a longstanding feud with cliches, proverbs, platitudes, and maxims. I find them all to be dumb and wrong. One such saying is that life is short. People say that all the time. But I beg to differ. Life is NOT short. It is long. It is extremely long. It is so long that previous periods of my life have faded into the mist of lost memory. I barely have any concept of them. I routinely completely forget about entire periods of my life. And when I happen to stumble across a photo or a piece of writing from a previous time in my life, I’m usually surprised. It’s like a reminder, and my brain goes, “Oh, yeah! I forgot about that. I went to university for four years.” It’s like that entire dramatic period of my life is just gone, like it never happened. And when I think back to flying into South Korea on that extremely cold day in 1991, I’m astonished.
I have plenty of such writing online in various places, and yesterday, as I said, I had this idea to create a category of such posts on Patreon. And I could call that Collection the Time Capsule or something like that.
I also spent some time working on this idea of Patreon tiers again. I’ve been trying to come to grips with that for a very long time. In fact, there are some journal entries on this Patreon that date all the way back to 2022 during the pandemic when I was living in Mae Sot in Thailand. I was already thinking about Patreon way back then and I was writing about it. What I wrote then isn’t much different from what I’m writing now. It’s different now because I’m more committed to actually launching the Patreon and making it real. Perhaps I should have done it already back in 2022, but I wasn’t as motivated. I find I’m quite motivated now. I will probably delete those 2022 journal entries from Patreon. They read as kind of weird to me now because I was babbling about Patreon so much, and then I never did anything about it. And my Patreon babbling today is just repeating much of what I was already thinking and writing back in 2022.
When I started thinking about deleting those old posts, I decided to make a backup copy of them. And I went through all of them and made copies and saved them in an online journal archive that I maintain. And since I started with those old Patreon posts, I thought I might as well make a backup copy of these new ones as well. So I spent some time doing that as well. That ended up taking longer than it should have. The issue is that I’m treating Patreon like a website. I’m creating a variety of content, just like I would with a personal blog or website, and Patreon doesn’t have the full suite of tools for that. It’s not designed for work like that. So the steps involved in copying and pasting every post one by one was somewhat slow and laborious. But I did do it. I copied all 65,000 words and nearly 100 pages into my archive and organized it there. I assume I will continue to do that into the future. Whenever I write something for Patreon, I don’t actually write it inside the Patreon site, of course. That would just be asking for trouble. The Internet could glitch, and I would lose whatever I had written. Instead, I do all this writing in a normal text document on my laptop, and this file is being saved automatically to Google Drive. And when it is done, I copy it to Patreon and format it there. And when THAT is done, I will copy that over to my archive, so I have a backup of everything. As long as my online journal archive is open in Google Chrome all the time, it won’t take long to make this backup. Just Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. Add a title and date, and I’m done.
The online archive I use gives an automatic word count for every document, so, just for fun, I copied that word count back to the posts on Patreon. I thought that maybe people would like to see just how long one of these posts is before they click on the “Show More” button. Maybe they can’t face 5,000 words, and they decide there’s no point opening the post. I noticed that on the Internet, some websites tell you how long it will take to read this or that article. It seems important these days to tell people how much time they’d have to invest in consuming online media.
The other big change I made yesterday was to add a descriptive phrase in every post title. I decided it was a good idea to tell people what type of post it was. And I made that decision because I found that the list of posts was starting to get confusing. They all look the same regardless of the main type of content. Most of them are journal entries, of course. And I’ve grouped them together into a Collection called Planet Doug Journal. However, if I wanted to, I could add a picture at the top of every post or even a video thumbnail. And when I post an actual video from YouTube, I usually write a short description to go along with it. And I did the same with photo posts. Therefore, they all looked the same. And you couldn’t tell if this was a journal (written text) post, a video post, or a photo post or something else. They all look the same, and there doesn’t seem to be any type of label showing people what kind of post it is. When I create a new post for Patreon, I have to choose from among the various types:
- Text
- Video
- Audio
- Image
- Link
- Poll
- Livestream
And it makes logical sense that the post itself would have some distinctive feature or label or some kind of appearance to distinguish one type of post from another. But I don’t think there is. They all look the same to me. So I went back over all the posts, and I added my own description before each title:
- Journal Post:
- Video Post:
- Photo Post:
- 360 Video Post:
- The Blue Dot
- Photo Montage
- Relive 3D Map
I don’t know if this is necessary, but it makes me happy. I like things to be organized and clear. When someone sees the words “Video Post”, they know that the main thing to do is to click on the video and watch it. The words I wrote under the video are not important. They are just the video description from YouTube that I copy and pasted. And if they see the words “Photo Montage”, they know it is a video slideshow of pictures and screenshots. And if I wrote a description of the Photo Montage, they know that it isn’t important. I’m conflicted about the “Photo Montage” Collection. It’s more like a slideshow than a montage. But the word slideshow sounds so cheap. Nobody wants to sit through a slideshow. That word is associated with tortuous family evenings watching the family holiday slides. Personally, I LOVE slideshows. But I know that the common joke in popular culture is that slideshows are awful and torture to sit through. Therefore, I went with Photo Montage. But it has evolved into more than just a Photo Montage. As I wrote about before, I don’t put music under the images anymore. I narrate and tell the story of the images. And I don’t know if the name “Photo Montage” properly conveys that. But it is what I have for now. And I worry that there isn’t a strong enough distinction between Photo Montage and Photo Post. A Photo Post consists of just photographs. But the Photo Montage is a video of photos in a slideshow format with narration. But when you see them on Patreon, they do look quite different. So it should be okay.
Of course, all of these problems for a visitor or viewer can be solved by them using the Collections feature. If all they want to do is read these Planet Doug journal entries, they can click on the Planet Doug Journal Collection, and they will get a list of ONLY journal entries in chronological order. Same thing for regular videos, bonus videos, etc. However, I doubt that the majority of people who might be checking out a Planet Doug Patreon would even know about Collections. I tend to hyper organize everything. I will have a long nested sequence of categories for everything, but a lot of that organizing work is wasted because the average person doesn’t even notice it.
I would also like to add some kind of graphic to the journal posts. It would be nice to have a small embedded thumbnail image at the very top. And I played around with that yesterday, but when you insert a photograph, it always shows up huge. It fills up the entire column. And now the post doesn’t look like a journal post anymore. It just looks like a photo post. So it becomes confusing. And there is no feature in Patreon that allows you to format a post with a thumbnail image or anything like that. You can’t even choose how big or small to make the photograph. You can’t even center it on the page. And you certainly can’t wrap text around a photograph. One workaround would be to embed a photo from an online photo site, such as SmugMug. With SmugMug, you can select how big or small to make the embedded photo. But now you are talking about a longer and more laborious process. I’d have to upload the photo to SmugMug first and then get the embed code and insert it into Patreon. It adds more steps.
Today, among other things, I might finally get around to testing the audio post type. I don’t know how it works. I really want to know because I really miss doing my long form BTS videos. I don’t know what to do about them. I haven’t shot or posted one of those videos to the BTS channel for a long time. I simply haven’t had time. And they were largely replaced while I was in Port Dickson by the videos I shot while testing my bicycle and all the camera gear mounts, etc. And then they got replaced further by these written journal entries. I’d love to do sit-down BTS videos, but they just take so long. Shooting them is fine. But then I have to edit them, export them, and upload them. And it can take an entire day or even two to do that for just one BTS video. And you have to ask yourself if it is worth it. Sure, they’re fun and I enjoy them. And I miss doing them. But when I make one of those videos, it takes away time from doing other things. It’s an opportunity cost situation.
These written journal entries by comparison are much faster. Once I’ve written one, I reread it to correct spelling mistakes. And then I copy and paste it, and it’s done. It’s so much faster. But I was wondering if audio might be a happy medium. People have told me in the past that they would play one of my BTS videos in the background while they were doing housework or something like that. The video is just me sitting on a bed. So the video isn’t important. Maybe I can have an audio component to Patreon. I’ve been attracted to the idea of podcasting, but I have no idea how podcasts work. I don’t know how to make one. And these days, everyone is making video podcasts.
Just for the experience, I think I’m going to read my very first Journal Post aloud and record that and upload it as an audio version. Then I can see what it looks like and how this feature works.