Monday, June 29th, 2026
7:55 a.m. Room A1, Makhota Vibe Inn
Melaka, Malaysia
I just posted my journal entry from last Friday. In that entry, I was writing mainly about how the weather has been changing, and I was wondering what that meant for potentially cycling up the east coast of Malaysia once I leave Melaka. Oddly enough, right after I wrote that on Friday, we experienced a Saturday and Sunday of intensely blue, clear, extremely hot days. And this morning, Monday, I woke up to rain and grey skies. And that turned out to be quite lucky because the annual Dragon Boat Races took place this weekend. I was worried for the organizers that they would put so much work into the event and then get hit with two days of nothing but rain. That would have been dismal. But they got the best weather they could possibly have hoped for.
However, before I talk about the Dragon Boat Races, I should go all the way back to Friday when, in fact, I DID revisit the Galeri Warisan Kota Melaka and shoot a second video. As I wrote about already, I had plans to shoot that video on Thursday. But I ended up spending the entire day doing research and other things. And that somehow led to a terrible night of no sleep. I guess my brain was too busy and I didn’t get any physical exercise during the day, so I was unable to sleep. And when I finally DID go to the museum to shoot the follow-up video on Friday, I was exhausted before it even started.
When I was at the museum, I felt completely off my game. I felt like I was babbling. I felt like I wasn’t making any sense. I felt like I wasn’t remembering things that I needed to get right. And all of that was probably true. But when I edited the video, it seemed okay. I could have done a lot better, but I think my main points still came across. I may not have dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s and gotten everything correct, but the main points were there. And if I got things wrong, I guess it’s okay. Oddly enough, while editing this video, I was inspired to track down a couple of videos I remembered from another YouTuber in Malaysia named Liam Richards. He travelled around Malaysia on a motorcycle, and I remembered that he had visited the Submarine Museum and shot another video about the history of Melaka. So I was curious about his videos, and I watched them. And if I felt uncertain about the accuracy of my own videos, I was reassured by watching his. His videos are far more popular than mine. Yet, he said either nothing about the history or he cast such a wide net that it hardly seemed relevant or he said things that were completely wrong. And nobody seemed to mind. Everyone in the comments called him some kind of history genius and said he should become a history professor. So I don’t think the average YouTube audience is going to care that much if I happen to get some some detail wrong.
I was actually surprised at Liam’s video about the Submarine Museum. He knew nothing about it and said nothing about it. I thought the story about that submarine was fascinating, and I read up on its history and I tried to include as much factual information as I could in my video. At the very least, I knew the name of the submarine and knew where it came from and how it was used for training Malaysian submariners. I knew the basics about how it ended up sitting there in a field outside of Melaka. Despite Liam’s interest in history, he knew none of that and said nothing about it. He used his camera to show the submarine from the outside and then did a tour through the interior, but he didn’t say a word about its history or purpose. I guess he didn’t know. And no one in the video comments seemed to care. I also noticed that, assuming you think of the submarine as an actual Submarine Museum, he was quite disrespectful. He handled everything, touched things, sat in the chairs, climbed into the bunks, climbed up the ladders, opened doors and tried to open doors. Museums have the written and unwritten rules that you don’t touch the exhibits. I guess it’s a bit unclear when you are talking about the museum itself being an actual submarine. Still, when I went through the submarine, I was aware that even though all the buttons and computers and dials were out in the open, I should try to control myself and make sure I don’t touch these things. But Liam treated the submarine like it was a children’s playground and he climbed all over everything. I actually wondered if it was his video that caused some of the signs and barriers to be put in place. He opened a door in the floor of the submarine and exposed a dark and wet basement area. But when I was there, there was now a sign on that door saying that you are not allowed to open it. And Liam climbed into the chairs where the submariners would sit to drive the submarine. But when I was there, there was a yellow chain blocking access to those chairs. There was no sign saying “Don’t Sit in the Chairs”, but the yellow chain was clearly a barrier you weren’t supposed to cross, so I didn’t. Interestingly, when I was there, some Malaysian families came through the submarine, and their children climbed past the yellow chain and they climbed all over the chairs, just like Liam. They ran all over the museum and touched everything and handled everything and their parents didn’t care and let them do whatever they wanted.
I found Liam’s video about the history of Melaka equally interesting from a YouTube point of view. The title of his video was “How Opium Caused the Richest Kingdom in South East Asia to FALL…” He opened the video with seven minutes of him going over a Google Map of the world on his laptop and talking about the maritime trading routes between Europe and Asia. Much of what he said didn’t make sense to me. I’m no expert in history, but it just felt off. And some of the facts and figures felt off. He even called the leader of the Chinese treasure fleet “Juan Hee”. That, of course, is Zheng He. That really jumped out at me because the pronunciation of Chinese and Malay names is a real problem. I struggle with it so much, and I try to get it somewhat close, at least for a standard English way of saying those names. I’m not going to try to say Zheng He with a perfect Chinese accent. I try to say it the way a typical English-speaking person would say it. And I’m sure I get it wrong, but I don’t think I ever came up with anything so obviously wrong as “Juan Hee”. But again, no one in the comments had anything to say about that terribly pronunciation. I think if I had called him Juan Hee, people would really have let me have it in the comments. But nobody minded in Liam’s video.
And I remember he was down at the Melaka River and at the Middleburg Bastion there and talking about history. But he didn’t seem to know very much. I questioned most of the things he said, including some simple facts, such as the size of Melaka’s fighting forces when the Portuguese arrived. He said that Melaka had 4,000 to 5,000 soldiers, when I believe the true size was closer to 20,000. He also blamed the fall of Melaka on the Sultan being an opium addict. Yet, the historical record is much more complex than that, and there is not much evidence to support that he was an opium addict. Liam didn’t really give the Sultan much credit and ignored a lot, including the fact that the Sultan personally led attacks against the Portuguese while riding his army’s war elephants. He was actively involved in planning and executing the defence of the city. He wasn’t some opium addict lying in a dark room oblivious to events going on around him.
Anyway, I could go on and on about things in his video that I felt weren’t quite accurate. Yet, because it’s on YouTube, it doesn’t seem to matter. The video is far more popular than mine. People love it. And all the comments are about what a historical genius Liam is. I guess the lesson is to not take YouTube too seriously.
Chances are I said just as many things in my latest video that weren’t quite true. I did my best, though, and I walked through the museum a second time and stopped at the most important exhibits and talked about the things I had learned since I shot the first video. A funny thing is that I’ve already edited the second video and while doing that, I fact-checked myself again, and then I found out MORE things that I forgot, didn’t know, or got wrong. So it’s like there could be an endless series of videos, each one correcting what I said wrong in the previous one. A big one, for example, is that in this video I talked again about how the Portuguese were given some ships by the Chinese community in Melaka. And they took one of these Chinese junks and reinforced it and mounted guns on the highest part of the bow and then ran it aground near the Melaka bridge to use it as an elevated position to shoot cannon and musket fire down on the defenders. I’ve told that story a couple of times. But now as I was editing this video, I did some fact-checking and now I’m finding out that this probably is just a story and didn’t really happen. So now I have no idea what is true and what isn’t.
The rest of my time over the last three days was involved with the Dragon Boat Races. Overall, it was a great experience. There were the usual issues that I always have. The main one was that I had trouble figuring out the details of the races. I wanted to watch them and shoot some video, of course, but in order to do that, I had to know where the races were taking place, when they were taking place, and how they were organized. And that was impossible for me to figure out. I did find some information online that had a schedule indicating they ran from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Saturday morning. With my normal routines, being down by the river at or before eight in the morning would be no problem. I’d be awake hours before that. But lately, I’ve been so tired. I just haven’t had the usual pattern of being awake and full of energy by 5 or 6 a.m. In fact, I had trouble getting to the river by 8, and I didn’t make it. I can’t remember exactly what time it was, but I was probably there at around 8:45. I’d have to check the time stamps of the videos I shot.
And I also didn’t really know where to go. I’d read that on Saturday, the teams were competing in long distance 8-kilometer races. But I didn’t know where the start line was or where the finish line was. I didn’t know how many teams were competing, where the teams were from, or how the races were organized. Perhaps the information about that was out there, but I couldn’t track it down anywhere. In particular, I didn’t know if the race involved going 8 kilometers up the river or 8 kilometers down the river. Or maybe the race involved going 4 kilometers in one direction, turning around and completing 4 kilometers back. If that were the case, the start line and the finish line would be the same, but I didn’t know if the finish line and start line was downtown in the heritage zone or upriver. Essentially, I knew nothing.
And then to my surprise everything worked out perfectly. Despite knowing nothing, my timing was very good. It took me a long time to figure all this out, but the 8-kilometer race started from the heritage zone, right across from the big Casa del Rio hotel. And the race started at exactly 8 a.m., but the boats didn’t leave all at once. There isn’t enough room on the river for a large number of boats to be paddling at the same time. So rather than the boats competing at the same time, they all left at staggered times. One boat would leave, and then thirty seconds or one minute later, the next boat would leave. And the organizers noted when they left and then noted the time when they got back. And then once every boat finished the full 8 kilometers and returned to the start line, which was now the finish line, they could compare the times and declare the winner.
And since I had arrived late, I had missed the start of the race. All the boats had left. But I arrived just in time to witness the first boat completing the race. This first boat had gone 4 kilometers up the river and then turned around and came back 4 kilometers, and the full route took each boat about 40 minutes. So it was essentially a single 40-minute race but with each boat leaving at a different time. I was able to hang out at the finish line for the entire time and witness all the competing teams completing the race. Even then, however, I had trouble getting things straight in my head. Of course, there were several categories for the various teams, and everyone I talked to told me something different. But in general, there appeared to be women-only teams, men-only teams, mixed teams, seniors teams, and the open category. So I think there were 5 categories and a certain number of boats and teams in each category. But the rules also seemed to be a bit loose. For example, for a mixed team, I wasn’t sure if there were rules about how many men and how many women could be on each time. I went there believing each boat had a crew of 22 people – 20 rowers, one drummer and one steerer. But these boats were smaller and had crews of 12 with only 10 rowers. So could a mixed team have a total of 11 men and just 1 woman and still qualify as a mixed team? Or did they have to have 6 men and 6 women? Nobody seemed to know. And nobody seemed to worry about it very much.
This could have been a mistake on my part, but I ended up filming that morning mainly with my Insta360 X3 for video and my GoPro plus Rode for audio. I did it that way because there were lots of people there – mainly dragon boat teams – and I wanted to be able to include video of all the people around me and not just the boats on the water. So the 360 camera let me film everything and reframe later. And that may have been a mistake because so far the video doesn’t look very good. And reframing the 360 video is turning out to be difficult because there was so much shouting and cheering and other ambient noise that the camera picked up very little of my voice. So I have no idea what I was talking about in the video, and I didn’t know where to aim the camera while reframing. But maybe it will all work out.
I was lucky in that while I was watching the boats cross the finish line, a woman standing next to me chimed in to answer a question that I was asking out loud about all the many things I didn’t understand. And I ended up talking with her a lot and I was able to ask her a bunch of questions. She was on a team from Singapore, and she explained a lot of things I didn’t know. It was from her that I learned that the boats went 4 kilometers upriver and then turned around and came back. She also told me that the start times for each team were staggered. And she told me something very, very important: She told me that the teams didn’t have their own boats. All the boats were owned by the Dragon Boat Festival organization, and each team was assigned a boat at random. So they were all competing in the exact same type of boat. So no team had an advantage in terms of having a lighter or more streamlined or more high-tech boat. PLUS that meant that the teams didn’t have to transport any boats. I thought international teams had to fly into Malaysia with their own huge dragon boats, and I wondered how they handled the logistics of that. But all they really brought were their own paddles and maybe life jackets. PLUS I learned that the international teams were not technically international at all. There was an Australian team and a team from the Philippines, but rather than flying into Malaysia from those countries, all the team members were actually living and working in Malaysia. So these were dragon boat clubs that formed among the expat communities. And that made a lot more sense to me.
The morning went by very quickly since I arrived late and the whole thing was done by maybe 10:30. And this also made sense to me because I wondered how the rest of Melaka that depended on the river for their livelihood would feel about the whole thing being shut down for the races. It was a Saturday after all and that was peak time for the river boat cruises to make money from tourists. And if the cruise boats can’t run, they lose the day’s income. And I’m assuming that they came to an arrangement with the Dragon Boat Festival organizers that they can shut down the river from 8 to 10 in the morning and not a minute later. That’s why they had to start so early. And I think starting so early certainly hurts the races as a spectator sport. I call myself a morning person, and even I had trouble getting there by 8. Of course, if I knew for sure the races started at 8, I would have made sure to get there on time. But for spectators, there were two related problems: the races started early and it was impossible to get information about the start time and place. At least, I couldn’t get that information.
The end result, perhaps because of these two factors, was that there were very few spectators. In fact, almost everyone there other than me and a scattering of others were either team members or team supporters. The mood was extremely loud and festive. That was fantastic. Lots of people on the rivershore were cheering on the boat crews as they poured it on to cross the finish line. But all those people cheering were the crews and supporters of other dragon boat teams. And that was another aspect to the races: there was so much good sportsmanship. The teams were competitive and wanted to win, but they all cheered on everyone else. Every team was cheering for other teams and encouraging them. It was a feel-good event and the dragon boat teams were having a wonderful time even if there was hardly anyone there watching.
My original idea was to shoot just one video about the dragon boat races. I knew it was a 2-day event, and there would be races on Saturday and on Sunday. And I thought I could make one video about the overall event. But it soon became clear that I’m not organized or disciplined enough for that. I knew very quickly that I was going to make a separate video about Saturday’s 8-kilometer long-distance race and I was going to make a separate video about Sunday’s 200-meter sprints. The Sunday races were clearly the main event anyway. Saturday’s race was simply an appetizer before the more popular more high-octane sprints on Sunday. When I was there on Saturday, I tried to get information about what would happen on Sunday, but I was frustrated again. In the end, I had no choice but to repeat what I did on Saturday: just wake up as early as I can and walk to the river as early as I can and just hope for the best. For example, I didn’t know exactly where the sprints would take place. I assumed it would at the same place as Saturday, but nobody could confirm that. And I tried to find out for sure where the start line was and where the finish line was. And people told me different things, so I couldn’t be sure.
On Sunday morning, with the experience of Saturday under my belt, I made a concerted effort to leave earlier and arrive at the river at 8 a.m. for the start of the sprints. Luckily my hotel is just 750 meters from the Melaka Bridge, where I guessed the sprints would be starting from. And as far as I know, I arrived at the starting line just seconds before the very first race started. This time, I had plans to leave my 360 camera in my knapsack. My plan was to shoot video with my GoPro and with my Olympus. I was hoping to get some closeup shots of the people paddling the boats. And I can’t do that with my GoPro. It was challenging and tiring to shoot video this way because I still assumed I needed the video from the Olympus but the audio from the GoPro. Later on, when I reviewed a bit of the video, I concluded that the audio from the Olympus built-in microphone would probably be usable. I didn’t even need to shoot with both cameras. I could have used just the Olympus. But I didn’t know that at the time. And in reviewing the video, the Olympus video looked very jerky. I don’t know why. I thought the amazing stabilization of the Olympus would make the video very smooth. When I held the camera steady, the video was very stable. But when I tried to pan and follow the boats, the video would jump ahead. It was quite jerky even though I was moving the camera smoothly. The stabilization would constantly have to catch up with my camera movement and it jerked and jumped ahead. In the future, I’ll have to try using the stabilization in the lens and not the IBIS. Maybe that would work better.
I stayed at the starting line for a long time shooting the start of a lot of races. A big issue I had continued to be my lack of information. I had no idea what was going on. I was kind of narrating the races and talking about the crews of each boat and which crew got off to a faster start. But there was zero information about which crew was which. Four boats lined up for each race, but nothing on the boats indicated with category they were in or what even the teams were. Sometimes you could zoom in on their lifejackets and they might have a name on them that gave a clue to which team it was. But in general, I had no idea which race was which and which team was which. The race could have been part of the Masters category (seniors) or the Open category or the Mixed category. I had no idea. The teams could have been from anywhere in Malaysia or anywhere from around the world. I had no idea. There were no flags and no markings and no signs of any kind to indicate what was going on. I found that made the races a lot less interesting. It’s hard to feel emotional about a race when you have no idea who is even competing. It would be like watching the Olympics or the World Cut but you never know what country the athletes or teams are from or even what event they are competing in. It’s fun to watch them do what they do, but it would be better to know what was going on.
I stayed at the starting line for quite a while, and then I decided to see if I could walk down to the finish line and watch some of the finishes of the races. I was actually a bit worried that I was going to miss it. Based on my experiences on Saturday, I thought the races were going to run from 8 until 10 and then that’s it. And if I didn’t make it to down to the finish line before 10, I would miss the whole thing. But I was completely wrong again. Not only didn’t the races end at 10, they went on all day. The event on Sunday was scheduled from 8 until 5 with the awards ceremony taking place sometime after 5. That’s amazing to me because they were quite fast and efficient with the races. They went off like clockwork and it seemed like a race was taking place very five minutes. And if there was a race happening every five minutes for an 8-hour day, that adds up to a LOT of races. I started to wonder just how many teams and how races there could possibly be.
When I walked down to the finish line, I tried to be very organized. In fact, I was trying to be organized and minimize my mistakes the entire time. So I was routinely and regularly playing back some video from all my cameras to make sure the video looked okay and that I was still recording audio. And I tried to anticipate when batteries might die and cameras might overheat. And I made sure to change the batteries BEFORE they ran out. I didn’t want to have a battery die just at the most important race or big event. And I did okay. But I still screwed up a bunch. It is so hard to stay on top of all this technology, especially when I was using the Olympus and the 360 cameras, which I don’t use all the time. I always have to refresh my memory about how those cameras work and I end up overlooking things and making mistakes in the settings.
Before I walked to the finish line, I made sure to change all the batteries so that I was starting fresh. And I decided to record my walk to the finish line with the 360 camera. I did that because I knew I would be walking through a much more crowded area with lots of people around, and I wanted the ability to reframe afterwards and not have to worry about aiming my GoPro in any particular direction. And when I did all this, I was moving fast and feeling under pressure, because it was getting close to 10 a.m. and I was worried that I was going to miss the last race and I wouldn’t get any video of the boats crossing the finish line. In the end, I needn’t have worried at all. I got to the finish line in plenty of time, and I recorded all kinds of video. And THEN I found out that these races were going to go on all day long until 5 p.m. There were still 7 hours of races to go, and I had plenty of time. In fact, there was no way I could stay there all day and witness and record all the races anyway. I’d die in the heat, and it’s not like I need 9 hours of dragon boat racing video.
Once I found out that the races were going to go on all day, I decided to pack it up mid-morning and go back to my hotel. I could get started on processing all the video and then, if I had the energy, I could return at 4 or 5 in the afternoon and catch the final races. At first, I wasn’t even that concerned about doing that. I had lots of video already, and as far as I knew, they were just timing the races and whoever had the fastest time would be the winner. So it made no difference if I returned at the end of the day. But then, once again, I discovered that I was totally wrong. I saw the organizers at the table where they were monitoring the end of each race, and they didn’t seem to be timing anything. I started asking around, and then I learned that the sprints were organized like an actual tournament. Each time there was a race, the winners of that race would move on to the next stage. So there were quarterfinals and semifinals and finals and things like that. And now that I knew that, the entire event was thrown into a brand new light. I had made a huge deal about being at the sprints BEFORE 8 a.m. because I was worried about missing the event, just as I had missed the start of the long-distance race. But it turned out that there was no point to being there early on Sunday. In fact, you could miss the entire day and just show up at 3 in the afternoon to catch the finals. But I didn’t know that. I had no idea the races were set up as a tournament. And that ties into how I didn’t even know how many categories there were, how many teams there were, and where each team was from. All I saw were dragon boats racing down the river, and I had no idea who was even competing or what the stakes were in each race.
I still got very lucky, though. Once I learned about the tournament structure, I decided to return to my hotel again. There was no way I could stay there at the river for the entire day. I even shot a conclusion to my video because I wasn’t sure I would even be returning. In fact, when I was back at my hotel, I got so involved in editing video that I completely lost track of the time. And it was a surprise to look at the time and see that it was 3:45, and if I wanted to catch the finals, I had to get going. So I quickly packed up my cameras and walked quickly back to the river. This time I went straight to the finish line. And to my amazement, I got there just in time to watch all the finals.
Of course, I didn’t know they were the finals. I got there just in time to take video of a race, and there was a huge amount of cheering and excitement for that race, so I asked people around me what was going on. And they said that that was the final race of one of the categories. And the next four races were going to be the finals of each category. So I ended up witnessing and taking video of all the races that decided which team was the champion of each category. It was perfect timing on my part and completely by accident. However, it still wasn’t quite as exciting as it could have been because I still didn’t really know what was going on. For each race, I had to ask people, “Which category is this?” And people gave me different answers. So even though I was watching the finals for each category, I wasn’t entirely sure if it was the Mixed finals, the Women-only finals, the Men-only finals, or the Master finals. And even when I thought I knew which race was which, I had no idea which team was which. So I didn’t know if the team from Penang was beating the team for Australia or the Filipino team was in the lead over the local Malaka favorites. They were just a bunch of people in boats paddling hard, and I didn’t know who was who or who won and who lost. The only thing I think I was sure about was that the final final final race of the day was the finals of the Open category. And the Open was the top dog. These were the best teams with the best times and the best athletes competing to see who was the absolute winner of the day. So I watched the race in the knowledge that this was what the entire festival was leading up to. This race would determine which team was the key champion for the weekend. And so it was exciting from that point of view. But I still didn’t know which teams had made it to the finals. I had no idea who was racing against who. And right now, I couldn’t tell you who won. I think I might have found out when I was shooting the video. But it was all so meaningless that I don’t really remember.
I thought each team identity was really important and that Penang would be competing against Kuala Lumpur and Johor and Ipoh, and they would be competing against Australia and Singapore and other countries. But I didn’t get a sense of strong identities like that. In fact, as I walked down to the finish line on Sunday, I noticed for the first time that each team tent had a label on it giving the name of the team. I wish I had seen that earlier. But even after I saw the labels, it didn’t help much because most were corporate sponsors. So rather than being the team from Ipoh or the team from Melaka, it was just the name of some company or organization that I had never heard of, and the team still had no clear identity for me.
Still, I’m glad I stayed in Melaka for this event. I enjoyed it very much. And now I face the probably very long task of editing those two videos. It will be fun, but it is going to be a big job. I’m a little bit uninspired about the whole video editing thing right now. I had high hopes for my video about the ships on the island outside of Melaka. I honestly thought that subject would strike a chord with a wider international audience. I had such a great day and I loved rambling around all those junked ships, and I worked so hard on capturing video of the experience and gathering up as much information as I could about what I was seeing. And on YouTube, videos about exploring abandoned places are popular. And I thought the visuals of those ships were amazing. In the video title, I even leaned into the idea that I had to sneak onto the island past security to add that element of adventure. I thought all the key elements were there to make a real video about a real day but also a video that would be very popular. And I had high hopes. But the video is actually one of my least popular videos out of the last ten. So it drives home once again that I just don’t know what I’m doing. I honestly thought that I had put together a video that hit all the key notes to be a success on YouTube. And not only is it NOT popular, it is actually one of my least popular. So I just don’t get it. I’m completely lost when it comes to making entertainment. My instincts are all completely wrong.
I sat down and thought about this and thought about the video and how I had structured it. And I started to re-edit the whole thing. I looked at the video to try to figure out why it is so unpopular, and I made some decisions about the mistakes I made. And I reopened the video project and rebuilt the opening and the ending AND I removed much of the middle. I see all these very popular videos on YouTube where the YouTuber includes zero information about anything. It’s like this video from Liam Richards about the submarine and his video about Melaka history where he either included no information at all or got everything wrong, and everybody loves his videos and tells him he is a genius. Meanwhile, I try very hard to make the video interesting and include context and details and information, and everybody hates it and says I’m boring. So I figure why bother even trying? Why not just throw things together and NOT learn about what I’m seeing? What’s the point of spending hours learning facts and putting them in the video when nobody cares?
In terms of making a new version of this video, I was lucky because I actually recorded a few bonus video clips that I intended to put on Patreon. And I realized that I could use those bonus video clips as a new opening and a new conclusion to the video. And those video clips are more story-oriented and less information-oriented. I also decided that having references to Melaka and Malaysia in the video title and thumbnail is also a mistake. If a person in the United States or Canada sees a video title about a secret island full of rusting ships, they might click on it. But if the video title references Melaka and Malaysia, maybe they will be uninterested. They’ll decide that they don’t care about Malaysia, so they won’t click on the video. I thought it was important to put information in the video about where it takes place and information about the ships and why they are there and information about the land reclamation projects in Malaysia. I thought it was important to have context for what is in the video. But perhaps all of that is just wasting my time.
So I did another edit of the video in which I completely changed the opening and ending and then I went through the middle of the video and deleted long sections where I was talking about land reclamation and other things. Anything that wasn’t showing a dramatic visual of a rusting hulking ship, I deleted it. All my random thoughts, I just removed. I thought about audience retention and nothing else. I thought about any moment in the video where a viewer might get bored, I removed it and jumped to the next big visual of a wild, sunken, rusty ship.
After I did that, the video felt a bit disjointed to me. I think I removed a bit too much. So I couldn’t help it, and I reinserted a little bit at the very beginning that allowed me to at least talk about land reclamation a little bit. I needed at least a little bit of that context for the island of ships to make sense. But I tried to keep it to a minimum.
I still have to do one more viewing of this new version of the video. I have to go through it again to finalize it. I will do that sometime today. And then I have to make a decision about what to do with it. I was thinking I could think of it as a brand new version of the same video, but one that is designed for an international audience. I probably shouldn’t have done it, but I already changed the title of the original video to one that doesn’t mention Malaysia or Melaka. And I changed the video thumbnail. This new title and the new thumbnail were the ones I was going to use for this international version of the video. But I was curious if changing the title and thumbnail of the original video would somehow spark a wider interest in the video. But I suppose if I do post the new version, I can change the titles and thumbnails back again to make them distinct from one another.
One interesting aspect to my weekend that I didn’t mention yet is that while I was watching the dragon boat races, I met a Planet Doug follower and subscriber. And not just a subscriber but someone who has been watching my videos for many years and who I feel like I know through his many comments. Of course, he knows me MUCH better than I know him. I know exactly who he is online and I remember all of his comments. So it was really nice to meet him in person and put a face to the name on YouTube. But he knows ME much better because I put so much personal information in my videos. In some ways, he seems to know me better than I know myself. He remembers things from my videos and things I did that even I don’t remember.
He and I hung out together at the dragon boat races a bit on Saturday, and then he treated me to a coconut drink and a cendol at a great place on Jonker street. Then we met up again on Sunday, and after the morning, he brought me to one of his favorite places on Jonker Street that is famous for the quality of their cendol. And today, in an hour in fact, we are meeting up for lunch. So that was a great little encounter to go along with my experience of the 41st annual Dragon Boat Races in Melaka.
I did, by the way, stick around all the way to the end of the races and the awards ceremony. There was a table and stage set up near the Melaka Water Wheel, and all the trophies were going to be handed out there. I thought it would be great for the video to capture some of this. I even found a perfect spot in the back where I could climb up on a fence and get a perfect view and vantage point for my cameras. At first, I thought it would work out perfectly because the first man to take the microphone was fun and exciting and came straight to the point. So I was hoping we would jump right into the fun of handing out the trophies. But then another dignitary got up to make a speech and this was an older man with a big stack of papers in front of him. And he stood at the microphone and started reading from his prepared speech. It was all in Malay, so I couldn’t understand him at all. But worse, he never looked up from his papers. He just read from his speech and he droned on and on and on and on. I thought he was never going to quit. And I noted that there were four other dignitaries on stage waiting for their turn to speak. And I gave up on the ceremony at that point. I was exhausted and hot and sweaty. I think all the dragon boat teams were equally worn out and they just wanted to get their trophy and go back to their hotels or climb into their vehicles for the long drive back to their homes. Even if the other speakers were shorter and more interesting, there were still a LOT of trophies to hand out. Each category for each event had a trophy for third runner up, second runner up, first runner up, and winner. And there were so many categories spread across the events over two days that I was surprised the table could support the weight of all those trophies. I decided that there was no point sticking around for the next two hours or however long the awards ceremony was going to take. I climbed down from my perch and left. And I ended the video down by the river with the awards ceremony far away in the background.