Entropy is my homeboy.

So I've taken one big step closer towards becoming the kind of old man I'm planning to be and I figured it'd be worth writing something here. 

I'm tempted to do a kind of overall appraisal but that's really what my annual End of the Year entries are for! 

I will say that I'm increasingly excited about Vidcon in July. If all I do is have fun then I won't think it a failure, but I am of course hoping to promote the heck out of the show. I'm perfectly aware that while my traffic has been increasing and my subscriber base has doubled since the start of the year...I still have a significantly smaller footprint than your average photogenic teenager talking into a $50 webcam about their hobbies. 


I say that without any bitterness or resentment! I'm very happy with what 2010 has done for the show so far, I'm just aware that in order to even make a part-time living I will need to increase my subscriber base to at least ten times it's current amount. 

I've been experimenting, of course. The "Radio" show christmas special, some Project Wonderful advertising, taking a break in January to build an episode buffer, getting more out-of-studio footage, A Very Special Surprise I'll begin putting up at the start of August, taking a topic from a viewer's suggestion and generally busting my butt to keep improving the Basic Product (I've finally gotten Adobe CS5 so I can learn how to clean up my greenscreening and perhaps do some effects that won't be as cheesy as any number of Dragonball Z fireballs or their ilk). 

The big thing is to try and escape a trap I've built myself. 


By trying to stand out from the crowd in what I talk about, framing episodes as reviews to help make things (ideally) more interesting then a straight up rant, I've ironically made it much more unlikely for people to find me. It's no secret that there are far more people searching for popstars, movies, video games, bands and Sexy Things than anything I talk about. While I do think there is something to the idea of the Internet as a meritocracy, I think that the nature of search engines, Youtube and just plain ol' people do a lot to prevent it from being a "pure" one. It makes sense and hell, it's not like I'm some superior being who never looks up any of that stuff! 

I bet I could do some could even do a pretty good show about that subject matter, but it's not where my strongest passions lay (for now, at least) and I have to wonder if becoming one of So Many wouldn't obscure me just as much. 

My best boosts have always come from someone with a larger audience being kind enough to point them in my general direction and what's encouraging is that when I do get a big influx of eyeballs, the vast majority of them choose to hang around. But that sort of thing comes about almost entirely by chance and I know that one of the first things to happen to anybody with some decent success is for them to become, understandably, chronically irritated by requests for a link or a mention in a video or whatever. 

Of course, I could just suck! Land sakes alive, I don't want to be one of those guys who constructs an elaborate theory for why they aren't having the sucess they'd like to have when the answer is plain to see for anyone who isn't him. But this conflicts with my natural desire to problem-solve, which means trying to come up with an explanation as well as a plan of action.


In non-Handful related news...
Though I've been thinking about it for a couple of months, I am now seriously looking at a trip to the Ukraine and Russia (the eastern bit) in fall of 2011. It should come as little surprise to most that my goal would be to traipse through the ruins of the Soviet Empire and that while this would certainly include Chernboyl & Pripyat, the Disneyland & Orlando of this kind of journey, I'd also be trying to get to a variety of other curious locations. I reckon I need to start planning now if only because I haven't figured out precisely where a lot of those things are! When I get closer to the date I think I shall see what I can do about contacting Russian urban explorers and maybe even seeing if I have any Russian fans who'd be willing and able to help me out in one way or another.

I figure that it's all very well and good to talk about Perfectly Wonderful & Horrible things but I also would like to see more of them up close. Plus, although I certainly did enjoy a lot about my trip to Athens I'd have to say the most valuable thing I took from that trip was a lesson in what kind of travel actually appeals to me. After seeing most of the classic ruins up close I found myself basically killing time until my flight back to England. Places to eat foreign (to you) food, places to swim, drink, dance and go for nice walks can all generally be found where you live - I'm not pissing on anybody elses parade but Athens taught me that doing those things in another country doesn't stimulate me enough to feel the expense is worth it. Maybe in time my mind will change or if I have the right company...but that's where I'm at now.

What absolutely feels worth it for me is not to take a vacation so much as to have an adventure. Meeting all sorts of Internet folk I've only emailed before, trying to promote the show and getting around a major American city that I may have to spend more time in if my career takes certain paths is a little adventure to me. Digging my way through the still standing bones of Reagan's beloved "Evil Empire", an entity whose imagery & culture have flooded so much fiction & non-fiction I've seen for my entire life, that strikes me as a big adventure the likes of which I may still be talking about when I reach that point I mentioned earlier. 

Coping with the Big Lever

"Hey humanity, what did you do today? " 

"Oh, I killed the gulf of Mexico". 

"Ah...good lad. Run along and play now." 

So how do you make peace with this? 

I actually had to call my mum this morning and ask her how she coped when the Cold War was at it's height. When it felt like a button might be pressed and that'd be the end of that. 

The thing the Cold War had over our War on the Environment is that, thanks to MAD, it was a very binary thing. Either somebody presed a button and launched nukes that started a chain reaction of retaliation which wiped out the species or they didn't. If they did then you'd have so little time to think about it before you died that you might as well not worry. Although you may very well end up living in a horrible blend of medieval technology and fascist government I suppose, though I always thought Threads was a tad optimistic. 

This isn't to trivialize the Cold War or provide a launching pad for a big fat, spittle spraying We Are Doomed rant. 

I just want to point out that the War on the Environment AKA Operation: Piss in Your Own Pool AKA Russian Roulette with an Automatic Pistol...is not a big red button to be pushed or not pushed. It's like a bloody great big lever that can be pulled or pushed closer to armageddon and it is very, very difficult to pull back. I could batter you over the head with statistics and links and flowery prose but that's not what I'm writing about here. 

I'm wrestling with how to cope and if you're paying any attention at all then I imagine there are moments where you struggle as well. So how do we do? 

With the Cold War it seems the most sensible thing was to remember that all you could do was try to vote in leaders who wouldn't press the damn button and otherwise remember that you were just one person with incredibly limited influence so you may as well accept your relative powerlessness and try to fucking relax. It'll happen or it won't. Though I'm not a fan of feeling powerless, I think I would have coped with the height of the Cold War reasonably well - not because I'm Batman but just because of how my mind works. I'm good at accepting things I have no power over, when that's truly the case. 

Operation: Shit in Your Own Mouth is different. I very much have an influence on it, we all do. Clearly world leaders and corporate CEO's have much, much more influence...but nobody can abandon responsibility like you could with the Cold War. Leaving your computer on overnight for no good reason? Driving any damn vehicle for any damn distance? Having a kid? Thanks buddy, you just helped lean a little more on that lever. That's good that you're recycling and please don't stop, but you could certainly do more. 

You could always do more. It's pretty overwhelming and a great way to become so neurotic it'd make Woody Allen say "Hey, slow down buddy" followed by "Anyways, it's totally less creepy I married my adopted daughter now that she's thirty-five".

In the same short period of time I read the thing that sent my head spiralling harder then it had done since I watched a certain film, this floated up to the surface as well. It's not like it's the first time I've thought or read about the idea that we should be the last generation. It's not like I didn't think "Well maybe I should off myself...or at least get a vasectomy". 

But it reeks of giving up. 

I hate giving up. 

It's clawing for an excuse to treat this like the Cold War, of wanting the lever we're all leaning on to be that big old red button. 

You don't need me to tell you how to live or vote more environmentally and like I said, that's not what this is about. It's about how do you cope? 

Well there's always denial, but you'll know what you're doing. If you have any conscience it'll eat at you and just cause a different kind of stress. So no, denial isn't the way to go for anybody except the kind of person who wasn't bothered by all this in the first place. 

I know the best thing for someone like me, someone who hates to give up, is to try and work things through in your head - perhaps sharing via writing or video - and then seeing what more you can do. I realize I won't be singlehandedly saving the world, but I'm starting the road towards becoming a vegetarian or at least cutting down to meat only once a week because I know that that will help. 


This won't be easy as I love meat, have been crap about vegetables my whole life, don't have any dietary need to stop eating it and certainly have no moral qualms with eating animals...but I know if I don't want to go crazy then I need to do more for the environment and, unlike having the CEO of British Petroleum forced to swim in the mess his company made, vegetarianism is within my reach. 

By the by, nobody will singlehandedly save the world by doing any single thing. Accepting that is certainly a good thing to help you cope. You're not giving up, you're removing a popular obstacle people often place between themselves and doing any damn thing. 


"Recycling these cans won't magically save the world and give me a ten hour solid gold erection so why bother?". 

Naturally I'm curious to hear anybody else's suggestions for how to cope wtih this thing. Like it or not, we're all in this together...