It’s been a very eventful adventure filled with lots of unexpected events and changes (which define the word “adventure”). It wouldn’t be an adventure if everything worked exactly as planned with nothing unexpected. (Imagine a D&D adventure beginning with a full plan on the dungeon and where the party was going to go, every turn, every place to get water and food, and ever monster they’d encounter along the way.) As I sit here in the apartment I never thought I’d ever see again (we don’t get our new one for another week) I have to make a few conclusions and changes to things from what I learned.
I have been watching the adventure from a teeny tiny screen through the entire time. Putting it up on a 40” screen has absolutely blown me away. We nailed the technical aspect of this adventure. I have never seen any IRL content as clear and cinematic covering areas that are more interesting to look at that the VODs we made over the last 20 days or so. I’m going to be really busy making highlight videos to ensure these videos remain preserved, and some of them copied over to YouTube as well.
The biggest winners for video quality are the absolutely amazing DJI Pocket 3 with its completely steady, cinematic gimble, and massive sensor making any action cam look silly in comparison. I was easily able to capture video while driving at night that is as crisp as anything I capture during the day. The Starlink pumped out 6k (the max) the whole time even when minimally boxed in by canyon walls and trees. It will get a real test when we do Linville Gorge this month.
When I’m completely honest with myself, I have to admit that the greatest joy comes from nailing this one aspect of the adventure. I’m a geek at heart and making this so seamless and beautiful really satisfies me. Now I just have to keep that happening. Even if I didn’t say a single thing during these adventures and just captured the outdoors in an ASMR way it would be spectacular.
60 lbs just for Starlink was always a stretch, but worth it if that meant nothing else was possible. If I could get my money back for the Starlink Gen 3 I would.
I had a pretty good habit established before the trip of not talking about politics. I even had a no-swearing thing working and a no-bad-talking-Mormons thing while in Logan, Utah. Then I got sick and the covid-is-a-myth trolls started appearing. I lost my shit on them (as usual). I was unable to follow my own better judgement and just not give these people any mental head space at all, to ignore them and focus on people that actually matter, who use their brains, who are educated, who love this country for the principles upon which it was founded. Everyone knows I am very weak when it comes to this. All I could see was stupidity all around. It’s everywhere in America. It started tanking my love for this country, everyone seemed to be filled with the same wetiko native Americans used to describe diseased “white men” who decimated the bison herds. Apparently, it used to take days to drive a wagon train around the mega-herds with 10s of thousands of head of bison. The fate of the bison is analogous to the fate of America and the cause is the same diseased mental illness that rots the brains of most Americans today, still. Realizing this has always triggered me. It’s one of my worst triggers. In so many ways I fucking hate America, and in so many ways I love it. But I cannot talk about that on a live stream without triggering all the zombies, to my peril.
There were other people saying how perfect of a leader Putin is. That I was being fed information from the CIA and I should question my sources even though that fucker very publicly dissolved his own countries constitution in order to stay in power. There’s no need to “vet” those glaring details. Or that he lied straight up about a “military exercise” before blowing the fuck out of innocent Ukrainians. The Russian mindless zombies, pushing “crypto” in their name were on the attack and I could not resist telling them HOW FUCKING STUPID they are. Could you? Would you be able to resist? The proper thing was probably to just ban and move on.
Another Iranian told me how stupid we were for paying “such a high price” for gasoline when it was one dollar per liter in Iran. Right, how fucking stupid are we for paying such a huge price, lol. The level of cluelessness is astounding. Who the fuck are these people watching my stream? When it grows is it going to be even more filled with such complete fucking morons?
It occurred to me, I’ve been helping people learn tech skills without regard for politics or geography. I’ve made a big deal about being okay to help anyone. But do I actually want to help Putin zombies, Iran apologists, and covid-deniers to learn what I have to teach? Fuck no! But how do I not help them if I continue to make it all public? How to I vet the people that I mentor. I used to give them an interview and I could decide if this was a person I wanted to help or not. Is open source even open source if the code being created has contingencies on what a group does or believes?
Then there is the issue of actively helping people from other countries work remote and take the jobs of those who now have to compete against them. I had this problem trying to compete on the world-market and was underbid by people doing work for less than three dollars an hour, because they could and their economies allowed it.
So I have some tough decisions to make regarding streaming in general. As for IRL, I’ll still do it, mostly for my own enjoyment, and I’ll go back to attempting to keep politics out of the conversation (even though I think discourse about politics is important to keep going in our country, apathy and ignoring it won’t fix anything).
As for the tech content? I cannot believe I’m going to say this, but I’m strongly considering closing my content down and making it much more like the intimate community I had while running SKILSTAK in person, to only those people I have approved and who have submitted applications to become members of my mentored community, only people who have provide their full home address and/or phone numbers on file (properly guarded) will be permitted, people I can implicitly trust, and who can trust me, people I can follow and watch grow over time, people who know each other by their actual names (but not necessarily their contact info), people who are not hiding behind anonymity, and people who are willing to pay something trivial to prove they are invested in the community. These requirements are less than any school in America, public or private, would require.
Technically, such a community won’t be closed, it will just have a gate that anyone can walk through who chooses to. I haven’t decided yet about the tech thing. I know it will he hugely unpopular if I do that, but I actually don’t give a shit. I’m done helping the assholes of the world succeed while others who need my attention can’t get it. The overall content would become so much better and I could focus more directly on individual instruction through Discord with only those who are members. Lots of long-time community supporters will simply not opt to participate because of the loss of anonymity, and that is fine. Those who have the courage to participate as themselves will benefit.