This essay is a bit short, so please point out areas where there could be more narration or reflection.
Just like everyone, I use YouTube regularly. Maybe not as much as most people though. I mostly listen to music, and occasionally watch videos of people dissecting game mechanics. There's really only one vlog that I watch, but not often.
On the music I listen to, I think I listen to different things than most of my friends and peers. I listen primarily to game soundtracks, and occasionally movie scores, though I also listen to the band Rush, but they're not exactly the kind of band that most of my fellow classmates listen to. I think that my choice of music to listen to is a product of my parents. I say this because my dad has been a Rush fan since before I was born, and also plays a lot of video games, listened to their soundtracks, and my parents have shown me several movies that have excellent soundtracks.
The selection of videos that I watch are fairly representative of what sort of person I am. I'm the sort of person to tear apart the mechanics of a game so that I can fully understand the game, and hopefully be able to use my deeper knowledge of any given game to outplay other people. Hence why I watch videos of other people dissecting game mechanics. I want to see what other people see and find out what sorts of things I overlooked.
As for the vlog that I watch, it's a bunch of people who make their living by making almost professional-grade videos for their main channel. For those of you who might be interested, the channel is called Sam and Niko after the founders of the YouTube studio, and their main channel is Corridor Digital. I've always liked cameras, especially the more professional ones. And these people use cameras all the time. They also have a huge arsenal of nerf and airsoft guns, which they use in making their videos.
All of this boils down to me watching videos of people doing things that I enjoy, and listening to the music that I like.
But as I've glanced at my friends' computer screens, I haven't seen them watching any of the same things that I watch, which is at some level surprising, but also not surprising at all. It surprises that me that all of my friends basically watch the same things, and that despite having shared experiences with them for almost four years now, I haunt a different section of YouTube than they do. Just as I do, they are watching videos pertaining to the activities they enjoy and listen to the music that they like.
I think the best thing about YouTube is the variety of content you can find. Some people use it for their news because that's how they are most receptive to it. Other people may use it to watch other people play the games that they enjoy. Still others just use it to listen to music, as I am as I write this. In fact, most people use YouTube for a combination of these things. There's so much out there that anyone can find channels that they enjoy on YouTube, no matter what background they come from.
Thursday, April 26, 2018
Thursday, April 12, 2018
I wasn't good enough.
2:25 800m run. Three seconds better than the leg of the 4x800 that I had run four weeks before, 12 seconds better than anything I had run last year. I could have done better. My parents are impressed, but I am disappointed with my pacing. I could have taken the second lap harder.
I always want to get better. Even when people around me tell me that I’ve succeeded, I ask myself, “If I could do that, how much further can I make myself go?” Going back to that 800 meter run, I asked myself how much more time I could have cut off if I had pushed myself harder through the middle two laps. I expect a certain standard out of myself and it shows when I make a mistake.
There are a couple of modes I fall into when I make a mistake. They generally fall into one of two types. The first is when I realize I messed up after doing something is done. In these cases, I wonder what I could have done differently. Sometimes the answer is obvious, sometimes not. Something like forgetting how algebra works during a test is something that is obvious after I start talking to other people who did the same problem. In that case, I just have to pay more attention next time. Other things, like with social interaction, it isn’t as clear when I've overstepped boundaries. It can take a while before I find out that I'd made a mistake, and by that time, it can be too late to fix things. I used to agonize for long periods of time, sometimes multiple days, on what I could have done, and how that might have made things ‘better,’ but I've since realized that that doesn't do me any good. So I accept that I messed up, and put my energy towards figuring out what to do next.
The other type of mistake is the ones I notice while I'm making them. When that happens, I tend to buckle down and focus on problem at hand, often at the cost of clear communication. This particularly shows up when I'm playing hard missions of Warframe with my dad. (I know, I write about this a lot, but I've invested over 1200 hours of my life into this game.) When things go sideways, I stop talking and start playing furiously. I start making faster movements, generally playing better, but my team has no idea what I'm doing, where I'm going, or what they can do to help. This is the point when my dad usually tells me "Talk to me. I get that things are going poorly, but I don't know what you want me to do to help out." It doesn't help that I play very fast characters, so if I blitz off on my own, it's unlikely that my team can catch up to me. This problem stems from me expecting to be able to do anything and everything. When things start going wrong, I want to solve the problems then and there, as soon as I can. And I also expect to be good enough to solve these problems on my own, even when the situation quickly shows me that I really do need some help.
Given how I react to mistake, I’d say I'm pretty hard on myself. I expect to do my best at whatever I do and am disappointed when I'm not. Sometimes that's me not knowing how far I can push myself and unintentionally limiting myself, such as in running, sometimes it's just straight-up overestimation of my ability. But because of this, I've learned to accept my mistakes and move on to figuring out how to avoid those mistakes. There's no changing the past. We have to live in the world we've created for ourselves.
I always want to get better. Even when people around me tell me that I’ve succeeded, I ask myself, “If I could do that, how much further can I make myself go?” Going back to that 800 meter run, I asked myself how much more time I could have cut off if I had pushed myself harder through the middle two laps. I expect a certain standard out of myself and it shows when I make a mistake.
There are a couple of modes I fall into when I make a mistake. They generally fall into one of two types. The first is when I realize I messed up after doing something is done. In these cases, I wonder what I could have done differently. Sometimes the answer is obvious, sometimes not. Something like forgetting how algebra works during a test is something that is obvious after I start talking to other people who did the same problem. In that case, I just have to pay more attention next time. Other things, like with social interaction, it isn’t as clear when I've overstepped boundaries. It can take a while before I find out that I'd made a mistake, and by that time, it can be too late to fix things. I used to agonize for long periods of time, sometimes multiple days, on what I could have done, and how that might have made things ‘better,’ but I've since realized that that doesn't do me any good. So I accept that I messed up, and put my energy towards figuring out what to do next.
The other type of mistake is the ones I notice while I'm making them. When that happens, I tend to buckle down and focus on problem at hand, often at the cost of clear communication. This particularly shows up when I'm playing hard missions of Warframe with my dad. (I know, I write about this a lot, but I've invested over 1200 hours of my life into this game.) When things go sideways, I stop talking and start playing furiously. I start making faster movements, generally playing better, but my team has no idea what I'm doing, where I'm going, or what they can do to help. This is the point when my dad usually tells me "Talk to me. I get that things are going poorly, but I don't know what you want me to do to help out." It doesn't help that I play very fast characters, so if I blitz off on my own, it's unlikely that my team can catch up to me. This problem stems from me expecting to be able to do anything and everything. When things start going wrong, I want to solve the problems then and there, as soon as I can. And I also expect to be good enough to solve these problems on my own, even when the situation quickly shows me that I really do need some help.
Given how I react to mistake, I’d say I'm pretty hard on myself. I expect to do my best at whatever I do and am disappointed when I'm not. Sometimes that's me not knowing how far I can push myself and unintentionally limiting myself, such as in running, sometimes it's just straight-up overestimation of my ability. But because of this, I've learned to accept my mistakes and move on to figuring out how to avoid those mistakes. There's no changing the past. We have to live in the world we've created for ourselves.
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