It's been a second

Hi-di-ho,

It's been a second since I last posted anything here but I figured I might as well stop by and say hello.

Let me start out by saying that my gaming YouTube channel is still going and I still upload a new video each and every week. I think I missed maybe one or two weeks a few months ago but I am really trying to get videos up each and every week and to actually have something to them more than just watching me playing a game. I set myself a little task or at least make the video focus on a specific aspect of the game I'm playing.

What this has taught me is that I was absolutely kidding myself about making a motocamping YouTube channel. The effort involved in just finding the time to play a game, capture enough interesting footage to make a 20 minute video and then edit it all, add music, add a voiceover and get it uploaded to YouTube each week is actually quote considerable. 

I was working on the channel today that may me want to drop by and write this down. Today I have roughly three and half hours of footage that will make my episode for this week. There is a lot of grinding and not so exciting aspects to the footage so I need to cut it down to my usual 20 to 30 minute video length. That basically means I have to watch and rewatch the three and half hours of footage and cut out the boring bits whilst still keeping the story line making sense. Once I've cut it down I then usually try and find the background music and tie it to the video so it makes sense and adds to the video. So ambient music when just kicking around, action movie music in exciting parts, and so on. Then once that's done I do the voice over and then I do subtitles. There's hours and hours of work involved.

The good news is that my videos seem to be well received and my channel is growing. At times I think my channel is growing too slowly and I'll never make anything of it and at other times my channel seems to leap forward. I've tried figuring out if it is my content or the schedule that I upload new content but I really think it is just the YouTube algorithm figuring out who my viewers are and then it is targeting that demographic and seeing if it makes a difference. It would be a bit of a balancing act for YouTube as if they don't promote new creators then they'll go stale, but the new creators can't monetise their videos so YouTube wouldn't be making anything much from their videos.

Anyway, I now think about what it would have been like trying to make motocamping videos and cringe. The effort involved in finding the time to get away, camp, film it all, then get back and edit it all would probably be too much for me. Not to mention if I spent all that effort to make a video and no one watched it, that would be very disheartening. 

There's a motocamping channel that I used to follow when I thought I was going to do it myself, he hasn't uploaded anything for over a year now and he videos are pretty good and somewhat similar to what I wanted to make. His early videos are now at something like 60,000 views but his more recent ones are lucky to be at 400 views. I'm not sure what happened to his channel but I'm betting he just found it too hard to keep making content on a regular schedule. His channel was active for around 4 years so he really put in a solid effort and he wasn't really rewarded for it. He would have been lucky to make $200 a year from his channel for all that effort. Whilst that's still $200 more than I've ever made from YouTube I would hope that after four years I'm at least making that every month otherwise it's not really worth it apart from it being a hobby.

Recently my channel has taken off a little, I grew by around 50 subscribers in the last couple of weeks so I'm now at just over 300 subscribers. A video I made several months ago suddenly took off and got a couple of thousand views which is amazing, yet I have some videos with only 40 or so views on them which I think are just as good if not better. So it's a little interesting seeing how it is all working out.

I don't really do any promotion of the channel anywhere, I occasionally post something on Reddit but that's very rarely and I've really been letting YouTube do all the heavy lifting for me.

On to other matters, I still want to change jobs and I almost walked off the other day but that's a whole blog in itself, I've basically had enough and my care level is completely gone, which could be a good thing as I'll just do my own thing and to hell with everyone else. I'm really starting to plan my long service leave now and looking at possible dates.

Which leads me on to the new house, well it's still getting built. The build itself is moving along, it's going slower than my wife would like but I think we're still on track for moving in the week before Christmas. The plan is to take a month or two of long service leave once we're in the new house to sort out a few things and just enjoy the new place.

Thanks for stopping by!

Bomber
Still doing the same things as always

Where to begin... This week I finally gave up the diet officially, however I really stopped around Christmas and then had a few weeks off work where I didn't really do the diet either. I put some weight back on over Christmas and for the last couple of weeks I've been half heartedly following the Optifast diet but I can't continue to eat just veges for dinner. We moved on to having a proper, but trying to be healthy dinner and I was having shakes for breakfast and lunch, or having a salad for lunch. We've now run out of shakes and I'm not going to buy any more. I'm still about 10kg lighter than when I started so that's a win. I can always give the shakes a go another time if I feel the need.

In other news, we've finally got some traction on our house build. After nearly 2 years to the day from when we paid our deposit, we finally got all the approvals done and work can commence on the actual build. In fact, this last week has seen the site cut occur so things are actually happening. Next it's the drainage and then the concrete slab goes down. The slab should be poured late this month or maybe early next month depending on the weather.

My gaming YouTube channel is still slowly growing, I've currently got 100 subscribers and I'm still releasing videos each week. I was actually watching a live stream of another gamer and I mentioned something in the live comments and he knew who I was and said that he loved my videos, that was really cool. My videos only usually get around 200 views at the moment, but it's great to get actual feed back from someone who I was watching myself.

Finally, the work situation is still uncertain. I'm kind of resigned to the fact that I'll be there for another year or two, the world is a changing place and I need the security of the position I'm currently in and the perks that comes with it. I just need to try and keep my head up and not let things out of my control ruin my day. Once we're in the new house and have our finances back in order I can reassess and figure out what direction I want or need to take.

Anyway, good chatting :)

Bomber
Things can always be worse.

I've lost 10kg

Christmas is almost here and I've taken some time off work to try and relax and get my head straight.

So as the title states, I've lost 10kg so far. The Optifast shakes have been working for me but I'm now starting to struggle with keeping it going. I'm going to keep on them for a while longer but being on holidays and eating out, kind of go hand and hand for me. I'm not too concerned as I know that I can get my act together again in the new year and continue losing weight. 

My goal weight is somewhere around 80kg, but I'm not sure if that's too far or not as I did some online calculator and it seemed to think that 90kg is what I should weigh. I guess I'll just see if I can even get to 90kg and see if I think I could still lose more or not.

The hardest thing about the shakes has been getting sick of only having veges or salad for dinner. What I've been doing is having shakes for breakfast and lunch, then having stir-fried veges or a salad for dinner, then having a shake for desert. Both my wife and I are really struggling with that. To spice things up, I've started adding some meat to dinner, but that then means that we can't have a shake for desert so we both start getting hungry and start looking for the kids chocolate.

Since I'm on holidays I've also bought some low carb beer and actually right now I'm having a can of Bourbon and Cola, not ideal but hey, you've still got to have fun every now and then and like I said, I'm going to get back on a more strict diet once my holidays are over.

The council finally approved our house plans so the builder is trying to get the construction certificate complete so we can actually start building. So that's great news. We're still hoping to be in the new house by next Christmas, but the builder isn't making any promises. We'd initially hoped to be in by Easter but there's no chance of that now and really we don't want them to rush. Thank-fully it seems that the La-Nina event is almost over so it shouldn't be raining so much over the next 12 months which will help the builder.

Finally, the gaming YouTube channel that I've been posting to is starting to get a few subscriptions and more regular veiwers. I'm not kidding myself as I still only get one to two hundred views per video and I currently have 32 subscribers, but hey, you've got to start somewhere and this is a genuine start. It's too early to know if the channel will become more popular or not, it may continue to grow, or I may have already peaked, who knows.

Anyway, thanks for reading and I wish you and yours all the best over the festive season and all the best for 2023.

Bomber
The biggest benefit of online shopping is that you can chose the christmas carols you listen to whilst you shop.

Life Update

 About 12 months ago I posted about how we were going to be building a new home and that we'd been designing it. Well, the process has been painfully slow but finally something is happening on the block, the builder has put the construction fences up and unfortunately that's all that has happened. 

Council is taking forever to approve the plans but we believe that we are now only a few weeks away from having the formal approval so the construction certificate can be issued. Once the certificate has been issued the build can begin. At this rate we're not expecting anything to start until January and although the builder has 12 months to complete the build, we're hoping that they'll be finished by next Christmas. All up, it will be roughly 3 years from when we paid the deposit on the block until we can actually move in. We knew that the process was going to take a while but we didn't think it would be 3 years.

I think the two biggest lessons that we've learnt from this experience are.

1. Buying a piece a land that isn't even registered yet isn't ideal, if we are ever going to build again then we'll buy a piece of land that is ready to build on. Due to the current market and the time things have taken to progress, the cost of the build has increased significantly. The builder has already sent an updated quote adding roughly $30K to the total cost and we've only got construction fences up.
2. We'll find our own architect and design the house that we want with them. The process of having to go through the sales person and not having any communication with the architect was extremely painful and changes kept getting introduced that we didn't ask for.

But as my wife and I keep saying, "it is what it is" and we're not pulling on the reigns just yet. We've been saving lots of money recently but it looks like we're going to need it.

My gaming YouTube channel is still going. I release a new video every week and sometimes do a mid-week short video but I need to work on the quality of the content. My subscriber base is very slowly growing, I currently have 22 subscribers, I had 9 old subscribers before I restarted so 13 new people. I've been trying a few different things to try and get more views but it is very hard going. I usually get only 10 or so views in the week that I release a video. For the shorts that I've done, I usually get several hundred views. I didn't really want to try and use click-bait but I'm thinking that's going to be the only way as that's how the shorts are doing so well. I'm still enjoying making the videos and am starting to realise just how hard it would have been to make the moto-camping videos I originally wanted to make.

Finally on to diet, exercise and losing weight. I'm currently at the end of my second week of being on Optifast. I've lost roughly 4kg so far by doing the "Intensive" program. I currently have an Optifast shake for breakfast, then only water water between breakfast and lunch. For lunch I have an Optifast chicken soup, then again nothing but water until dinner. For dinner I have a vegetable stir-fry or some other low starch vegetable meal, like cauliflower mash in a vegetable gravy/soup. Last night I had baked curried cauliflower with a cabbage, carrot and capsicum slaw on the side. I need to have at least two cups of vegetables a day and this is the easiest way to achieve that. Then I continue to have water and at around 8pm I usually have an Optifast chocolate desert. The results are currently there so I'm going to continue with this program for as long as I can.

I can't continue on the intensive program for too long, but I do intend to break my diet for Christmas, I'm not sure at this stage if it was just be for Christmas Day or if it will be for a week or so. My brother is coming to visit so no doubt there will be a few family get togethers. 

I've started doing weights again too, well when I say "started", I mean I managed to do them once last week but I'm hoping to do them several times a week from here on in.

Take care out there,

Bomber

Random Blogger at Best.

Tubing the Yous

It's me again, I was just watching some YouTube videos and thought about how things have changed and what hasn't. It's one of those things that make me remember about this blog. I can't believe that it's been so long since I last wrote here. 

About two months ago, I started playing a game that I used to play about 7 years ago, DayZ. I really enjoyed playing it again and I decided to make a little video of me playing it and published it to YouTube. I can't remember if I've mentioned this previously or not, but about 7 years ago I tried to start a YouTube channel based around some of the games I was playing. I made half a dozen videos and shared them with the friends I was gaming with and that was about it.

Currently I'm up to about 15 new videos, I currently publish one each week and have them scheduled to come out for the next 7 or so weeks. I'm enjoying making the videos and editing them. I guess I'm putting to use some of the skills I started practicing back when I wanted to make a motovlog channel.

I have about 3 or 4 more videos I can make with the gaming that I've already captured and I have a couple of ideas for other videos in DayZ.

On to other life updates. Construction is still yet to start on our new house, the plans have been submitted to council and we're waiting for the approval to come through. I'm still in the same job and I'm still over weight. I haven't bought a new bike yet either. Oh well some things never change.

My mental heath has been suffering a bit lately, but I think that's mainly due to the stress I've been experiencing because of work. There's just so much that needs to be done at the moment and I still have people in my team that get away with doing nothing. The team has a new boss, so I'm hoping that he'll be able to straighten things out a little and let me get on with actually enjoying my job again.

Anyway, that's quite a lot for now, considering it's been so long, I don't know if I'll get back to writing more often again or not at this stage.

Bomber
I thought I'd just say g'day!

Merry Christmas

We managed to make it down the coast for Christmas. It's about a 2 hour drive and the traffic was surprisingly light on Christmas Eve. Our kids were well behaved at night and we all got up around 6am to see if Santa had paid us a visit. Thankfully, he had and no one had any coal in their stockings. My wife's parents put on a great lunch with plenty of food and my wife's sister joined us too. My wife's brother didn't join us this year, he's become more and more of a recluse in recent years and pulling away from the family a little. Neither my sister-in-law or brother-in-law have partners or kids of their own, which is a little odd and means that our kids don't have any cousins on my wife's side of the family, it makes Christmas a lot smaller than it could be, which is probably nice in some ways but sad in others.

What was  nice to get away from town, even if only for a couple of nights, it was a break from the everyday routine and it was nice to not have to worry about cooking dinner for a couple of nights at the very least. 

I rediscovered my love of reading last night which is great too. For the last year or two I've been watching an episode of some show or another in bed each night before going to sleep. I've enjoyed the shows but at times they have kept me up later than I would have liked. I'd packed my Kindle for the trip down the coast as I thought I might have to tuck myself away with a book at some stage to get some peace, but I didn't end up having to do that. However, last night, as we had no TV in our room, I decided to read a couple of chapters from a new book and I really enjoyed it. I read another couple of chapters this morning and again this afternoon.

Bomber
More to share, but not for a Christmas post.

 

We Have Choices

In the last few days or so, my wife and I went and paid a visit to the kitchen manufacturer for our new house. I thought that my wife had some idea of what she wanted and that it could be fairly quick. Boy was I wrong. We ended being there for at least an hour and we only really had three decisions to make. We knew the style of cupboards we wanted, we'd already been given the proposed design and we were happy with it, all we had to do was.
1. Pick the colour of cabinets
2. Pick the colour of the bench top
3. Choose the handles for the cupboards

My wife had spoken to me lots about what she thought she wanted so I was surprised when she couldn't decide what colour the cupboards should be and if she wanted the the island bench cupboards to be the same as everything else or a different colour. We're going for a sort of Hampton's look which I thought was pretty straight forward. White, white, more white and maybe a little grey. Well the kitchen place had several whites and a whole wall of greys. I probably would have made my mind up in a minute or two, but most of the time was spent just on the colour of the cupboards. 

We then looked at the different styles of benchtops, unfortunately, the ones we wanted weren't in our budget so we've had to compromise a little, the one I think we have chosen is a slightly more expensive then the standard range but it shouldn't be too much more and it does look quite nice. I think it will probably look the nicest in the laundry and bathrooms as we're using the same bench top throughout the house, but it will still look nice in the kitchen.

Finally it was the handles turn, that was relatively painless, but what we've chosen may not go with the tapware so we may need to make more changes later on.

At the end of all of that, my wife still couldn't pull the trigger so we came away with a large number of samples that we have been pouring over.

Next stop was the tile shop, we need to select tiles for the wet areas of the house. We pulled into the parking lot of the tile place, but didn't manage to get out of the car, we drove off again as we couldn't face selecting tiles, especially since we hadn't chosen the cupboard and bench top colours.

We did manage to make it to the flooring shop. We walked in and managed to talk to the right people who actually knew about our build and had started working on the plans. I pulled out a copy of the build contract as it had the ranges that we were meant to be selecting from listed in it. The salesperson said that it was only a guide as there was plenty of other flooring that would be in the same price bracket but we decided to start looking within the range that was listed and managed to pretty quickly decide on the type of floorboards that we were going to have. Next there was the carpet, again just sticking within the listed range there was only two or three that worked with the floorboards and we made a decision in around a minute. Finally, the flooring place is also supplying the blinds as well so we had to choose them. The contract states blockout roller blinds and that's what we would have wanted anyway so too easy. From the listed range there was only two that worked with flooring choices and one of them worked really well with the carpet so that's what we chose.

The sales person then tried to up-sell us on better underlay for the carpet and I read out what was in the contract and we were already meant to be getting the premium underlay and then he asked if we wanted acoustic underlay for the floorboards and I told him that was already in the contract and showed him that. At least the builder wasn't trying to make the contract cheaper by using the cheapest options. None of the flooring was the top of the range options but it was far from the bottom. 

We still have to go back and choose the tiles at some stage as well as make all the interior paint colour decisions, but they should be relatively easy.

 

Bomber
Have I told you that I'm colour-blind? I truly am.