Goodbye to all that.

Beginnings and endings.

Saying goodbye to YouTube and Facebook this spring.

Spring is a great time to start new things – an exercise program is a good example but it’s also a good time for a thorough cleaning session and de junk : when I was a lot younger we used to call it a spring clean. Right now i’m in the process of clearing out my workshop and getting rid of stuff that iv’e kept assiduously for years in the hope that one day I might use it – hence about a dozen bags of stuff waiting to go to the tip.

This spring and early summer I hope to go from being ‘3 boat’ Steve to just having one boat but one that is fully sorted for it’s role so as well as everything else one of them is on Ebay and the big one will be back up for sale on Apollo Duck at a much reduced asking price.

So far this spring I have deleted my profile from Facebook – essentially I have permanently closed that account and at the same time I closed my Pinterest page account as in both cases my account seems to have been hacked : in the case of Facebook marketplace I was getting messages from potential buyers for the several van/motorcycle/boat that I was, unknown to me, the advertised seller of. When I tried to contact Facebook to take issue with the site I went round and round the houses without ever speaking to an actual live person and in the end lost the will to live and simply shut it down and walked away with tears in my eyes (not).

There is a slightly more serious aspect to this post and to explain it i’d like to tell a short story so : A few weeks ago I was sat up in bed (one result of my strokes is that I get very tired) and looking out of the bedroom window across to the opposite side of the valley – my horizon being the ridge of high ground that is the western edge of Devon – us being in Kernow. The ridge has several trails up to it and then a forest road and several other walking trails which used to be my stamping ground for rucking : hard walking for exercise with a loaded rucksack.

I was thinking, rather sadly, that i’m highly unlikely to walk that route ever again because I just don’t have the energy or effort to drop into the valley and get up to that trail on the opposite side : one last time perhaps to say goodbye. If that sounds a bit maudlin then please excuse me while I have a good maudle

With Pinterest I got a message telling me that my account had been suspended due to inappropriate behavior – although they wouldn’t tell me what behavior !. The issue seems to be that someone or something has been using my account/profile to post dodgy images, strange that iv’e only used that account to search for and download stuff that I follow – model boats amd model/fantasy buildings for example. My last search, BTW, was for a picture of Scorotite (an Arsenic bearing mineral) for a recent post.

This post comes with a slightly more serious message although to explain that I need to tell a short story so…….

A couple of weeks ago I was sat up in bed after dinner because I was both tired and cold – I get extremely tired with my physical work and sitting in bed is a useful escape from the continuous over stimulation I get with Youtube video’s. Anyway, I was sat there looking out of the bedroom window and across to our local horizon which is the high ground on the opposite side of the valley – the western edge of Devon. Sometimes I see lights moving along the trail and forest road which I take to be ‘mountain’ bikers out for an evening ride.

In times past I used to ruck those trails, rucking, or trail walking with a heavy pack used to be part of my training routine as my rucking route that side of the valley was a useful few miles and finished in the local market town where I could take a coffee break and usually catch a bus home.

This week, in fact the last few months, iv’e had to accept that I will never walk those trails again because I have neither the strength to grunt my way across the valley and not endurance enough to hike the trail even as far as the obvious road pick up point – maybe one last time, on a good day, to say goodbye to all that side of my life : if that seems a bit maudlin then please excuse me while I have a good maudle !

Quick on the draw with the neologisms as I may be this morning but relaxing on the bed in the evening is partially an escape from too much time spent on Youtube, both in trying to produce worthwhile video content although mainly in the enormous amount of time I spend not quite watching other makers work. I have this awful habit of not watching a video for long so that,at the end of day, when I go through my search history and delete most of it, I find that I may well have clicked on to 30 or more video clips but not spent much time with any of them : several days later I can’t remember a fraction of what iv’e watched.

This week, as I write, I have signed out of Youtube and, as far as I can, closed my account ; I have no intention to make another video as frankly I am fed up with the whole effort and work required plus I really need a whole heap of new equipment – a new camera, new microphone and a whole load of boat specific mountings to make it all work.

I really began to question the purpose and value of being a Youtube contributor and even more I started to wonder why I spent so much time watching video’s myself. Making video’s seems to me to be a whole load of fruitless work and far more difficult than simply writing blog posts : when I write that’s all that I do except for taking a few photographs but when I film, filming takes over as I have to write the script and then be the ‘actor’ but beyond that I have to be the camera man and the sound guy all rolled into one and at the end of filming I have to be the editor and producer.

I will continue with my written blog even though video is what many people want nowadays – I tried a slightly different approach in attempting to info-tain with words, photography and video. Recently I revamped my video channel and at first I thought I was gaining subscribers but recently, with my first rowing video – itself a lot of work – I seem to be losing subscribers so obviously whatever I am doing isn’t making any impact. Furthermore I think that it would be a much better use of my time to simply walk the walk rather than filming and presenting what feels like an endless selfie in video form : I can see why many Youtubers do that and it seems to be more about gaining approval from the audience – an endless need for a pat on the head !

In one way I can say that iv’e been here before and quite enjoyed the experience : when I had my 110 day cruise and living aboard the little Liberty i’d had to make the outward passage without a computer as the secondhand laptop that i’d ordered hadn’t arrived. For the first week I was a bit lost without one mainly because I couldn’t write and publish blog posts without it but I quickly got into the habit of making a longer narrative in my logbook and as quickly turned to reading for relaxation – one of the last things I did before leaving Falmouth was a trip around to the secondhand bookshop and I came out with an arm load of Rebus to read.

If I have an analogy about the internet and Youtube specifically I would say that it’s a bit like internet pornography in that it’s mostly made for a male audience, is addictive in a similar way although as with most addictive behaviors it’s deeply unsatisfying and just like internet porn there’s so much of it online that if you started watching video’s say then there’s so many new clips every day that you could never watch them all. Like internet pornography I think that Youtube limits creativity because there are only so many stories and outcomes that can be told.

Who needs the internet when this is the view from the kitchen window ?

In true tabloid interviewer kind of fashion you might now ask ‘so how do you feel about not having access to thousand of hours of creators work and equally how do you feel about taking away the means to do it yourself ?’ My answer is pretty good. in fact the decision to stop making videos is great because it takes away a whole load of necessary expense – new blogging camera, new microphone and a whole heap of Gopro gadgets – and what I feel is a significant pressure to try and do it well. I find it better, as I said before, to go out there and just enjoy the challenges of doing the thing itself rather than trying to film, with sensitive electronics in a salty environment plus having poor dexterity and the only outcome being an occasional pat on the head from the cheap seats.

Just to give notice though that i’m going to take a complete blogging break for a few weeks so there won’t be much output until I make some progress with : 1 – the workshop project and 2 – getting rid of at least two of the boats that are cluttering the place up right now.