I apologize profusely for missing the past few weeks of blog posts. Running the hottest up-and-coming global media empire has seemingly put a lot more on my plate than expected. Hopefully, Tim Duncan, Anonymous Hot Female with Massive Honkers, and the two Chinese fans of this blog are still interested in reading after my hiatus.
This week I wanted to talk about putting myself out there, something that’s always been particularly difficult for me.
As long as I’ve known, the only thing that’s brought me any semblance of joy during my wretched and meaningless existence has been creating things. Though, always privately. My music is hidden in a maze of folders on my laptop. My writings sit unopened on my desktop once completed. I have over seventy episodes of a podcast I never plan on releasing. This list goes on and on.
I guess for some reason, when creating things, I hold myself to the highest of standards. Musically, if I create anything less than Voodoo by D’Angelo, I’m a complete failure. If my novels don’t blow Brandon Sanderson out of the water, I’m a horrible author. If I say um one time during a podcast, I’m a bumbling imbecile. And should I release these creations, everyone else will know how horrible I really am and hate me for it.
But with Balsic Media, I have sort of forced myself to put my creations out there. Should I publicly announce the launch of my multimedia empire and do nothing with it, I will be an even bigger sham than I already am. Thus, I’ve been forced into action, and I’m grateful for it. Most notably with the Balsic Media YouTube channel.
YouTube was never really a main goal of mine. I mainly view it as a way to build an audience for Balsic Media and our larger projects, though I find myself having fun. Over the course of two weeks, we’ve accumulated 28.6k views and twenty-one subscribers. While I’m improving with the content released here, I do find myself getting discouraged. We peaked at 22 subscribers, and when I lost one, I drank nearly a fifth of a handle of Wild Turkey 101 on my bathroom floor with the shower running, listening to Radiohead’s OK Computer. I also seemed to have angered the fanbase of the hit animanga, Death Note, for my review of the franchise in my RANKED series.
For those who are unaware, the series follows a high school student, portrayed as a genius with a God complex, who is given the ultimate power when he receives a notebook from a demon that, once a name is written in it, will cause the person to die. My problem with this is that while he is portrayed to be a genius, he’s genuinely not. When authors write a genius, they tend to portray this by having them use big words and overexplain their simple plans. This is what we authors call The Genius Problem.
My critique was simply that his lines of logic were basic and he made a plethora of mistakes, but the characters around him were written by the author to fall right into his traps.
The fans of this beloved franchise are pompous edgelords who think because they are weirdos alienated from society that they too are of a higher intelligence, basing their whole identities around Light Yagami. The fanbase went after me, attacking my own intelligence by calling me stupid in every way imaginable, while their only arguments were fictional accomplishments of the character in the story, such as him fooling detectives, not understanding that my critique was that these deceptions mean nothing because the author did not write them well.
I’m getting distracted, but my point is, this is the first time I’ve really received criticism for something I’ve created. This was the thing I feared most about all of this, and it happened. And it was not at all what I expected.
The thing is... I really didn't give a shit. This massive fear that’s held me back all of my life turned out to be just like the monster in my closet… a strange 20-year-old man who’s obsessed with a teenage boy, who I have no interest in being appealing to.
Needless to say, I feel more confident than ever, not that that means much given my confidence was at the floor. So I think I’ll continue to try stuff and extend my reach. But most importantly, I’ll continue to make things. And I’ll be proud of what I make, regardless of the imperfections.
