The amount of YouTube collaboration spam increased dramatically the other day. They may be legit - doubtful - but either way indistinguishable from phishing attempts to get me to “login with YouTube” on some dodgy site.
Normally I get 4-5 a week, but the last couple of days it’s been like that per-day.
Last newsletter the prediction was I’d hit 10,000 subscribers on the 21st September, a few days from now, and I thought for a moment that this increase in spam was an interesting way to discover I’d hit that number early. Turns out at time of writing I’m at 9,993.
But, some of the backend of YouTube was hiccuping yesterday so I couldn’t check the precise numbers, which may have also explained the rise in spam; if the bots couldn’t see them perhaps they spam more?!
🎯 🎯 🎯
# THE NUMBERS DON’T MATTER, UNTIL THEY DO FOR THE WRONG REASONS
I’m not, for the record, particularly chasing numbers - if I was I wouldn’t be making all these tutorial videos - the reason for tracking the “Target” is; I’ve been told things can get weird on the spam front when you hit 10k.
It’s worth keeping an eye on, in case I think I’ve suddenly become successful (or even good), rather than a more likely automated email targeting from bots.
🤖 🤖 🤖
# THE TUTORIAL TO AI PIPELINE, AND BURNOUT
We’re up to 20 videos on the Drawing Machines 101 course.
The approach I’m taking with this is; “What if I were running a college course for a year, and had the students for 1-hour a week” - over the weeks I’d be building up the fundamentals, introducing concepts and developing them over the future lessons.
Things are going generally to plan.
However, there’s still this nagging feeling that I’m now just feeding the AI machine.
Pen plotting is niche, there’s a lot of code out there, so I’m definitely not the only source of that. But there are very few of us making courses and videos going through pen plotting step-by-step, unlike say how-to-shoot-cinematic-videos videos.
I’m pretty sure the pipeline goes like this.
I think & plan what’s going to do into a video to introduce the next bit of pen plotting code, why it’s important and how it fits in with everything else.
I shoot the video, edit it and upload it.
YouTube/Google transcribes the video and processes it with AI.
Someone googles a pen plotting question.
google AI answers the question based in some part on the contents of the video I created.
I understand that I’m making UGC - “User Generated Content”, and I’m a “content creator” - but the old deal was platforms would put my content and me in front of people.
And if it’s not the platform then someone else is feeding it all to an AI to make new (probably better) videos 🤷♂️
🥰 🥰 🥰
# FUN
I’ve decided the correct response to this is to get back to also having fun.
If the platforms aren’t going to satisfy my deregulated dopamine receptors, then I’m just going to have to do it myself.
I used to make “Weeknotes” videos (144 of them, wow), which were purely for myself, as a visual journal and way to learn how to use all the hardware & software involved in making videos.
They were fun, but weekly was hard work.
Instead I’m having a stab at a hybrid project/journal video format; starting with the monthly Patreon projects. Where I’m recording a video diary of the progress of each project. At some point, when all the Drawing Machine 101 tutorials are completed (hahahahahah), then I’ll be able to spend all my time making project/journal videos.
For now though, I think I’ve made enough of the tutorial videos, that I’m “allowed” to drop in these other videos.
The one I’m still working on, shown above, is about the handwriting/typewriter pen plots, which’ll switch to being something art based for the posting out to Patreon members next week (so there’s still time to sign up).
🔫 🔫 🔫
# DOOM & PATREON
A couple of months ago I was playing with the code from the game The Sentinel to convert levels into plottable SVG files (and riso prints). Recently I’ve been tinkering with making 3D galleries as a way to view the photos and blog posts on my website (not live yet), for various ridiculous reasons.
As part of doing that I had to do two things, one; deal with 3d randomised room layouts, handling wireframes and so on, which look a bit like this.
The second is pre-baking lighting into the textures so I don’t have to do it at ‘run-time’, which is an old DOOM game trick.
Having dipped my foot into writing ray-tracing code, at which I’m not particularly good and the code isn’t particularly fast, that experience has allowed me to write slow clunky code that takes about 16 minutes to ‘light’ a gallery, and gives me a texture map like this…
…and those textures then get stuck on the walls, ceiling and floor of the rooms, so they look like this…
(Boring details, lighting information is then also stored for each spot where a photo/picture can be ‘hung’, so any images pulled in from blog posts, can be lit properly to match the location on the wall).
Fun fact, a long time ago, I wrote a level editor for DOOM, which converted ASCII nethack style maps into DOOM maps, so back in my Uni days I was deep into the .WAD and maps file format. I’d not touched it for a good while, but I’ve seen enough libraries pop up, including in javascript to know playing with maps would be do-able.
So while I’m not going to convert all the sprites and UI to pen plottable vectors, I have managed to convert the map data into something I can work with. Chaining it with the hidden line removal tools I had to write for The Sentinel, I’m like 98% certain, I can pen plot DOOM 😁
It’s not quite can you play DOOM on a pen plotter, but next month for Patreon (and YouTube), I’m going to have a go at plotting frames of a run through of E1M1 to turn into an animation. The Postcard level of the Patreon, will get you a couple of frames & something else Doom map related, and I’m going to do some much larger pieces that’ll end up in the shop [only just up and running and not much there yet] about four months after the Patreon.
(This video will be compressed tf by SubStack).
😴 😴 😴
# THE END
I’m at the point where a whole bunch of things happen to be almost finished at the same time, each about 95% of the way there. The shop is like 95% finished, I just need to get more stuff up there, the flow of tutorial & ‘normal’ videos feels like it’s getting nailed down. The 3d gallery stuff is almost ready to go live, as is the update to my website. The handwriting capture on an iPad is so close, and the process that goes along with that (capturing 👉 generating SVG).
This month I did have to take just over a week off (last week to take Zee to Uni at the other end of the country), and I’ve been super poorly this week, so I haven’t done as much Patreon posting as I’d have liked, but that feels like it’s settling into a good groove too.
To the point that the Patreon is supposed to support making the tutorial videos (and send art out to members) and this month there was enough left over from postage to pay for my groceries while I was away/poorly, which took the mental pressure off doing/making/showing for a bit.
Which was extraordinarily lovely.
It feels like it’s… working?!?
I don’t particularly enjoy self promotion (although this edition of the newsletter seems particularly self promotionally), but I suspect the next few months will feel a bit more “Hey, I’ve finished a thing, here it is” until I’ve gotten them all out of the way, sorry about that, I’ll try not to do it too much 😁
Until next time - Thursday 1st October - by which I’m pretty sure we’ll have hit that 10k YouTube subs target, and can pick a new arbitrary number.
Love you all
Dan
🧡