Update on Gaslighting Extravaganza, the Podcast, and in General...

Last time, I'd written that my next post would be more interesting, although I'm not sure I can beat the part about the near-spontaneous pantsformation. Yes, I am feeling more energetic, though my energy levels have been wavering as well. For the past several days I've been fairly sedentary besides my daily physical therapy/exercise.
` Instead of holding my body in a more or less vertical position so that I can type or edit videos, I've taken to studying via book and electronic means, while in more of a diagonal position. While this has been useful for my next video, I've been dragging my feet on writing my blog posts (moreso than email).

Giant "thumbnail" image for Part 1.

My videos are only coming along slowly because in order to make my next video, in which I comment on (and continue from) this video, I've had to watch the entire 1 hour 20-some minute Extravaganza. Once I did so, I fixed a couple tiny editing glitches and added the fancy "custom thumbnail" images that I colored real pretty, which fluorescently blaze before each part.
` I was able to save the changes to Part 2 without causing any upheaval. However, in order to change Part 1, I had to make a copy. I took down the first copy, which had been published on January 13, at 8:57a.m., mere hours before Part 2.
` It had two thumbs-up and 142 views, probably most of them came from me watching it in sections. It was survived by no comments, but the new copy has a chance to acquire some.

That is a long-winded explanation of why Part 1 now appears chronologically after Part 2. According to YouTube, the new copy finished copying on February 24, 2017 4:07 PM, but it wasn't published until the wee hours of this morning. So, it was just baaarely bumped into March!

This was partly since I spent a while trying to find ways to "move" the video back to January. Then I figured, what's wrong with posting a "new video" that already has a Part 2?

Here's the new link to Part 1: Torture and Imprisonment, with Intro and Cat. At last, I feel like I can move onto making the next video! And there's a lot that has already been made, so my video production output ought to speed up a little, I should think!

Now, for a brief discussion of how I horribly defaced Part 2:

Annotations and Title Screens vs. Cards and End Screens

Feeling better and expending more energy!

This darn cold is finally starting to go away, I've started three good-sized blog posts, have made a little progress on my YouTube channel, and have been catching up with writing emails. (That reminds me, I keep telling Tim Farley [plug] that I'm going to get back to him, and regarding something I contacted him about and find interesting, but I haven't yet! Really?)

And the interesting thing is not my pants, which magically transformed into bellbottoms while I was at the park earlier. I got them from a thrift store, and they seemed a bit short. When I was putting on my walking shoes, I noticed that they seemed to be rolled up inward and... 'snap!' some threads broke and I had a sizeable flare protecting my ankles! They're so much like the ones I had in the 90's, too!

It's almost four in the morning, I just cooked and ate some buckwheat pasta with a mass of cheesy, cream-filled tomatoness and a piece of whole wheat garlic bread. That's after a peanut butter-covered bagel with banana slices on top.
This is the type of thing I am doing -- being awake at odd hours and eating, sometimes masses of food. I always start out with the box of salad greens I keep on the fridge door. And then move onto something more substantial.
Sometimes it's sandwiches with ingredients such as celery and cranberry sauce. Sometimes it's something like ice cream or nachos. Mm, guacamole.

Since I've been ill, I've also been somewhat sedentary and eat a lot of junk but don't seem to have any real problems related to this, and hardly any body fat. My blood sugar is apparently more stable than it has been before, my cholesterol levels have been fine despite the masses of ice cream over the past year and a half. (I like to add cocoa powder and peanut powder, too...)
I feel that the physical therapy/cardio I do every day exhausts me, and the rest of the day I spend most of the time laying down or leaning up against something. (Well, it's hard to do anything else.) If it weren't for my feeling so worn-out, I'd think of myself as slothful and gluttonous. It feels really good right now, so I'm going with it.

I look forward to having more energy to invest in blogging and videoing. When I wake up again, later. My next post should be very interesting...

So THAT'S why I've been out of energy...

The good news is, it wasn't until right after being up front at the Robby Krieger Band concert that I started to feel some serious sinus stinging.
I took some photos of the concert and put them on Facebook. I tried to put a couple here, but they won't upload.

Not only was this the first concert I've ever been to, but I put my hands onstage, two feet away from Robby's feet while he was soloing! Whoa!

Right now, however, I have quite the sinus thing going. All my muscles, sinuses, and lymphatic tissues are reeeallly hurting, some other things hurt worse than usual, and I have been not much more useful than a lump.

I said in my last post that I had next to no excuse for not getting more done. Well, maybe I had a little more of an excuse than that. My mind just can't seem to stay alert at all, but I am starting to feel a little better today.

At some point soon, I will get back to my blogging and videoing ways... Stay tuned!

posted from Bloggeroid

Sparkly new title screens!

I have next to no excuse for not getting everything done as fast as I thought, other than my muscles being so sore, me still needing a lot of sleep, and taking it easy because [Edit: Actually, I was coming down with something]. The day I'd written my last little update, I'd done some physical therapy at the gym and am still sore even today. Oh, and I killed a bunch of time with some gel pens and card stock...
` I have some more updatage for you, but first, it seems important that I post photos of the title cards to be added to my YouTube videos. Because personal stories of horror need colorful title cards, gleaming in the sun:

My first attempt to digitize them was to tape them to a darker card in order to make them visible to the scanner. This had the unfortunate consequence of both bending the card and bleaching out the image's lighter colors:

I have more energy now, whatever shall I do about it?

The other day I went to an overflowing Puget Sound Mycological Society lecture by Albert Garcia-Romaeu about the work of him and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins. They have been studying the various benefits of psilocybin, the LSD-like ingredient in magic mushrooms. They have observed and confirmed various psychological, neurological and medical benefits, as well as the benefit of a life-changing experience. (Here's a link to his work.)

This has been an important topic on my last blog, but I am planning to cover it better on this blog and on my YouTube channel. I will write more about this in an upcoming post, and no doubt in videos.

First I must say, I feel physiologically amazing from all these years of physical therapy are paying off. My right glute and the right side of my leg, which is still not quite developed enough, is the most sore from doing squats and whatnot at the gym the other day. Most of my left side is not sore. Such is the asymmetry of my body.

I seem to be needing 10-12 hours of sleep a day, as I sometimes do. Despite this, I am about to move ahead with my next video, as soon as I review both parts of my Gaslighting Extravaganza.

Tomorrow, I am planning to meet a friend in SoDo as he takes off on the Red Dress Run, wearing a paisley muumuu. I may try to watch Part 1 before and Part 2 afterward. What an interesting plan for an intermission!

As far as my laptop goes, it's still in the shop, but I should get it back this month! When I do, I should have a chance to scrape some of my podcast together and put it on the YouTube channel!

Rest assured, I have recorded much other video for YouTube, mostly in October and November, and even some this month when it snowed, which I have planned for a little musical interlude. I am not about to run out of video anytime soon!

Something else: There are several posts that I had started on this blog last year and never finished, due to several factors. Now that my back seems capable of holding me upright and keeping my torso in its proper shape, and I am planning on publishing videos that were supposed to "go with" some of these posts, it is much easier for me to focus on and accomplish this task.

There are, of course, many other things I haven't been working on, and am getting back to, so we will see how fast I am able to accomplish all of this!

I'm still here, trying to stay awake!

Sometimes it's all I can do to get out of bed, stretch, go back to bed, get up, go for a walk, eat dinner, go back to bed, get up, take a shower, and go back to bed. Who has energy for other things? Not me! My body is about the only thing I attend to consistently, and most of the things I normally do, I haven't been for one reason or another.

Before I can move ahead with my videos, I must first check the Gaslighting Extravaganza for mistakes. In order to do that, I must find the pieces of yellow paper that I need to check it. And then to make my next video, I have had some clips uploaded since October, but I must find my yellow mini legal sheets that have the script for the rest of it before I can finish it.

Somehow, these legal sheets keep falling on the floor and getting picked up and put in random places each time I try to put them in some kind of coherent order. So, I have made several attempts to do this already, but it seems fruitless. This is what happens when I'm in too much pain to type. But even that seems to be changing slowly. Maybe next video after that, I can use a computer screen to read from!

Spoony's Gaslighting Extravaganza! True tales of torture and denial!

Partly to make up for not publishing anything for some time, here's a very unusually long (two-part) video with a gripping story, which I think I've succeeded at making somewhat uplifting and entertaining:
In 2003, I was horribly tortured, drugged, etc., with devastating effects on my sense of identity. My mom and boyfriend disowned me unless I pretended it didn't happen. After even more gaslighting, I wound up in a mental institution, where I was physically attacked and humiliated further, treated as though my reaction to being traumatized was a form of psychosis.

On this channel, I want to share with people the amazing things I've learned about the mind. This is no exception!

I made sure to include an informative catching-up and introduction segment, in which I hope to explain the relevance of these past experiences to the content of this channel. If you just want to get to the beginning of the story, go to 23:52.

If you are hoping for a transcript, well, not yet, but... it's forthcoming!

The neighbor's cat, by the way, is named Chester.

If I'd been tortured and imprisoned in a POW camp, that would have been one thing. Instead, it happened under more insidious circumstances where the pain and suffering could be blamed on me.

In this second part of the story, the sheer level of denial will astound you.

It even includes the story where Bill turns around in his seat in order to avoid acknowledging that the car is careening across lanes!



By the end of this, I hope that many of you are doing your own version of the "negativity dance". Boogie down!

With all the Facebook comments I've been getting about how people are anticipating these new videos, I'm surprised no one has 'liked' or commented on either of the links in the past 12 hours. I was hoping to add that to this blog post, but, nothing so far.

[Edit: That changed while I was writing this post. And here is a comment I liked from Boe DuRansier:

Difficult to watch but incredibly important. You could, and should, become the voice for all those who have endured and suffered in silence simply because the one(s) who hurt them had better credentials. 

And, I promise, I really will make transcripts for these videos, now that they are done. They are certainly transcript-worthy!]

Now that I have all this out of the way, I'll get back to making shorter videos with more whiteboard and more "aliens"! There are already two I've been working on....