Starting the Character Conflict (video)

In the few days before my surgery, I was trying to get up a second writing video.  I didnt' make it; I was about half an hour away.  Anyway, felt well enough to muscle through that, so it's up now.

https://youtu.be/MyqhKvQXKpg?si=8X8RfbfZCHosPH6Y

The Empty Page (video)

A different take on an earlier writing essay:

https://youtu.be/Wl2h0KlOoV4?si=gmg4TG5KolscRPcT

See it, hit like please, much appreciated.  Hope you enjoy the visuals.

Daði

In Breaking Bad, the workers for Pollos Hermanos place a small star on the buckets of chicken slop that have drugs concealed inside them, so that the receivers don't have to open every slop bucket.  This post needs a star to indicate that it doesn't end in a link.

I want to tentatively recommend a youtube D&D content producer, Mystic Arts, specifically yesterday's misnamed video.  I resist giving any outright praise; the presenter's attitude contains that sort of performative smugness that I fucking hate, specifically because it's designed to make the listener feel the speaker really believes what's being said... and because, in this case, as the speaker, Daði, has revealed himself to be of this school, it's the shitty voice that film arts school teaches graduates to adopt.  Some graduates buy in very hard on this.  The video doesn't quite reach the level of ire-inducing face-breaking that I reserve for guys like Colville, but I would rather this fellow just talk like a human fucking being.

He has some valuable things to say regarding presentation, which some readers here could advantage.  Daði has identified a problem that's rarely addressed, one I don't have simply because I don't stop talking during a game session until I've successfully put the players in a position that they have to act in order to protect themselves or achieve their fore-stated goals.  There are many examples of this in my game play scattered throughout this blog and other places.

Frustratingly, Daði has identified this as "the DM hasn't presented them with a game."  In this instance, the word "game" is terrifically non-distinctive, which greatly weakens the value of his argument.  It is a little bit like saying that the two teams are standing around because the referee, or the umpire, hasn't yet given them a "game" to play.  This is true, but it's not the parlance we'd expect.

Using this quote from 5.5 player's handbook,

"The rhythm of play is as follows: the dungeon master describes a scene; the players describe what their characters do; the DM narrates the results of the adventurer's actions... the dungeon master tells the players where their adventures are and what's around them, how many doors lead out of a room, what's on a table..." [and so on]

This is a reflection of an old, old habit, and not the result of a badly made game (though it is one).  Description is not an adequate motivation to play.  Players cannot be soothed with "easily digestible chunks of information" alone, though Daði makes a game attempt at arguing as much.  Asking my party mate to read a scroll I cannot read does not make for "exploration," nor is it "problem solving," any more so than my shorter daughter asking me to reach to the top shelf to get down a pot that gets used twice a year.   Rolling a die to see if a term is remembered isn't "exploration" either, it's a totally random, tiresome old-school game feature that continues to rely on the argument, "not knowing" is scarier than "knowing."

I'll take a moment and explain this one.  Two characters don't know the meaning of "the screaming mass."  Suie the druid has a chance of knowing what this is and makes an intelligence check.  In game, if Suie succeeds, the party learns what this term means.  If Suie fails, they don't... and must withstand the agony over not knowing, which supposedly gives the die roll meaning.

It doesn't.  It never has.  Why wouldn't you want your players to know what this is?  You could provide them with a deeply disturbing terrifying description of the mass, which is far, far more engaging and immersing than the teaser of two words... and you're using a game mechanic that has, as it's "feature," the ability to muzzle the DM's capacity for creating immersion.  This is idiocy.  It is based on a cinematic premise (Daði is a self-described filmmaker) that ALSO assumes that every answer in a film will be answered within 20 minutes of it being mentioned.

D&D does not move at anything like that pace... and it shouldn't.  It's not a movie.  Therefore, we should discard "movie rules" about information giving, which trusts to keeping the viewers locked in because, in reality, this concept won't take more than three episodes of binge watching to reveal.  If it takes more than three episodes, then the watcher's going to get tired of waiting and turn off.  There are rules to these damn things; you can't apply those to D&D because unlike three episodes of a streamed show, which last just over 2 hours, a session goes twice that just to resolve a combat (in 5th, that is).

But this is a quibble.  Daði has the right idea... it's only that he suffers from the miscomprehension that these tiny, incredibly dull details are sufficient to drive actions, regardless of how they're presented.  If your players are jumping at the description of a rolling staff, as though this is the best thing that's ever happened to them, then we're presenting the level of interesting that can only be found in reality television shows.  You know, the sort where the premise is that every episode will show a different iteration of more or less the same discoveries and responses, such as watching the enormous face of a sleasy asshole who purchases crap, only to sell said crap to other sleasy people.  In every episode.  All episode.

Fundamentally, Daði is arguing for the gamefication of a game that is already a game... only all the parts of the game that used to be there in earlier versions has been gutted and removed for the sake of new "game" concepts.  This isn't good, but it's a logical result.

Gamification is the practice of incorporating game-like elements into non-game activities to make them more engaging and motivating. It involves using features such as rewards, challenges, and competition to encourage participation and enhance the user experience. By tapping into people's natural desire for achievement and "fun," it's hoped that something that's really dull and boring, like the workplace, or education for children, can be made engaging.

However, gamification is a bad thing.  Ian Bogost has referred to it as "exploitationware" that exploits psychological triggers for profit.  Heather Chaplin, writing for Slate, describes gamification as "an allegedly populist idea that actually benefits corporate interests over those of ordinary people," suggesting it serves more as a tool for corporate manipulation than genuine user engagement.  Kevin Slavin of MIT has criticised gamification as flawed and misleading, particularly for those unfamiliar with gaming.  Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropologist, has studied how gamification techniques, initially designed for immersive game experiences, are now pervasive on smartphones, affecting various apps from social media to investment platforms, often leading to detrimental consequences like fostering addiction and promoting unproductive behaviors.  It's not accidental that this kind of thinking has drifted into modern D&D, which is more concerned with making the new version feel like a game rather than it actually being one.

On the whole, gamification reduces the context of rewards and achievement to shallow, supposedly reward-based systems, such posing a group of doors for players to open, or like Balder's gate, a set of premade things to click on, to provide "something," to use Daði's word.  This is barely above the level of encouraging monkeys to press a lever to get a mango, then calling it a game suitable for humans.

Overall, it treats players as though this alone will be enough to satisfy their interest level.  It's short-term engagement, unlike the longer lasting adventure-driven model where players are unsure for a long time if they'll survive the quest.  If, on the other hand, we remove survival as a concern, and make the success at the quest a certainty, it removes the overall stress that's related to long-term goals.  Short-term goals, on the other hand, those associated with gamification, employ the same psychological principles that drive gambling.  Suie isn't really learning what "the screaming mass" is, she's learning whether or not her die roll is successful, without the knowledge or reward being given having any real meaning.

This short-term engagement is expected to take the place of long-term growth, which 5th edition has done everything in its power to kill.  Judging from the content, 5.5 is not taking another direction.  Daði's video pretends that providing these "rewards" for "problem solving" have meaning... but, in fact, his particular version of this only works if the game itself is irretreivably dull and broken.  Which it is.  Since the goal has long since ceased to be, "become great."  This has been replaced with, "Enjoy being great.  Leap at a rolling staff."

Charlie Brown Lands on His Back Again

I've taken a bold step, creating a short combat video related to the self-play tutorial and dungeon, found on youtube here:  https://youtu.be/cbTPP7MoVyM?si=acqLE3oh8R01aS0v

And predictably, it has face-planted with regards to the public media.  For me personally, youtube will always be Lucy, no matter how many times I line up to kick.

The idea is this: make a video of a combat, a demonstration of the combat rules being played out, not only in one example but combat after combat.  Create a transcript of the combat and post that to my wiki, so that I can add links to the transcript that explain the rules being played.  I think it's innovative, I think it's brilliant, I think there's absolutely nothing like it on youtube or in anything I've ever seen about D&D.

And unfortunately, without noticing it until it was too late, the entrance way and guard room look like a dick pic:

The analytics tell the tale:

For the first hour, the number of actual appearances on youtube, the chances that anyone could click the video and look at it, were under a hundred.  They are now very slowly climbing upwards (my other vids would have more than 10,000 impressions by this time).  Maybe this'll change, but I don't expect so.

Anyway, there's the link, see the video.  I'll be doing another like it, when I'm ready.  I woke up this morning, excited to be creating it, getting it rendered into video and making the transcript, but I see no reason for celebrating now.

It's a good idea.  Fuck you, youtube.

Audio Files

My players were amused by the recordings that I recently released these last two weeks, but they declined to be recorded again last night.  So I shall have to find some other way to become rich and famous through youtube.

Self-torment

The next step in my recent youtube video publishing has been to include a 30-minute segment from my last D&D running, where the players encounter a small village in the delta of the Danube river.  The video isn't doing that well on youtube, not that I expected it would.  I suppose it reveals what a fraud I am as a DM, as no doubt I don't blow the doors off game play.  I'm not Mike Mercer.

But I want to talk about editing and creating the video, because I think it's a learning curve to which I haven't sternly applied myself.  I found listening to my delivery, and editing my delivery, a painful and bitter process, as to my mind I fall far short of where I wish I could be.  There's no question the players are invested.  They engage, they ask questions, they're interested in the material and such ... but speaking about myself, it's appalling how much I derail my own running as it happens.

None of that is in the video; I've cut it all out.  But the memory is fresh in my mind and as I'm being honest with myself, I am a mess of bad habits and clumsy, inconsistent exposition.  When I'm dredging up information on the spur of the moment, I stutter in a most frustrating manner.  Even writing about it here is upsetting.

This, I think, is the point.  Editing myself is so unpleasant, my strongest instinct is to never record the campaign again, never force myself to focus on every syllable and every word as I've just done this week, and certainly never put the results of that out in public. Ignorance is a far more desirable prospect here, one that allows me to maintain my delusions and preserves me from having to put myself though an emotional torment like this again.

Which has been my strategy since the invention of youtube, and all the content I've strained to produce in the past.  As such, I haven't even stayed the same over time.  I've gotten worse.  My players are so forgiving, they don't even see how much I'm phoning the campaign in.  I've been able to pretend to myself for I don't know how long ... and if there's anything that's become plain to me in the last seven or eight days, since starting this edit, it's that.  Ouch.

If I'm going to get better; if I ever was better; the only way I'm going to get there is by continuing to rake myself over these coals.  And it makes sense.  Listening to oneself can only help to make one more conscious about what's being done wrong ... and thus encourage the conscious mind to seek a remedy for that.  By hearing myself make the same mistakes, by hearing the tone of my voice grate upon my nerves just so, I at least have a chance of knowing what not to do, what not to say, how not to derail the game to input some observation or give some lecture that doesn't need to be done just then.

So, it doesn't matter if the videos do well, so much as it matters that I make them and force myself, unpleasantly, to post them.  And, occasionally, though I won't much enjoy this either, to listen to them.

I suppose there are people in this world who like the sound of their own voice, and are able to think to themselves, "I did a great job."

I'm not a person like that.

It's, um, Not What You Think

My apologies for not writing here for days.  For those interested, I've produced content for the map blog, and for a recent project called shifting sands, and for patreon, but not here ... and of course, here is the only place that really counts.

My daughter, her husband and their son had to vacate their former place of residence at the end of February; they can't take possession of their next residence until the 16th of March, so for the present they're bivouaked with Tamara and me.  We're all friendly and pleasant, though our place is just 750 sq.ft., so naturally there are hurdles.  One benefit is that my daughter and I were able to record a video for her let's play site on Monday, which is always fun; she's been in the middle of a long and difficult move and hasn't been able to post anything, so she's glad to have something to put there.  Please have a look if you're willing, give her a like and let it run a bit, since that helps her stats.  It's me explaining how I play Oxygen Not Included, which might reveal something of my general character with regards to D&D.  It is, after all, a design-based logistical game.

I wasn't able to put a preview up of the Streetvendor's Guide last Friday, and the way it looks I won't this Friday either.  There's lots going on, I'm struggling to find quiet time to do my job (which for whatever reason needs doing) and frankly I haven't even been able to open the document since last Thursday.  Lately, the time I've found for myself has been spent making maps because it's comparatively relaxing compared to producing serious content.  It doesn't help that I've run into a block regarding the layout of the wood section early parts ... as that's what I've started putting together.  Things are sure to settle down after a week or so, when I can return to my weekly pattern of equanimity.

Did have a useful conversation about the production of content, motivated by yet another one of thos many youtube videos in which some person talks about all the people who are quitting youtube and how hard it is to make money on the platform, and what's it all for anyway, and besides the real hard part is finding something meaningful to make content about.  You know the type.  Here's an example from a mature, adult woman whose able to express herself competently without having to posture like either a testosterone-driven jackass or an estrogen-possessed flake.

I trust that's an equally balanced insult of people of both sexes.  I don't want to play favourites.

Creating something new is hard.  Therefore, it's obviously easier to create something that's, um, derivative.  Something derivative may receive a lot of views and likes, but at the same time it's not exactly soul-sustaining.  If we make something derivative, it feels like it's derivative, so any actual praise we get for it feels, um, empty.

If later we then create something actually original, we can't help noticing that it gets precisely the same praise as something derivative.  Often, it gets less praise.  This is discouraging.  In fact, it's discouraging in the same way that praise for derivative stuff feels empty.  This is true even if the channel is making money.

All in all, this result undermines one's motivation to produce ... anything.  In fact, it's rather crippling.  Fortunately for me, I experienced this spiral in roughly the 1980s, when my audience consisted of no more than 60 persons at the best of times, and more usually a circle of about 6 friends.  Eventually I settled into a groove of comfortably creating content regardless of anyone ever seeing it.  I had no idea the internet would eventually happen.

Now that it has, I try occasionally to take some advantage of it ... only to be usually disappointed.  But I've been better trained to handle that then most people who are turning to the internet as, um, an alternative to working a real job.  Only to find, all too often, that creating stuff is a lot like a real job that fails to provide the purpose of a job: income.

Lets see ... I ought to provide some sort of advice here.  If you're going to make a youtube channel, film yourself doing something you're already doing every day.  If you like to sail, and you would be doing that anyway, learn how to post four well-secured cameras in the right places around your vessel and then film yourself until the power on these cameras runs out.  Then teach yourself how to voice over, so you can explain where you are, what you're doing, why you're doing it and so on.  The end product of cutting all four camera feeds may turn out to be utter garbage ... but at least you got to do what you would have done anyway.  And you've gained some knowledge of how cameras, editing and overdubbing works.  Win-win.

I write.  If the world were empty of all people, if I were the last man left alive, I would still write down things today because four years from now, I'd enjoy reading what I wrote four years ago.  This is the sort of madness you'll need if you're going to do something for a living, without a boss that pays you money just for showing up.

DON'T decide to do something you've never done before and film that.  Don't.  You won't like the thing ... and if your channel somehow does well, you'll learn to really, really, really hate the thing.  Eventually, you'll hate your fans for liking that you do something that you hate.  You'll hate them.  And that'll come out.  And you'll regret it.  Not just because your channel isn't popular any more, but because it once was, it stopped being, and you're going to utterly hate yourself for letting it fail.  It's a lose-lose.  Don't do this.

DON'T base your channel or anything else you're doing on someone else's work.  You may have a mission to teach people the wonders of history, but if all you're doing with your history channel is repeating information that exists in books, or hundreds of other history channels, in the end you're going to feel like you're on a hamster wheel.  You may have a wonderful plan for your next presentation, you may put hundreds of hours into making your presentation pretty, or witty, but if you're on a hamster wheel and that's not where you really want to be, in a few years you'll realise that this is all getting you nowhere.  Even if it makes money for you.  In the end, you'll realise you're not making any kind of difference at all, any more than all the other copies of your work do.  You'll realise you're not special, and you're never going to be.  You won't like that.  And worst of all, it's not going to be an alternative to doing a "real job."  It will be a real job.  One you might be able, someday, to get numb to, but not one that's going to fill you with joy.

Truth be told, most of us don't do something every day that's worth pointing a camera at.  Sorry.  Just how it is.  Most of the time, these people who sigh and show regret for the internet not being what they hoped for are just too, um, ordinary to be watched.  Again, sorry.  Just how it is.  Performance is for performers.  It's a type.  Not everyone is a class clown.  And most of the time, being a class clown isn't all that rewarding anyhow.

It's great that youtube and the general internet gives everyone a shot at being a class clown, or some other kind of performer ... but realistically, a "shot" isn't much.  It's not fame.  It's mostly not rewarding.  It's mostly a wasted afternoon getting ready for the audition.

Getting it Done

So where have I been?  Those familiar with my Patreon know that I've been spending a lot of time posting there, nearly every day, sometimes three times a day.  It's not that I'm trying to sell myself there, but that it's a better platform for posting what I've done in a given day than here on blogger ... largely because it's central and better for publishing pdfs or pngs.  Much of the material I'm posting there is also being created for my Map Blog, which I've taken up again since January 15th.

For all the things I watch or read about creators at work on the internet, I see little about creators themselves.  The linked video is a year old and mostly on the mark — particularly this insight that creators are not expected to create "content" on Youtube, but "ad space."  This is old news to a journalist like me, however, who learned in university that articles in newspapers have been there to create ad space since the 17th century.  But Youtube is new and glitzy, and teenage creators don't have some old hand cold selling advertising on the phone to tell them what's what, like I did.  All content is for the purpose of creating space for ads.  That's the reason "public material" was invented.

It's no mystery here that I began playing D&D a bit more than 44 years ago ... but more importantly, I began working on my game at nearly the same time.  Less than four months after my introduction, I had an idea for a game world and had convinced some fellow players, and friends who had never played the game, to give it a try.  I don't know what calendar day I launched the world; I'd guess about a month after I'd gotten the D&D books for Christmas of '79.  That is, sometime in the last week, 44 years ago.

Until 2008, all of 28 years, all the time spent in building and creating my world was done alone, with the exception that my players would see evidence from week to week of things I sought to introduce.  In creator terms, it's something like a sincere group of musicians with ten years experience of playing together, who haven't yet published their first album for a record company.  All that while, there's plenty of time to test things on audiences, change lyrics, change the bridge, practice getting it right and building a deep familiarity with the chords and colouratura of each piece.  And there's time to write a lot of pieces, since constant touring and press junkets don't exist to get in the way of being a musician.

Which is why, as most know, the second album is rarely as good as the first.  There's less time.  There's all this fame in the way.  There's the total uprooting of the musician's lifestyle to this other thing.  There are fifty voices having a say beyond the band members.  It takes someone who's either willing to fight every minute for the integrity of their vision, or be willing to say "fuck all of you" and walk away from money, fame, glamour and fans, knowing that in the long run their talent will pay off despite the temporary loss of these things.  The greatest musicians, writers, designers and other creators are those with the strength to do one or the other — take on the industry and win, or do it without the industry.

This is not most people.  Most people with talent will compromise; and nearly all of those without talent can talk animatedly about how fast they'd compromise, if only they got the chance.  This latter describes nearly every person on youtube or any other creative platform.  Because they don't have content to create, they spend years searching sites that might tell them what content they might create if only it would make them rich and "happy."  What they're not doing is "creating," because they haven't anything to create.

To attain the top 1% of youtube creators, the cherished 610 thousand channel owners in the whole world, we need 56 followers who regularly follow our videos and watch them to the end.  This requires a very minimal skill set.  One has to be able to turn on a computer, sit in front of it, use a simple program that can be bought, and talk about something moderately popular for 10 to 20 minutes, three times a week.  There are 61 million creators on youtube.  In front of an audience of 2.7 billion.  There are 44 watchers for every creator.  It takes only the least bit of resilience to get our 44 watchers watching ... and yet only 1% of all would-be creators can do that.

None of this describes me.  I didn't work on my game world for 28 years with the expectation of a musician.  There was no rich moneyed company by which I could ever be "discovered."  When I read the Dragon magazine in my teens, I thought the writing was shit, I thought the approach to D&D was shit, I thought the people involved were amateur writers who would never amount to anything.  And as writers, except pitching to their own audience, that's all they ever were.  None rose to the status of Leiber, Anderson, Anthony or even Asprin, much less Tolkein.  None of the artists achieved anything.  Neither have I, obviously, but for fuck's sake, when I measure myself against a "creator," I'm self-aware enough to measure myself against Zelazny or at the very least Pratchett ... NOT fucking Arneson.  Jeebus.  I may be just another of the D&D hacks out here, but as least I know it.  I'm not here writing eulogies for so-called "legendary" game designer Jennell Jaquays.

Forgive me if I haven't got cares to give about people who have had zero influence on my work or my thinking process.

I attribute my "success," as it were, as I have more than most on Patreon, to my disregard of success as a goal.  It's something I'd like to have.  It's something I think I deserve to have ... but I don't have it because it's not a "goal."  It's not something I'm aiming to achieve and it never has been.  For reasons that make no sense to most people, I'm trying to make a world here — the best possible game world I can create, with the best possible rules, and the best possible tools to make it go.  It happens that a lot of things I've learned how to do, and things I've happened to create, are things that other people find worth seeing or having.  These are things they haven't figured out how to create themselves.  Having these things gives them an opportunity to have a better world, with better rules and tools.

My readers aren't going — I should gawddamned hope — to stand out in the rain at some vigil upon my death, because they and I don't give a rat's crap about my halo effect.  When I die, the spigot gets turned off.  That's the only thing to feel sad about.  Chances are, I'm going to weaken and be unable to do what I'm doing now long before I actually die, just as happens to nearly every creator.  It's a pity that Chita Rivera died on Tuesday, without much fanfare I notice, but it's not like she was in the middle of making of film or anything.  Carl Weathers died too, day before yesterday.  I'm sure they'll be missed sincerely by their families.  The rest of us are entitled to a feeling like, "Gee, I remember watching them," and that's about it.  With the one who says,"I heard this and I am soooo saddened by it," it's more selfishness than sadness.  But I digress.

Now and then, I've got to back away from writing blog posts because this isn't getting me anywhere.  Just now, I'm exercising some 400+ minutes a week — though gently, very gently.  I get in about 90 minutes of floor stretching and 330 minutes of walking, most of the latter on a treadmill that we bought for ourselves a year ago because Tamara needed a firm, reliable surface to walk on.  Calves and thighs are toughening up, I'm shedding a little weight and I'm in a state of calm tiredness and moderate sweating that awakes in brief hot flashes, mostly at night when I'm sleeping.  Blood pressure is steady at 120/80, heart rate is 65-66, I'm eating less and not doing too bad.

When I find time separate from writing for work, I write or edit the Streetvendor's Guide.  I've done all the cloth now, have been stuck for three days completing the small section on rope and cordage for ropes and fishing nets, and am on the verge of starting hides, skins and furs.  At the same time, I finished editing the two introduction sections at the start of the book and I'm cleaning up the section on cultivation, having added an additional three quarters of a page of content since starting on that.  Parts of this work are being posted on Patreon every Friday (I just posted edited versions of pp. 24 and 25), for the benefit of those patreon supporters who give me a minimum of $10 each month.  Showing is about 1/6th the content I'm publishing there each week ... so if you're really interested in knowing how the Guide is going, and that it's actually going, then help me pay for the artwork that's set to support this thing.

When I'm too tired to work on this — because, frankly, wanting to be both accurate and interesting is more important to me than getting it done — I spend bits of time here and there working on mapping the Balkans.  I got interested in resurrecting the map blog because I found I needed some kind of thing to pass the time that felt moderately robotic and yet interesting enough to get my head out of the Guide occasionally.  My partner told me to "smile" the other day, because I haven't for awhile.  It's two weeks into my work-out plan (with the kidney foundation being quite supportive, I should say), and between that and the Guide I admit I've been fairly grim.  There's nothing for it.  On a good day I get three quarters of a page of new-written material done, or a full page of editing done, between other commitments and the limitations of my energy supply.  So when I have enough gumption to distract myself, I work on maps.

When I haven't got the mental energy for those, I drift into some mild problem-solving game like a jigsaw puzzle or Oxygen Not Included, or I drive in EuroTruck Simulator 2, or Two-Point Hospital or whatever, while listening to a movie or music.  This is just waste time, honestly.  But I'm the sort of person who can't just sit and stare.  If I do that, then I start thinking about what I'm not doing; and if I'm not doing the Guide, and thinking about it, this doesn't encourage me.  It fact, it makes me quite aware of how BIG the damn thing is, and how STUPID a person has to be to start a project like this, and how it's still an unbelievable time before it's going to be done ...

This doesn't push me towards doing it, it pushes me away.  I've learned these last ten years that this is a sort of self-preservation thing; that as homo sapiens, spending too much time doing something without an expected yield in the short term is a great way to die of starvation in the savanna.  To get the Guide done, I have to trick my animal brain into thinking I'm doing other needful things.  Then, at some point, playing a game or making a map, I have a thought that goes, "Why am I wasting time with this drivelling shit when I could be working on the Guide?"  Then I close everything and work on the Guide.  It's quite a reliable technique, even if it does involve putting my animal brain to sleep while sneaking up on my ego with a dagger.

Being creative is about getting something done.  It's not about making money, or becoming famous, or winning approval or respect.  Those who succeed at it are those who want to get things done.  If the thing getting done is popular, all the better.  If the success gets in the way of getting the thing done, well, see the success for what it is, kick it to the curb if need be, and get it done.  Because getting it done is all that matters.

For people with nothing to do, who want to have youtube channels or blogs, well of course they're never going to achieve anything.  Because from the start, they've never had anything to do.