SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND (Patreon)

Happy Saturday, gang! I thought I'd just check in with you all before I take a break. 

I suspect many of you will be up in Blackpool this weekend. Here's hoping it's going to be an excellent Play Expo.

I confess... I'd been invited onto a panel, and even asked about doing a sort of Digitiser Live Lite, but the offer came right after I was recovering from the live show in July, and I was hesitant about confirming. 

Plus, the other Digitiser The Show hosts either couldn't, or didn't want to, go... so I'd have somehow been left doing it by myself. Even now, I'm never entirely comfortable being in the spotlight on my own.

Then I booked this holiday, and didn't really fancy having to trek up to Blackpool a couple of days before going away, so I backed out. I was replaced by Iain Lee and Big Boy Barry. God help you all.

Anyhow. State of play.

LOOK AT THE STATE OF THAT

There's the Digi Mini going up this Sunday - which some of you will have already seen - all about the miracle of dry ice. I don't know yet whether there'll be one the following Sunday. It depends whether I wake up on Monday feeling like I want to edit something. 

Either way, there's going to be a break in transmission, which I think the channel needs, for a while. I'm now accepting that the two-a-week schedule was probably a mistake, and I feel like people are sick of us...! One a week might even be too much. Dunno.

We did some filming yesterday with Ashens. He was a trooper, as always, though Paul and I were both depleted from the epic recording session for Cheapshow 150 the previous night (it'll be an interesting one; it's quite Digi-heavy in some curious ways, but I don't feel I was on my best form... though I enjoyed doing some "acting").

On top of that, neither Paul nor I had gotten much in the way of sleep before yesterday's session, while Sanja had a tooth extracted a couple of days ago, so even she wasn't feeling it either.

I'm frustrated, because it was the first filming where it seemed like we were forcing it, a bit, and I regret that we had a guest there for that. If it had just been the regulars, we'd have probably knocked it on the head, and admitted it wasn't happening.

I don't want the Minis to ever feel like we're going through the motions, but due to not having had the time to really plan this session, and not having the focus, inspiration, or energy we needed to step up... that's how it seemed. 

The plan had been to think through these eps a bit more before we started filming them, but we never got the time to do it. Stuart deserved better really.

That said, I don't think any of that will come across on screen - Stuart was, of course, superb, and mucked in with aplomb - it was more that I had to dig deep to deep to find the energy I needed, but I still remained annoyingly unfocused and scatty. I'm pretty sure it'll come together well in the edit, though (and I'll make damn sure it does, for Stuart's sake). 

I mean, the dry ice mini turned out great, but it was an absolute beast to pull together, because we shot it last that day, and hadn't really planned anything beyond "We've got some dry ice"...!

Ironically, the funniest Mini we shot yesterday had me dressed as a ghost, which - regrettably - I probably won't put out, as my costume on-camera looks a little too overtly Klan-like. Had we been a bit more on form, and less tired, us three regulars might've picked up on it (though Sanja said my ghost just looked like a "blob" to her, and not problematic, so I dunno).

I put out a photo from filming on Twitter Digi last night, with me in my sheet, and didn't even see how bad it looked, because to me I was so obviously a ghost... then, of course, I got a fair few alarmed comments. Rob Manuel of b3ta commented - though later deleted - saying "Glad this is your problem and not mine. Good luck".

Suffice to say, I took it down pretty damn quick. 

In short, it underlined that I need this break that I've been waffling on about. Normally, my super-busy day job period - due to the sort of cyclical schedule of the kids TV industry - lasts until early-August, then I get to have a holiday, and a quieter period where I do some stuff for me, and have the brain space to figure out what's next. 

This year... I was still writing scripts as late as this week, which was annoying, as I'd made clear to people that I was intending to take all of October off. Never mind! 

The Ashens eps will probably mark the end of the Digi Minis Series 1 era. I've had massive amounts of fun doing the knockabout episodes, but I'm finally starting to miss the structure we had in the earlier gaming ones. I guess I was left yesterday questioning what the point of them was exactly, and feeling like I'd let Stuart down. 

It's clear I need to mix things up to keep me interested, so I'm wondering... why am I doing the Minis? Thus far, it's because I've enjoyed the messing about, and loving the editing of them, but given that I didn't wholly love what I was doing yesterday, and given that views are way down on the channel... I'm today going: "What's the point?"

I don't want to scare the horses, and I'm probably overthinking it, I know, but that's what I do...! 

I might do some Digi posts early next week, having rediscovered my mojo... but I'll then be gone from Thursday for a couple of weeks. At least.

I SAY I SAY

As I say, I know I need it, but I think we all need it. I've started feeling a bit too ubiquitous over the past year, and I've begun wondering whether I'd benefit from there being a bit less me out there. Whether that means I retreat into the shadows for a while, and just stick to Patreon updates, or live streams, or something, I don't know... but you'll have seen from all my naval-gazing posts of late that I'm going through a spell of figuring-stuff-out.

I've had so many people kindly tell me "Do what you want to do - we'll be here for you"... but when you're not sure what it is you want to do, that only goes so far...!

That said, I'm gagging to pull together this new Found Footage idea I've had - it's seriously exciting - but it's going to have more impact if it gets to stand alone, in isolation. I'm not certain that, if it's surrounded by Minis, and Digi posts, it will feel special in the way that the first one did... when me being around was a novelty, rather than part of the furniture.

I need to figure out the best thing for FF - or Lost Tapes, as I'm currently calling it; what's going to help us raise the biggest budget, because some elements of it I really want to feel cinematic (don't worry: it's still mostly a messed-up, lo-fi, sketch show, of sorts). But I also know I won't have the support of a broader, hardcore retro gaming, community this time.

AND FINALLY... 

Obviously, as I've mentioned here and elsewhere before, I think part of why I'm feeling like this, where I'm kind of all over the place, is because I'm grieving. 

If you've ever experienced it, grief is a weird thing. you can be fine one minute, and the next... boom. You're just kind of frozen to the spot, and your chest feels like it has a black hole in it. And this is particularly weird grief, because it's over somebody I hadn't seen in decades. Nonetheless, for most of September, into the first week of October, I cried most days.  

And that was on top of my uncle dying the previous month, and having been the one who broke the news to my dad. 

Jimmy Lee - or Jimbob, to most of us - was, to be blunt, my hero, yet... to most people in my family he was a "bastard". I hadn't seen him since the early 90s, and had buried how I felt when they split up, and he moved back to America, out of loyalty to my sister, but his suicide has hit me hard.

Not a day goes by where something doesn't remind me of him, or some new memory gets triggered. Even while we were recording Cheapshow the other night... we had to roll dice for one segment, and then I flashed back to playing Monopoly with him.

I'm pretty sure my dad, still reeling from losing his brother, has been struggling too. I had to get something from his bedroom a couple of weeks back, and next to his bed were all the photo albums from when we visited my sister and him in America, in 1984. 

I'm finding it strange, I'm trying to figure out what it all means to me and why I've been left so bereft by it. What makes it harder is the nature of how he died; that he took his own life, that he clearly had so many, many, problems - and his suicide note suggests that at least one of those problems was that he'd felt he had to bury the fact he was gay. 

Whoever you really are, please... please try and accept yourself. 

For certain, I regret not having had the chance to say goodbye, to tell him how much he meant to me. I know that at least one of my nephews feels the same way, even though he hadn't spoken to his dad since he was very little. We're both crushed knowing that he didn't even have a funeral; he was cremated alone, and his ashes have been scattered in Arlington Cemetery. 

On top of that, there's a kind of frustration that he never knew that - despite what happened, despite what he did - not everybody in my family hated him. Quite the opposite in my case, and somehow I just hadn't realised it (despite Sanja pointing out to me that - in the years we've known one another - I spoke about him all the time). 

That realisation - realising I loved somebody who I never even saw - has kind of flooded me with emotions. It's really complex, and I'm trying to make sense of it all, but I think it's all playing into how I'm feeling about everything at the moment. And why I wonder whether it's a good idea to just disappear for a bit until it blows through... and take my time over whatever I do next. Release the pressure to keep regular content going.

But... so I don't end this epic post on too down a note... I'm really excited about going away. We've a lot of cool things planned, I think it's going to recharge my creative batteries, and we would both like to film some of it to share it with you (though not in a way that gets in the way of us enjoying ourselves). I dunno where I'd put the footage, as it doesn't feel like it really fits with the Digi channel. But maybe that doesn't matter. Dunno. 

What do you think?

Anyhow... thank you for indulging my long-winded ramble. You might've figured this is how I do my "working-out", and usually it helps me. 

And thank you for continuing to support me. It's because of this community, because of all of you, that I keep putting stuff out there. The fact that it feels like you've got my back, and you're so supportive of whatever I choose to do, is mind-blowing. Thank you.

Paul