May Update: Things Aren't Great, To Be Perfectly Honest
Hey team,
Not all of my news is bad. None of it's good.
The last two weeks have been a major relapse in sciatica symptoms. I seem to be through the worst of it and am somewhat functional again, but, seeing as we don't know what caused the relapse, we're very hesitant to resume any of my normal life activities. The relapse was enough to convince my insurance to get me an MRI, and we have officially confirmed it's a herniated disc, and next up is a spine assessment to determine whether or not I need surgery.
All this for sitting in a car seems quite excessive.
Given that I officially have no idea how long this is going to last, I am finally calling in the cavalry. Here's where things stand:
A friend and fellow YouTuber has agreed to edit my UC Merced talk for me. I've sent her everything it requires and it should be a fairly simple task. In my ideal world I would release the final CO-VID before putting an Alt-Right Playbook Endnote online, so I might show it to you and then sit on it for a bit.
Another friend and fellow YouTuber has agreed to edit a couple of other videos for me. I looked over my list of potential topics and picked a couple ideas I had about some movies that I know this YouTuber is a fan of, and so they could probably do an edit without too much guidance from me. This is much more involved so it's a paid gig, not a favor, but I trust them a lot. Those scripts haven't been written, however, so I don't know how long they'll take.
I still have that collaboration I've been teasing planned, and we're now targeting the end of the summer, and having two people should help work around my infirmities.
Finally, I have installed Premiere on my laptop and gotten a cooling tray to perch it on and will - pain allowing - experiment with editing while lying prone on a futon mattress. This is how I will attempt to edit the final CO-VID.
The thing I really want to get back to is Alt-Right Playbook, obvs, so I'm having to consider hiring an animator. This is tricky, because those are a lot of work, and I frankly don't get paid enough for the hundreds of hours I put into them, so paying someone what they deserve might leave me with not very much. Maybe I'll run a small Indiegogo to raise the animator's salary, I dunno.
Point is: I am only partially functional for the foreseeable future and I'm starting to work around that rather than waiting for it to get better.
Thanks for your patience, and for (mostly) not bailing on me.
-I