Okay, it’s the “middle” of the “work week” and this is my next daily “blog post”, in case any of you reading didn’t know these things.

I made a video yesterday, and I even pretty much edited it, but I haven’t yet posted it to YouTube, and so I cannot share/embed it here.  It was a free-form recording, and ended up being essentially a form of minor self-promotion, in which I encourage people to buy my books (and to a lesser extent to listen to my music) if they want to support me—though that raises the question of whether anyone would ever want to support me in the first place.  In my experience, the answer is “no”.  Heck, I don’t even want to support myself.

But it does show, at least, that I have a certain amount of affection, bordering on pride, for my fiction, and indeed, I am reasonably proud of my books and short stories.  I’m even fairly proud of my songs, though I wish I’d had better equipment to record and produce them.  Still, considering I was literally learning as I went along, I think they came out okay.

I will say this, though—I don’t think I’m going to be making many more videos using my Samsung tablet.  In addition to giving me the black sidebar thingies, which I chose to accept, since lateral videos just need to have background edited out, it also records at way too high a definition, and so videos take up an absurd amount of memory.  I suppose this would be useful and good if I were recording fine visuals, so I have no actual complaints about the tablet’s camera quality, but when the picture is basically just me then frankly, the lower the definition the better.

If I could be rendered in 8-bit graphics, it probably wouldn’t be a horrible thing.

Also, upon sending the video to the desktop, via Google Drive, I couldn’t import it directly into DaVinci* Resolve without the video getting all higgledy-piggledy**, so I had first to import it into the Microsoft video editor (I took advantage and adjusted the audio right then and there at an earlier step than usual), then export it to import into Resolve.  But, of course, even after doing that, and adjusting the output for only medium video quality, the file was still huge.

How much impact on the environment is occurring because of all the memory being generated and all the electricity needed to operate and cool all the huge servers which we use to run and store just the videos we use and the documents in Google Drives and the like?  Might it be more ecologically efficient if we literally just recorded the entire internet on old-fashioned paper?

If we get the wood pulp from tree farms, it would not decrease the forests in the world, and in fact, the paper would be, at least for a time, an effective carbon sink.  Interesting, no?  It just goes to show you, real situations are complicated, and your first, instinctive reactions are often inaccurate.  It’s hard to store an actual video on paper of course, but celluloid is another matter…though that is extremely flammable.

I think for my next video, I’m just going to try to use the camera on the little laptop on which I write this blog post.  It’s comparatively low definition, which is fine with me.  If the microphone were better I might use it for everything, except the Resolve parts.  I’ve tried attaching my USB microphone to a mini laptop once and it didn’t work well—but I think that might have been my previous laptop, not this one.  I think I have tried the native microphone for this laptop, and it was good enough for general recording.

Anyway, that’s yet another blog post about nothing, following on a video about nothing after a previous blog post about nothing.  It’s fine, though, since really everything is about nothing.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we’re all just (metaphorical) virtual particles***, popping into existence, sometimes (rarely) having externally felt mass effects, and then vanishing back into the nothingness from which we arose before a Planck time (metaphorically, again) has even passed.  Though, en masse, we can have local effects, any individual virtual particle (it would be pairs of particles, really, if the metaphor were strictly applied) effectively does not exist at all, from the point of view of the outside universe.  Think on that, and…

…have a nice day.

*Which seems to imply that the program comes from the city of Vinci, which is in Tuscany, in Italy.  DaVinci wasn’t Leonardo’s “last name” in the modern use of such things, it was just an indicator of where he was from, like Conan of Cimmeria or Simon of Sheboygan.  When people use “DaVinci” to refer to Leonardo as if it were his last name, it leads to some humorous effects at times, if you’re paying attention and applying the literal meaning of the words.

**Please excuse the technical jargon.

***Strictly speaking, virtual particles are sort of metaphorical even in quantum mechanics, at least according to my best understanding.  They really are a shorthand for a more sophisticated process involving quantum fields, but I guess it’s easier to think of things as virtual particles.  That seems to complicate matters unnecessarily, to me, not make them simpler, but I’m weird.