My New Years resolution going into 2025 was to upload at least 1 drum track a week for the entire year. I didn’t actually get started until February, and I had a child on June 24, and in spite of that, I still managed to make 44 drum tracks this year. During this year, I also wrote 2 written reviews for this website, as well as reuploaded 6 articles from my previous website. I started a new segment where instead of my typical reviews based on deep game analysis and dissection, I do a scathing takedown of some bullshit-or-other in the gaming scene, and I added 3 articles in that style to the site. Since I was so active on YouTube from uploading my drum tracks, I decided to make the home of the gaming podcast there, and thusly added 5 brand new episodes of the Bone Robot Games podcast to my YouTube, in addition to reuploading 2 episodes from the podcast website to YouTube. These are all my different creative pursuits.
I also read the last 7 books in The Wheel of Time series, as well as a handful of other books this year, including Red Rising, Between Two Fires, Bluebird and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut, The Mountain In The Sea, Station Eleven, and Thrum.
I’m quite proud of this accomplishment, even though I failed my goal of 1 drum track per week, because I usually set very lofty full-year goals as resolutions and don’t get close to completing them. Having uploaded 44 out of 52 times, while also building out the rest of my catalogue and continuing to write articles and upload podcast reviews and discussions classifies as a win. Beyond that, the scope of my drum project changed as I continued doing it. Prepare for a rant as an aside:
I have noticed with all of my projects, sometimes you have an outline of an idea, or you don’t even realize an idea needs to be fleshed out until you’ve already begun. Some ideas I nail right from the beginning. For my review articles and gaming talk show, I’ve always known what I wanted to do and the project has had my voice and style from top-to-bottom, start-to-finish. For the drum project, I only knew I wanted to play drum tracks to video game songs, and my simplistic approach ended up not being enough to upload to YouTube, for their standards or my own. I needed to learn how to edit the drum tracks, how to make videos out of the MP3s and add a static image for the YouTube requirement. I started off making jokey images of low quality, then I got really into making custom thumbnails to represent the song with images from the game and different versions of the Bone Robot character. I started off writing one sentence descriptions simply because you need a description for a YouTube video. This evolved into me writing long, detailed descriptions about my history with the game, why the song is important to me or why I found it interesting, why I chose it, explanations of my drum techniques or choices, or a combination of several of those.
It’s important to be dynamic in your approach to your goals, accolades, and progress. Having my actual tangible metrics represented here allows me to track my projects, but it’s not always about increasing that number. I played dozens of games this year that I didn’t warrant even being worthy a review, whether due to the quality of the game or it’s simplicity or because I didn't feel like it, or usually that it simply wasn't worthy of review. Success is not measured only in a number, which is actually a problem of YouTube itself these days. I could have put out 52 drum tracks, but if the quality of each one was not up to my high standards, it would not have been a success. It is far more important to put out less content, but each piece has a higher quality, than to churn out something for the sake of it, and have the actual material be rote, low-grade, or worst of all, vapid. I am proud of each drum track, article, and review. In fact, I am so proud, on my YouTube recap this year I was the top viewer of my own channel. I would listen to my drum track playlist on runs, walks to the store, and when I was at home playing music around the house for myself.
The point of this is that I am not setting a goal for 2026 beyond “continue to create.” I will be making more drum tracks, more takedown articles, blog posts, highlights, reviews, and discussion videos. I will be uploading all of my old audio-only podcast episodes to YouTube (which is a long process in itself because I am re-listening to all the 1 hour+ episodes and ensuring I still approve of the quality before uploading.) A familiar TreeBone adage I have often stated is to make as much time for yourself as you do for work. You wake up early even when you don't want to so that your boss doesn’t fire you, but you don’t schedule time in your free time for yourself. Be your own boss, and fire your dumb ass if you don’t show up.
Thank you to all that enjoyed any of my content this year. I clearly do it for myself, as my conceit in my own quality is enough, but it truly means an incredible amount when I get a comment from a complete random on here or YouTube and they enjoyed my work. There will be far more to come in the future as I usher in an era, single-handedly, of quality gaming content for people who care.
Cheers!
Comments
Post a Comment