Live Streaming
Live streaming is the best and worst thing to do for my brain.
I made a video on this topic already, but wanted to elaborate on some of the appeal that live streaming has for me.
What is abundantly clear for me is that my mind is a mess of so many thoughts and plans that it’s difficult to fully be articulate of what’s going on. Writing would be the most ideal way to go about structuring everything which is very helpful, but a lot of the time, it is not as fun as live streaming. Being able to speak my thoughts live makes all of these complex thoughts more clear to me. I still come across as a bit incoherent or just yap a little too long, but from that mess of spoken thoughts, clarity arises from speaking into the camera.
It’s like my mind is working overtime and it occasionally hits an insight during the flow state of yapping.
Combine that with the interaction of other people on the internet, and something beautiful occurs, entropic thought. I don’t know, I just made up that term just now, but basically I am combining the chaos of my own mind with the randomness of other people’s minds along with the timing of the moment. Or rather, the context of the moment, makes whatever thoughts and in turn the experiences that come forth really unique.
An example I found was during my recent rewatch of Code Geass on weebcloset. After watching the first half, I found that one of the characters in the show was surprisingly well written even though they are a seemingly objective bad character for the show (Nina). To sum it up quickly, she’s a character that represents the stupidity and idealogic mindset an intelligent person can have and how even someone that’s this delusional can affect the plot of the story.
Even though I was building these thoughts from having knowledge from the show beforehand, this insight would not have occurred if I didn’t point these things out during the rewatch live. Granted, I am probably filtering my thoughts in the lens of trying to be entertaining and the need to continue yapping, but finding these things within the moment always surprises me.
The key attribute that appeals to me is the moment to moment part of live streaming. Even with a structured plan, beautiful experiences that I would not have imagined occurs often during the streams that have a somewhat mundane premise. Like the experiences I had during my trip to Otakon in 2024; practically nothing was planned outside of showing up to the anime convention and sort of interacting with whatever pops up. To be fair, live streaming wasn’t really necessary to get the experiences that occurred at Otakon, but it was the thing that guided the decision making to end up at Otakon.
To me, live streaming is like writing with a pen. To express myself with whatever thoughts and feelings I have at the current moment, and in doing so, realize what I’ve expressed is there on the paper without the immediate compulsion to remove it. I let the idea be expressed and during the moment either iterate on that idea or notice the flaws in my thinking.
This is partially why I hate editing videos as I constantly have to erase thoughts that seem irrelevant to the topic at hand. However, all of those meanderings and mistakes tell their own story and provide the additional context for whatever I am trying to express. If there’s a bunch of crossing out of things when I am writing with a pen, it’s an indicator of how torn I am on what I am trying to say. As such, live streaming shows directly my facial movements and all of the imperfections that occur while I am trying to form and express a specific idea. This is the value I get out of it in real time. Obviously, I focus and distill the core result that comes out of the long yap sessions I am on, but that real time feedback is a wonderful feeling (especially when I start spitting some truly insightful/funny stuff).
