New Year's Resolutions

Published on 12/31/2023, 517 words, 2 minutes to read

Hi, it's Xe. At the time of recording, it's 11.30pm on New Year's Eve, and I just wanted to record something about New Year's resolutions and specifically what mine is for the next year.

Over the last year, my New Year's resolution could be summed up in, like, a couple words. Get over my fear of public speaking. Get over my fear of being a jackass on stage and talking about things that are funny, engaging in ways that teach people things fundamental about computer science.

I am fairly confident to say that I have made a huge impact on that, if not basically gotten over the most of it, and the rest of it is really just, like, smoothing out the logistics of actually doing things, actually recording things, all of that.

I think I know what my resolution for 2023 is going to be.

Historically, I've been kind of afraid of doing video for my blog, I'm afraid of video because of how permanent it is, how much effort it is to change things. With blog posts you edit a couple words here and there, and then bam, your message is completely different.

But video has a lot more intention behind it. It has a lot more editing. It has a lot more steps.

I want to get over my fear of looking like a jackass on video. I'm going to work on that.

And the way I'm going to work on that is by doing it, putting myself out there, being vulnerable, and just seeing what happens.

It's kind of actually terrifying to make this kind of resolution out in front of a bunch of people, you know, in this sort of intimate face cam style. I usually use a v-tubing rig because, well, my hair is super greasy right now.

This is totally unfiltered. I don't even have a script right now. I normally script basically everything that I do in video to an inch of my life. I script the hand gestures that I do.

I want to change that. I want to be a bit more spontaneous. I want to basically just create for the love of creation.

My resolution for this year is to put out a video once a month.

Oh, and as an aside, to stop using GitHub Gists because there's a whole story there that I'm probably going to make the first video of the new year. It's got action, danger, and accidentally getting on the front page of Twitter by getting on my gist links tweeted by Elon Musk, then finding out that the GitHub Gists product has been effectively abandoned by the team because nobody got promoted working on it. So I had to delete the gist because at the time of me being unemployed, having a bunch of people on Twitter looking into my history probably wouldn't be for the best. You can understand, right?

Thanks for sticking with me. Thanks for believing. And let's see if I can get this video out before New Year's.

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

Tags: