April 18th 2016

Today my perfectionism showed a little bit. And it’s weird to think that someone who is as lazy and uncaring as I am can have traits of a perfectionist, but I sometimes do. Let me explain.

Recently I’ve been editing and uploading these daily video logs (vlogs, if you will) from my time travelling Europe this summer. I recorded one every day, edited it, and uploaded it to YouTube that same night just so that I could show my family what I was up to and where I was staying and such. Eventually, as we got further east into Europe, the Wifi standards made it impossible to upload, and by the time we got back west, I was too far behind to be motivated to continue editing and uploading them. But I did still film everything. Since I’ve been home I’ve been (very) gradually churning them out when technology allows it. I’ve had hiccups with lost memory cards and broken computers, and such, but in the last week or two it’s been my main project to finally finish editing and uploading every video from each day of travelling I had left.

I was editing one just now, and I realised something, and this is where the first line of this blog post comes in. On the last two videos I’d uploaded I’d put the wrong date on the title screen. Oops. I must’ve forgotten to change it when I copied the text template over from the previous video. So the videos were live with a mistake in each of them. And that wasn’t okay with me. They had to be perfect.

So, I changed the date on both of the titlecards, exported them both (which takes ages), uploaded both (which takes even longer), deleted the previous and erroneous videos, and now it’s fixed. I’ve lost any views that the previous two had, but that’s not important to me, it’s important that I have a complete and accurate documentation of my time travelling. (as in, the time I spent travelling. NOT: when I travelled through time)

It’s weird, because this kind of idiosyncrasy infrequently comes out. The editing of the video’s is in some places sloppy and lazy, but in parts I’ll spend five minutes making sure the clip ends on the exact right frame. In the grand scheme of things, one number being different in a titlescreen that takes up 3 seconds of the video isn’t important. It’s not important to the viewer, but it’s important to me. And I don’t really know why.

I kinda wish I could in some way extrapolate this perfectionism into everything I do, but it only seems to be important to me in very weird and specific occasions, usually when it comes to numbers. It would be handy if I paid that much attention and care to editing my novel, or tidying my room.

Until tomorrow, are you sure you want to delete that?

Jacn