Couple of topics to go over.

Topic the First:

For a couple of years now, I've been sort of suspecting something about myself that I've been reluctant to confirm.  When I got diagnosed with Anxiety/Depression, and then later with ADHD, each time there was a brief moment of clarity, the realization that "oh, this is why I felt sad for no reason" or "why I struggled paying attention" or why I behaved in a particular manner during a particular situation.

But because I grew up with someone who didn't believe in mental illnesses, or at least thought of those who took medication for them as being "lesser", and always blamed these problems in my case as me not trying or just acting up or what have you (ironic, really, when you consider I'm pretty sure that person has the same symptoms), this clarity was quickly followed with a sense of "who the hell even am I anymore?".  Of the things I did, ways I reacted, people I upset/hurt in my past, was that me or was it a mental issue I couldn't do anything about because no one would fucking tell me what was going on?  It's a question I'm still wrestling with to this day.

Because I had an anger problem - still do, but not nearly to the degree of, say, my teens/20s - shortly after I moved to North Dakota, I talked with a doctor up here about the possibility of being bipolar, but they didn't seem to think I was, which was probably just as well since, as I told myself later, I don't know if I can take any more moments of "oh, great, yet another mental issue that could have made my life vastly different if someone told me about it/helped me with it".  It's for that reason why, despite coming to recognize the signs of it in both childhood and the present day over the past couple of years, I've held off on seeking confirmation for this new problem.

But I made a friend up here through local D&D games.  Said friend happens to be autistic.  And after talking with her over the past few months, making observations and comparisons, I've come to the conclusion that I'm very likely autistic as well.  To what degree, I don't know, as I still don't want to get an official diagnosis.  Partially for the aforementioned reason, but also because of the fear of "what if the doctor says I'm not autistic, THEN what could it be?".

But it probably is; the signs are there.  I won't go into all of them since, even though my wife, our friend, and I discussed them, lest we forget, I'm also ADHD (or apparently "AuDHD" now) and my memory is shit.  But of the ones that stand out to me:

• I was told that as a child I liked to have my toys in a certain order, and even as an adult while my office isn't necessarily "clean" per se, everything is in a certain place and I can readily lay my hands on something if I need it, and if my wife moves something, even if it's like an inch or two away from where I'm used to it being, it throws me off.

• I've always been a picky eater, and I've always put it down to the fact that I was made to eat a lot of things I didn't like when I was a child, and over time that shifted into the mindset that there's a lot of foods I don't like.  That's probably still true, but through discussions with my friend, we've determined it may also be that I tend to eat a lot of the same things just for the familiarity.

• This is the one that sort of tipped the scales, so to speak.  I saw a post on Facebook recently that I noticed I heavily identified with.  It said "I hate last minute changes unless they're MY last minute changes."  Once I get into a routine, I'm always highly annoyed if it gets changed unexpectedly or if there's a sudden interruption to it.

So, yeah.  I'm autistic now - or at least, I always have been but only just now became aware of it.  Yay, I guess.

Topic the Second:

As I write this, I've *finally* finished editing and uploading the last few episodes of my Old Skies Let's Play.  I say "finally" because the time between my finishing my last recording session and my rendering the last episode was about a month.  That, in and of itself, isn't necessarily a bad thing, but Old Skies, at the time I was recording it, was a brand new game, and I wanted to try to get the finished series out as soon as I could, but because it was taking so long to get the episodes edited, I ended up having to render/upload a few at a time during the editing process.  This meant that, as a result, I was doing two things I told myself I didn't want to do when I returned to YouTube: rush to meet deadlines/stay relevant, and promote something before it's finished.

It was an exhausting process for a few reasons.  1.) I ended up with 20 episodes worth of LP material, and many of them are between 45 minutes to a little over an hour, and even assuming I'm just doing a basic (cutting bits out, no special effects) edit, it takes me, at a rough estimate, 3-4x the length of a given episode to edit it.  Granted, this is mainly due to my perfectionism, and I tend to have a lot of extraneous mouth noises in my voice track which lately I've tried to cut out so people don't find it annoying.

2.) I started recording the Old Skies LP the day after the game came out, and that was less than two weeks after I'd finished editing and uploading my LP of another at-the-time brand new game, Rosewater (21 episodes, again with a few running >45 minutes).  So between those two games, that's essentially 2-and-a-bit straight months of recording/editing work which, again, I felt like I needed to rush to finish while the games were still new.

Now, you may be thinking "well, just make the episodes shorter", but it's not that simple.  No matter how many episodes I divide an LP into, there's still the same amount of gameplay to get through.  Plus, I edit my LPs with the full awareness that I'm on the internet and, as such, I don't have a strict timeslot to fill, although I do try to make my episodes at least 15 minutes long.  Thus, especially with story-heavy games like Old Skies and Rosewater, I tend to keep editing an episode until I feel it comes to a natural cutting-off point.  That could be 20 minutes, it could be over an hour.

You might also be thinking "just edit and upload a few episodes at a time".  And, for those that don't already know, this is where a bit of paranoia comes into play.  I used to do just that.  And I used to promote projects that I was planning or working on, be it LPs, review videos or streams.  But as time went on, I began noticing "real life" started getting in the way more and more.  Either my ADHD would kick in and I would forget to record/edit, or I'd have computer problems, or something would come up and I would have to postpone/cancel a project, or I would suddenly decide for whatever reason to stop playing a game I was recording/streaming, or whatever.  Eventually I started feeling like I jinxed myself anytime I promoted projects that were in the works, and so I decided that, in future, in most cases I wouldn't promote anything anymore until I knew for damn sure that the project was going to go out.

Another thing I felt unsatisfied with was the way I gave my concluding remarks at the end of Old Skies and Rosewater.  I had made bullet points of things I wanted to remark about (if you see me glancing off-camera at the end of those playthroughs, that's what I'm looking at), and the closing comments I made were genuine, but - and this may tie into something else related to my apparent autism: not being good at expressing my thoughts - I didn't feel like I was as detailed or accurate as I'd like to have been when I was speaking mostly off-the-cuff, unlike, say, my old review videos where I at least had the time to formulate my thoughts into a semi-coherent script.

All of this is a rather long-winded way of saying I think I'm gonna have to change how I go about covering new games.  I don't know what exactly I'm going to do yet, but I'm probably not going to do a Let's Play series just to have to rush to get it out as close to the game's release date as possible.  I've got a couple of possibilities in mind.  I might stream it, either on Twitch, YouTube, or perhaps even in my Discord server, and then work on an actual review of some kind, either video or text.  Alternatively, I may just reverse the order a bit - record the game, make a review (again either video or text), and THEN should I still feel like it, edit/upload a Let's Play of it.

Because at the end of the day, that's what my channel's always been about.  If someone decides to watch my stuff and they find they enjoy it, all the better, but at the same time how can they enjoy looking at something that I, for whatever reason, didn't enjoy making?  And that's why I've always tried to focus on making what *I* want to make, at my own pace - that last part especially so since my YT return - and I think, whether from the excitement of two games from two of my favorite devs coming out back to back, or from the possibility of more engagement via new games, I briefly lost sight of that focus.