Lol. 2020 New Year's Resolutions!
I had to stop paying myself for reading books because, strangely, my "all my eggs in one basket" source of income evaporated in 2020. I managed to earn enough from it to cover my expenses for the year (adobe subscription, fresh books accounting subscription, etc.) and pretty much nothing else.
In good news, I hit my 1000 subscriber YouTube goal at the end of May and started making YouTube ad money, and while I didn't hit my extended subscriber goal, I did get to 1674 subscribers and have a handful of Patreon subscribers, which is a start. I just went through all my videos, and from 2017-2019 I uploaded about 9 videos each year, and in 2020 I uploaded 25, and I'm pretty happy with that increase. I still need to be better at sticking to a schedule, so that will be a goal in 2020. I've also reactivated my old YouTube channel to post music stuff to, so that I'm not diluting my art channel with that. I'll use that channel to upload both practice and finished things, and I'm also interested in the idea of live-streaming and/or making process videos about writing/mixing songs as I learn how to do more things.
For reference when I'm looking back in a year, here are my current subscriber counts...
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I lucked into the gift of a secondhand laptop at the start of the year, and it ran rings around my ancient iMac. We've just traded that laptop in for one of the new MacBook Air machines, and the difference again is just unbelievable. It's so fast. And so silent. And has such a good battery. And I finally have an Australian/US keyboard layout again, which makes so much more sense than the dumb UK keyboard layout. Anyway, all that to say I have an excellent new computer now which should be able to render and export video much more reliably.
On the house purchase front, in retrospect I'm pretty glad that the 2020 attempted house purchase fell through, because Toshiro's business was sold while we were in Australia to some kind of vulture company who dismantled most of the Irish business, and in December he left with a decent chunk of payout. He started a new job straight away (for much more money, yay, and for an employer that's not going to be sold to a vulture fund...) but it's on the other side of town, so now we're not stuck living a long way from his work and can look for a house that's much closer. Unfortunately we have to wait six months again for him to pass his trial period (six months is standard here in Ireland, which just seems ridiculously long and absurd) because the bank won't give us a mortgage now until that's passed. Our current rental house is too small and a bit frustrating, but at least we have excellent internet here in the meantime.
On the music front, I counted up yesterday and I made 21 songfight entries, 1 original side fight entry, 8 Nur Ein entries and 5 cover songs (four for side fights here and one for a different thing), which is 35 SONGS RECORDED! I think I made some real progress in 2020, particularly with learning about recording and mixing, and I'd like to do
something with some of those songs. I've done enough quantity-wise now that I'm seeing themes and ideas emerge, so we'll see what happens, I guess. I think my biggest win for the year was two weeks ago when I was recording a songfight and MAH OWN HUZZBND, king of refusing to listen to anything he doesn't like in even the smallest way (which includes most of my songs), actually told me I was getting much better at singing.