Isekai Ukulele

Category: Featured

Featured posts, typically monthly reviews or major announcements

  • July was a month and its over

    It’s a well documented phenomenon that musicians have a higher rate of mental illness than the general population. In my case, I’m quite prone to depression. I actually underwent Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) therapy after pharmaceutical antidepressants didn’t seem to help because one of the theories for what was causing my malaise before we learned about CSF Leaks was that it was a byproduct of depression.

    From my point of view, experiencing constant nausea and being unable to live normally made me feel like a degree of depression was sort of appropriate. Should I be happy that I lost my career and had to move back in with my parents? And felt like throwing up every minute of every day? Even now, being exuberantly happy while being a basically useless human being and still getting ridiculously debilitating migraines after being upright for a little too long seems like an unreasonable expectation.

    But the TMS therapy did take most of the edge off. Being alive as I am is bearable enough. It could always be worse. But if I could press reset or just turn off this game I would very much like that. 

    Unsurprisingly, my depression typically flares up under periods of duress or stress. I had major migraine episodes again over two weekends this month. Luckily they didn’t happen during the week to force me to cancel a stream, but the effects did linger into the week. There were a couple streams this month where I was just doing all I could to get through them.

    My opinion is that any practice is better than no practice at all, even if I’m not practicing the things I “should” be doing to get to my goals. So, a day just playing music I like is better than playing nothing at all. If I cancel a stream, I still have to pass the time every day anyway, and I’d probably spend it playing music in some form, so might as well keep the show rolling. 

    I also got news that the insurance denied coverage for my upcoming operation, so that added a significant amount of stress. First there was a scramble to see if we could appeal the denial and argue for keeping the appointment, but then the appointment itself got cancelled and now there’s a whole new slew of hoops to jump through to take the next steps.

    The reason for the denial was that there are people in my state who specialize in CSF leaks, which on one hand is actually a good sign. This did not exist 5 years ago when they sent me to Stanford. I like to think that my case was part of the impetus for this, and that it validates and makes use of Dr. Carroll’s research.

    On the other hand, I would very much prefer to go see the guy whose career for the past decade has been treating this condition in exceptional cases like mine, and who has been the expert overseeing my case for this whole time. But as someone with very little income, I’m basically at the mercy of what insurance will allow. And, you know, thank goodness for insurance providing any opportunity at all. 

    Given the unique circumstances of my case, it’s always a question if the treatment will even be effective at all. It’s really hard to plan for the future when an operation next month could potentially solve the problem… or do nothing at all. Then that date gets cancelled, and now it’s a question of when and where and what is going to be done by who. Instead of just killing time while waiting for a miracle of modern science to occur, I’ve been trying to shift my efforts to build up opportunities that I can pursue even in my current condition.

    I mean, I haven’t made it back to the beach since last month since that kind of wiped me out for a week, and then I had two weekends of pain and existential dread. But in theory, if I could make it out to the beach regularly like I have been able to do my live streams regularly, that could eventually develop into a regular “gig” at a poolside, which is my current aspiration. Every pool has chaise lounges that I can stay flat while playing, so I’m thinking there may be hope. 

    I had already decided previously to pivot away from continuing to attempt to build up the channel through social media promotion. I’ve made accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and BlueSky, and I hate them all. Even making YouTube Shorts is something I really don’t like to do, but it does seem to be the most effective way to grow the channel.

    Speaking of, we passed 200 subscribers this month, and that’s super neat! Yay! Though I’ve kind of made a conscious decision to not care about the number, because I hate the trap of evaluating if my efforts are working based on the measurable outcomes. It seems almost completely random if a short is going to get 100 or 1000 views, and I strongly dislike letting the algorithm determine how I feel about my output. I’m still working to grow the community, I’m just not trying to make a goal of gaining X followers in the next month or whatever. 

    Instead, I find that I’m really enjoying seeing regular names pop into the stream. Someone randomly asked what my stream was about, and though I stumbled over the answer at the time, it got me thinking of a good one: the stream is about making friends. If you like my music, I like you. If you like isekai or anime, that’s another plus. And if you like ukulele too, well, we’ll get along just fine. My recipe for friendship is: common interests, common place, common times. If we like the same things, we’ll have stuff to talk about and bond over. Add proximity and regular interactions, and that’s how friendship blooms.

    I really hate hustle culture, especially among streamers and social media influencers. Yeah, asking for subs and likes and follows and donations will net you more of those things. But then it turns it into a transactional relationship. I’d rather not blur the line between friends and customers, at least not on the stream. Trying to spend my time on stage trying to sell stuff sounds like an awful time.

    I hope to avoid trying to get money out of my audience for as long as possible. The way I want to monetize is by creating a particular product: an isekai story and accompanying ukulele album. Hopefully my friends will like it, but I’m not necessarily designing it for them in particular. Instead, I envision the people who I’m gathering in my stream to help spread the word when the time comes.

    To gather more people into the stream, instead of forcing myself to use the social media I detest,  the current vision is to go play music on the beach and by pools, so that anyone who happens to pass by can connect. Then it becomes a kind of thing where you made a memory on vacation, and whenever you feel like tuning in you can see how this guy you met is doing.

    I’d love to be a restaurant singer someday, but I kind of don’t see that happening if I can’t be upright. I still need to get much better at singing to reach that level too, anyway. 

    I’ve been writing and composing a little bit, but I’m still pretty out of energy by the end of my daily streams. And then with malaise over the weekends, progress has been slow. But, I’m not in much of a rush anyway. That’s the best part of being a useless hikki-neet: nothing is expected of you, and nobody cares if you do nothing. It’s ok. It’ll work out in due time. Or it won’t. Who cares?

  • Bonus stream! Beachside Practice

    Bonus stream! Beachside Practice

    I was working up to it all week: getting my hair cut, practicing on the tenor uke, going through songs I have memorized. I woke up a little later than I wanted to and almost made an excuse to not go, but I did it!

    It took 12 minutes of upright time from preparing to leave to getting flat on the beach. I got really lucky with an open space under a tree very close to the beach entrance so I didn’t even have to open up the umbrella I brought. Not bad. I think next time I’ll jump into the water for a second before settling in to play.

    It was really weird to play with no monitoring whatsoever, so I had no clue until afterward if the stream was working or how the sound was. It seems the data gets choppy and lags on occasion, but overall I think it sounds good. I was worried that the sound of the waves would be overwhelming, but the balance seems quite ok.

    Playing from memory was mostly ok too. Good thing a lot of my memorized songs are relatively beach-friendly. It definitely feels strange to play certain songs out on the sand. Now I want to start memorizing more too though so I have more new songs to sing away from the charts.

    If I place the camera in such a way that people can see me I won’t be able to monitor or respond to chat, which isn’t often a problem but I don’t know if that’s really a good plan. I can’t really think of a good way to capture me and the beach and watch chat in on a single phone. Even with ordering some of the gear I’m thinking of to support this kind of thing it might be tricky. I hope with an Ipad I’ll at least be able to check chat between songs? Maybe.

    I had to cut the stream short because I forgot to bring sunscreen and I haven’t been outside in quite a long time. I was already feel the sun on my arms after an hour, and usually by the time you feel it its already too late. Luckily I don’t seemed to have gotten burned, but I definitely need to use the sunscreen. The number one rule of the beach is “Respect Nature”. The ocean is bigger than you and owes you nothing. The sun will get you, its just a matter of time.

    The return trip home totaled 30 minutes of upright time. There was extra time for packing up, dusting off the sand, and showering afterwards. The additional activity and pushing my upright time to the limit did leave me on the verge of a headache for the rest of the day, so I rightfully chilled out and didn’t do much afterwards. I was glad I only spent an hour outside, though maybe the extra time between upright activity might work out a little better.

    All in all I think its a good start. It might be some time before I’m able to do this without several days of recovery in between them, but I think I’ll be able to make it a habit.

  • Nobody Said It Was Easy… 

    Last month I was on the verge of burning out, so this month I let go of trying so hard for the sake of sanity. I had initially envisioned this as a part-time endeavor to kill time between seasons of anime, but ambitions grew and I started putting in 40 hour work weeks. That was a bit too much to handle, both physically and mentally. I started getting migraines more frequently, and getting stressed and depressed over not being able to do as much as I wanted as quickly as I wanted to. I mean, I am disabled after all. The reason I’m confined to bed is because I start suffering if I try too hard to do things. And that seems to have not changed. So out of necessity I had to take a step back and relax more. That’s the problem with turning a hobby into a profession: you need to do the tedious work to get the results, not just the fun stuff that you enjoy. 

    The good news is that all that exhausting and annoying work making youtube videos and shorts from three months or so ago is still paying off. I’ve mostly caught up with what I had prepared for videos, but I’ve still got shorts to post daily for a while longer. I should make more soon, but the burnout has me rethinking my approach a bit, so I’m hesitating to do more of the same. Though, it was working to a degree. Channel growth has been slow but steady. More importantly, the number of people who are becoming regulars on the stream is growing. It’s really hard to resist the urge to see “number go up” but I’m finding I really like it a lot more when a few people I recognize keep coming back to the stream and I start to get to know them more. Quality over quantity. I’d rather have a few people I know well and enjoy chatting with than a thousand followers whose names I don’t recognize. 

    To that end, I’ve been learning a lot of songs that my few regulars have been requesting. Over the past two months I’ve added over 150 songs to the list of playables, while my to-be-learned list has bloomed to around 300 tracks. Part of this was a realization that I had a big gap of knowledge in songs from the 1970’s, so I sat down with my parents and asked them about the music they enjoyed when they were young. I was familiar with stuff they listened to while I was growing up, but not so much what they liked before that. I figured beyond just expanding my horizons, it will also be a nice mental memento for me to associate with them whenever I hear or play the songs. 

    I pulled each of them aside separately and got to hear stories of their youthful adventures that were conjured up by the memories associated with music. Dad remembered driving while listening to Kim Carnes on the radio, sitting down and rocking out to Yes and Gentle Giant records on HI-FI sound systems, and the vivid mind-blowing experience of the first time hearing a synthesizer live for the first time at an Emerson, Lake, & Palmer concert. Mom was more into pop crooners like BIlly Joel, Elton John, and Phil Collins. She also brought forward Tina Turner, Heart, and Natalie Merchant. It turns out that by the 90’s their musical tastes had converged, and one of the things that brought them closer together was discovering that they had complimentary CD collections. They both enjoyed the various projects of the musicians from Genesis, Fleetwood Mac, and 10,000 maniacs. 

    With over 300 songs now on the docket to try to learn, I’ve started to experiment with “live learning” on stream. I noticed established streamers often take payment in exchange to learn a requested song live, and after spending some time figuring out how to make that happen for me, I think I can do it. To learn a new song I typically sing along with the original recording while reading a chart, then go over it a few times to hammer out any kinks and solidify my version. An issue with this is that playing any pre-recorded audio on stream could set you up for a copyright strike. Well, Twitch is kind of ok with it unless somebody reports you, but YouTube has a very strong algorithm that catches and marks any copyrighted audio. So, you’ll see a lot of Twitch-only streamers playing audio without a problem. 

    Since I’m streaming on both platforms, I had to come up with a separate solution: using earbuds to play audio from my phone during the stream. The only issue with this is that playing music stops my stream feed, so I lose the ability to monitor chat in real time while learning this new song. And because of my particular setup, going back to read chat is a little difficult. I’m in bed, and my monitors are kind of across the room, so it isn’t the easiest thing for me. But since I have so many songs to learn, I might dedicate one stream a week to learning new music. Initially I was doing this on Sunday, but lately I’ve been just taking the whole weekend off. Two days of rest to avoid the burnout seems to be working. Also since I’m not interested in monetizing until the following is larger, and probably monetizing in a different way altogether, I’m not eager to start charging for this service. 

    Speaking of monetization, I’ve devised a “secret” menu of things I can do that is a little out of my normal activities that mostly come with a monetary cost. Initially I had some options available for free, but after some trial and error it seems that placing a monetary restriction on them will be ideal. For instance, I’ve had several people asking me to play guitar, which I can’t do at anywhere near the same proficiency. So I placed a large dollar cost on that request, in hopes that nobody ever selects that option. Or if they do, I get a nice little payday. Live learning is also in this category, since it requires me to put in earbuds and shift my attention away from the stream. Someone finally requested a NSFW day, and that turned out to be a rather larger disruption than I had anticipated as well, so now there’s a cost associated. I’m not really expecting to make much off of these things, but who knows. It’s all a big live experiment.

    Where do we go from here? 

    A suggestion was made to start focusing on a niche, and I wholeheartedly agree. A vision is forming of where I want to go and what I actually want to do. Right now the end goal looks like this: I play music while streaming poolside at various resorts around my neighborhood. From there people learn about the stream and can watch me afterwards, so the following grows. Maybe I’ll earn some tips, or start a patreon or something eventually. I suppose this means I should start cultivating a setlist that is highly amenable to a tropical resort, but it’s hard to stop playing just anything and everything. The few times I have played at the beach, I do notice that certain songs seem to fit the vibe better. More reggae, less emo. But I’m not sure. Maybe that’s just me. 

    Cutting my hair was the first step in this next phase, because I want to gain experience playing and streaming on the beach before approaching establishments to play poolside. My hair was really long, and since I still need to lay down, getting sand in it is inevitable. So I had to cut it short to be able to quickly rinse off afterward and stay within my upright time. It’s already a difficult thing to make it to the beach and back to play, and I need to reduce my upright time as much as possible. I may also need to change the time that I’m streaming, since I normally stream right in the afternoon when the sun is shining brightest. We’ll see. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to do a beach side stream or two this month, please stay tuned to see how that goes. 

    Finally, I want to create a concept album of ukulele music tied to an isekai story which will be the main form of monetization. I’ve been slowly working on the story and finding a variety of musical ideas that I want to use. It’s going to take a lot of work to bring it all together, and I may need to go past my “part time” working limit again, but maybe it won’t be so bad if it’s creative work that I enjoy instead of annoying video editing and social media management that I detest. My target audience is threefold: a generation around my age that has young children who they could read the story with and play ukulele for, an older generation who are learning to play ukulele and might share the music and story with their children (who might be around around my age already) and a slightly younger generation who appreciate isekai stories and in which an interest in ukulele might be kindled. 

    If you make your living as a performer, as soon as you stop performing, the money stops flowing in. Instead, creating a multimedia product can reach a far wider audience and continue to generate revenue long after you step off the stage. The live performance is the advertisement for the album, which has long been a music industry standard. Though in modern days that has been somewhat reversed now since streaming music is essentially free, and novel experiences are worth a higher premium. Since my body is uniquely unreliable, aiming to be a performer seems like a generally bad idea. I do have one more operation coming up next month that may fix me, or it may not. It’s hard to tell, and after so many attempts, hard to have high hopes. I gotta do it but it’ll be however it will be. 

    A primary goal of my rigorous streaming schedule has been to develop my voice to a point where I can be happy with recording vocals for the album. Presumably, once you do it, that’s it for most of forever unless you pull a Taylor Swift and remake your Masters.  I’ll probably want to make an audiobook version of the story as well, so I can reach a variety of readers and listeners. I may even try to have my artist friend turn it into a graphic novel or something similar. I started by trying to just tell the story in a purely lyrical format, but ran into a roadblock of trying to create too many things at the same time. So I decided to write out the story with all the characters and plot points first, then extract the lyrics from that, and finally layer the ukulele parts on top for the finished product. That’s the plan for now at least. I think it’s got potential. A lot of it rides on how good of a story I can make, how good the songs I can write will be, and how well my plan to cultivate an audience for this work actually goes how I imagine it will. 

    Curiously, as much anime as I watch, I don’t read a lot of fiction. Most of my reading is rather heavy nonfiction accounts of history, business, and economics. My latest read was “The Making of an Economic Superpower: Unlocking China’s Secret of Rapid Industrialization.” It was a fascinating story with many insightful and well documented details supporting the general thesis. Most of the writing I have done was also non-fiction, in the same business oriented report sense. So I’m actually not extremely confident in my ability to write fiction, and I’m trying my best to not underestimate the creative endeavor. But I think I can do it. I guess the only way to find out is to try!

    I think its also time to rethink my approach to this blog and website. Got some ideas, but we’ll see if the body will let me actualize them. Please stay tuned!