The Grind

6FPS V6#2: February 12, 2024

chuqvr@gmail.com • @chuqvr@fosstodon.org • chuq.me

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

We had our winter cold spell, with a bit of snow but not enough to disrupt anything. It’s been a wetter winter than the last couple, which is nice. As it does every year, the sun finally shifted out of “endless night” mode and days are getting longer again, which makes me happy.

I have hopes to be able to get out and get some nice birding done as spring migration kicks in. I’m not seeing signs of it here yet, but I know in other parts of the country it seems to be starting.

I have decided on my next e-book project, and I’m currently organizing that. I’m learning a new publishing tool, Affinity Publisher, for this, and while it’s early, I’m quite liking it. I did no e-books last year, but right now, I’m considering three for 2024, two of them smaller and quicker projects. We’ll see how this works out. I think I’m changing my approach to future e-books; I’ve been really appreciating how Sarah Marino does hers, and I think I’m going to adopt this into my own works.

No timing on release yet, but after 2023 sort of turning into a year where a lot of things just got put on hold, I’m dusting them all off and getting back at them.

Shop Update

Speaking of dusting things off, I’ve been putting some quality time in the shop, trying to get out there for a few sessions a week. I identified three projects I needed to do to really be able to put the shop into “ready to use” mode; one of those is complete. The second is ready to go, but I ended up deciding to dive into re-organizing the garage part of the building first, and I’m quite happy with the results so far, which include three trips to Goodwill so far as I look at the stuff we put into storage when we moved and deciding that year, it’s surplus. The big shift here is I found that where my project table was didn’t work well because I couldn’t get to it from all sides, and so I re-arranged things so it is up against a wall but there’s an open space so I can roll it out for access from all directions when I want.

That table is also the one I have intended to use for tabletop photography projects, but where I had it set up didn’t work well for that. This new location does, and will let me set up the lighting stand, which is still in the “un-re-organized” part of the garage.

I’ll go into more detail on this once things settle down a bit more and hopefully by next issue that second project will be done and the shop will be shifting into “do things” mode instead of “re-arrange things” mode.

Vertigo Update

In December, I finally was able to take the tests my ear specialist ordered (a reality of post-Covid medicine is that staffing is usually tight in most health disciplines, so getting scheduled takes time. And yes, this has been going on since I kicked it off in July). The test results indicate that — ta da — my ears are working normally and aren’t the cause of the vertigo.

And so my next stop is to talk to a specialist in Neurology. This wasn’t a waste of time, I should note — we’re learned a lot about what isn’t going on, and gained some strong hints of where to look. But as of now, the actual cause is still undecided; that said, my case has definitely shifted into the “this isn’t the typical problem” side of the ledger.

After literally a couple of months of testing different dosages of the drug I take to suppress the symptoms, I have found the best dosage for me at this point, and it is =— surprise — the dosage I was taking up until May, when things went a little sideways and I upped to dosage to compensate. I’m not sure I made it clear previously, but the challenge here is that what I’m taking, Meclizine, suppresses symptoms, but if you take too much, it can cause symptoms as well, so the issue is finding that sweet spot where it’s not replacing the core symptoms with its own.

Overall things are fairly stable, although not as good as they were prior to May, but definitely the best they’ve been since. I can actually sit down at the computer for longer periods of time, although I still get uncomfortable and have to stop here and there.

So we’ve made progress, but we still have digging to do. My initial consult in Neurology is a couple of days after this issue gets into your mailbox, so hopefully, we can move this puppy along.

Possible Tripping

I have a plan to do a 2-3 day trip down to Southern Washington to put some extra time into the area, including Ridgefield NWR, but also some of the other birding hotspots and refuges like Sauvie Island. I’m also seriously considering an overnight out to the Dalles or Hood River to travel along the Columbia and re-visit that area. Right now this trip depends on how I’m doing with the vertigo and what I learn with the neurologist. I’ve been hesitant to do lots of driving but I think things are good enough I can schedule something before the winter birds head out. We’ll see how it goes. Longer travel is still on the sidelines until we find a way to lock the vertigo back in the basement reliably.

Vision Pro

Since I got asked — no, I didn’t buy a Vision Pro. I didn’t consider buying it. I think this is a revolutionary technology, but it’s important to remember, it’s very much a version 1.0. As one wag online noted, this is the worst Vision Pro apple will ever ship.

I wasn’t sure I’d be interested in this technology, but after watching the launch keynote, it feels like Apple knows how to make this a really important platform. That said, I stepped off the beta train long ago, and I’m happy to let others blaze the trails into this future, and I never considered purchasing one. That said, if it was $1500 I’d probably have gone for it as a toy — but if Apple built a $1500 version of this now, it wouldn’t be much of a usable tool. But I expect to hop onto this technology in within the next couple of years.

And it’s not the first time I’ve waited to adopt an Apple platform. My first iPhone was, if I recall correctly, the third generation.

If you want a good, reasoned look at the product, I recommend Jason Snell at Sixcolors.com. He’s my general go-to person to pay attention to on most things Apple and has been for a while.

Stuff to Like

Since I’m feeling better about sitting at the computer again, I’m trying to get back in the habit of writing more consistently. One thing that’s been on the back burner for a while is a new category of postings I’m calling Stuff to Like, which are going to be discussions about things I have and use that I want to share and talk about to you. With any luck, the first one (I bought an Ember mug and I have opinions!) will be available about the time this hits your inbox. Some of the items will be tech, some of them not, and hopefully, all of them will be interesting and maybe point you to things you didn’t know you wanted in your life.

New Wallpapers!

I’ve released a new set of 12 wallpaper images to the secret 6FPS subscriber only download page. Details and download links are below, so as a subscriber, please check them out, download them and enjoy!

You probably will be surprised to hear this, but at one point I decided to become a YouTuber. I had fallen into YouTube heavily as a content site, and had been playing with video and doing some small projects, and I really felt there were some gaps in the photography world on YouTube I could fill.

I ended up spending about six months researching the project, including doing a business plan, coming up a couple of months of topics, figuring out a marketing plan, and doing a prototype video to start working on the design and graphics of the video.

At some point, I sat down and reviewed what I’d created, and had the infamous “GO - NO GO” meeting with myself. Could I do this? Was the concept viable?

Yes, on both counts.

And then I killed the project.

It was the right call, for a couple of reasons. First, the audience I was targeting was the intermediate level photographer, and to be blunt about it, you aren’t going to build a large audience chasing that demographic. If you want numbers, you need to speak to the beginners. So I felt I could build a viable channel that wouldn’t pay the bills, but would help pay for camera gears and travel, which was fine — but it would always be a smaller, more niche channel.

But the primary reason I killed it was because of the Grind.

Thomas Heaton, one of the larger and better YouTube channels dedicated to photography, once did a video where he spoke to photographers thinking about becoming a YouTuber. His view is that being a YouTuber is a lifestyle; you have to make commitments and compromises in your life to successfully create the video you need to feed the channel.

I think he’s spot on, and while I made my decision to kill my channel years before he posted that video, in many ways I made that decision because I wasn’t willing to make those sacrifices to make the channel work. I wasn’t committed enough to take on the Grind.

What’s the Grind? It’s taking on a commitment that you are never able to complete. You might finish some aspect of it, but then the next piece hits the top of the ToDo pile.

I’ve done the Grind — often, if you think about it, your work is a grind. When I was much younger, I published 30+ issues of an amateur zine called Other Realms — and it came out monthly. I was often asked how I did that, and looking back at past me from today, I have to say I’m not sure how I avoided massive burnout. Since then, I’ve always tried to recognize when I was committing to the Grind, and part of my decision process is always to understand whether I’m really willing to take it on. I have at least two other big projects I dug into over the years that I also killed — one six weeks from launch — because I realized I just wasn’t willing to take on the Grind for it.

I bring the idea of the Grind because recently, there have been a number of photographers and other YouTubers who have quit, or gone on hiatus. A good overview discussion of this was done by Marques Brownlee recently, and I recommend you watch it; he’s got a really thoughtful take on the reality of YouTube and the toll it takes on creators.

You can’t do something like YouTube — or a successful blog, or, basically, any kind of creator content form — without the Grind. Your fans always want more, and you have to find that balance point between filling their wishes and getting enough of the Grind layered onto you that you burn out.

That balance is hard, and it changes over time. As your channel grows, managing it becomes more complicated, and takes more time. And that layers in more of the Grind. Or your audience plateaus at a lower level than you hoped; but you’re still doing the same amount of work.

I think understanding the Grind you are taking on when you start up any kind of venture is crucial to success. The reality, at least to me, is that creating a thing was never as difficult as the process of managing and running that thing indefinitely once it launched, and many people I’ve talked to over the years never even considered the “after launch” part.

Building a new web site? Great! How are you going to fill it with content? How are you going to handle abusive comments? Have you stopped to think that 3 blog posts a week is 300 topics a year? Do you have a list of potential topics? How long is it? Okay, so in six weeks, what are you going to write about?

Back in the early day of blogging there was a thought that the average number of blog posts in an abandoned blog is three, because that’s about the time running a blog shifts from “I shipped! I’m awesome!” to “wow, this is work!” and people get too enthused at the building part to worry about the managing part that comes next. And when it hits, they give up.

I’m not immune to that; a few years ago, another thing you probably didn’t know: I started a podcast. It came out out of both a desire to really understand how the process of doing something like that, and because I’d been talking to my boss at work and there was some thinking about starting a company podcast and I might have been tasked with producing it (that never happened for reasons). I felt the best way to be ready for that was to do it, and that’s how Occam’s Fireaxe was born.

It lasted 8 episodes. By episode 3 growth leveled off and started shrinking. By eposode 4 I fully understood the time committments and knew that this project was really Grindy, especially given the small audience — and when I listened back at the final audio I was releasing, I just didn’t think it was that interesting. I could have fixed that, but I’d succeeded at my primary goal (learning how to produce and edit podcasts), and it was clear the challenge of the Grind was always going to be more of a problem than the value I got out of it — so I killed it and took it back offline.

That said, that was a case where I really felt shipping it despite knowing I was jumping into the Grind made sense, as part of learning the producer aspects. And it made sense to kill it once that part of the project succeeded, because it was going to take up a chunk of hours a month, and really wasn’t producing much of value. Other than the title, which I still hope I can figure out how to make use of again some day, there really wasn’t much here to point at proudly.

If I were to try that again some day (don’t bet on it), a lot more work would have been needed on fine tuning the content and doing some demo/test episodes to really upgrade the content aspects; since the primary goal of the project was learning the technical bits, it’s not a shock in retrospect that the content itself was merely okay.

But it’s a good example of how the Grind can and should affect your decisions and planning, and why keeping it in mind whenever you decide to start a project. Because often, getting to “hey! we launched!” is the easy part…

As I create new images and re-process older ones, I post them on my site in the Recent Work area. Additionally, every Wednesday is Photo Wednesday on the blog, where I post one of my non-bird images, and the bird images are posted on the blog each week as part of Feathery Friday.

My only camera trip this month was another visit to Ridgefield NWR with Laurie. Light was poor, birds were mostly distant, but I did get a really nice shot of this Tundra Swan, along with some rather average but useable images. I’m hoping to head back down there for a couple of intensive camera days towards the end of January where I can put in enough time to do the location justice.

It’s also time for my annual best/favorite photos of the year, and you can see them here:

I have eight e-books available. All are free for you to download and read with no obligation. You can download them from my e-book page on the web site.

These are the books that are available:

  • Birding 101: Hints and Tips for the New Birder

  • Merced National Wildlife Refuge

  • And the Geese Exploded: A Life With Birds

  • Birds of Santa Clara County

  • 2021.1: A Year of Transitions

  • 2020.1: Images from the year when Covid changed everything

  • 2019 (1)

  • 2019 (2)

Free Wallpapers just for Subscribers

New Wallpapers (January, 2024). A new set of 12 wallpapers are now available.

You can download this new set from the 6FPS Secret Wallpaper. The previous set of wallpapers are now with the full public set at Public Wallpaper page.

These are available only to you, my favorite people who happen to be subscribers to 6FPS. The previous set of images I released here are now available to the general public.

This is a small gift to you to thank you for being a subscriber. You are welcome to use any or all of them if you wish, but please: don't share the private hangout link with others, encourage them to subscribe via https://www.chuq.me/6fps instead. Thanks.

Free Prints to Subscribers

Anyone who’s interested in a free 8x10 print of one of my images si welcome to it. All you need to do is check out the images in one of the four portfolio galleries on my photography page, and then send me an email with the request, including the title of the image (or URL to the image), your name and a mailing address. My only requirement is that the email the request comes from must be a subscriber to 6FPS when I get the request. I will mail these out at no charge worldwide for any request I get during November, as quickly as I can make the prints and get them packaged up.

And with that, see you next issue!

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com). 6FPS is Copyright © 2024 by Chuq Von Rospach. All Rights Reserved.

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

Some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does help pay my web site bills. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.

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And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq