Sam's Sanity Diary

It's January 1st, 2022. I just did my first show of the year and I bombed. Not only that, I was the worst performer of the night. And that's not even a matter of opinion. We had the Ong Show, which is sort of a gameshow format where the audience gets to decide if they want you to keep performing and I only performed for 4 minutes. Everybody else did way longer sets than me, which means I was objectively, and by far, the worst performer tonight. Last night, I bombed as well. I did a 30-minute set on my livestream and at first, I was getting some laughs but towards the end, everyone stopped sending the laughing emojis. I was just glad I managed to get through it and I told myself that was the last time I would commit to doing an online set. I would go back to live performances where I'm appreciated. And then I bombed at tonight's show. So ended 2021 by bombing and started 2022 by bombing. The sad thing is, out of all the performers tonight, I'd been doing comedy the l...

Tomorrow is my final stream as a Twitch affiliate. How do I feel about it? I am looking forward to being free to multistream so that I can chat with the Facebook gang again. I do feel a bit overwhelmed because I don't know what to stream tomorrow. I guess it will just be another Just Chatting stream. I do have a community challenge to prepare for, which is to do a half hour of comedy on stream and that scares the hell out of me because I have never done a half hour of material before, and I have never done comedy on Twitch before. What if nobody watches? Or some people watch and then they stop watching? I'd just have to bomb through a half hour set with no audience. While I'm trying to remember what joke is next, I have to try not to think of whether or not I have zero audience. It's also kind of a busy day because I'm going to get a booster shot in the morning and then run some errands and then prepare for my set for the stream. Theoretically, I'm ready. I just...

  This is for my own sanity, so I don’t feel like I lost two years of my life.  During the pandemic, I learnt how to use OBS, Streamyard, Stream Elements, Restream, Voicemod, Voicemeeter, Snap Camera, LioranBoard, Audacity, Filmora and Da Vinci Resolve. I learnt about overlays, colour grading, B-roll, J-cuts, L-cuts, audio compression, equalisers, ducking, noise gates and noise suppression. I learnt about Twitch bits, redemption points, hype trains and raids. I learnt how to set up a Discord server. I learnt about Tik Tok. I studied the origins of memes.   I learnt how to build computers, sharpen knives and carve wooden miniatures. I learnt how to set up, tune and play a guitar and solder an instrument cable. I learnt how to tell a joke to an audience I couldn’t see or hear. And lastly, I learnt that out of all the things I know how to do, I want to do comedy the most.

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION 2022 1. Perform 600 minutes of comedy in 2022. 2. Co-headline in January. 3. 1-hour show in October 4. Write, Shoot, Edit 1 hour Youtube project (codenamed Open Micer) 5. Learn on Guitar:  Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out More Than Words I Remember You Wonderwall

I'm pretty certain I'm doing something wrong but I don't know what it is. I have just been feeling overwhelmed again lately. As a writer and content creator, I feel guilty for saying this for the thousandth time, but it is a real feeling that I feel often, so I do feel like I have to blog about it. I just feel like with the house renovations, and the holiday season commitments, and Anji being in town and with Patfern being in town, I just didn't have the time and energy to think about jokes or the big finale stream as a Twitch affiliate. And to be honest, the number of viewers are always low anyway, so there's a lazy part of me that feels like I can get away with not having a big final affiliate stream. And then I've been thinking of this pretty big Youtube project that I need to learn to write, shoot and edit. Basically, it's a movie idea except I'm also feeling intimidated by it, so I've been considering shooting it in 3 acts or even smaller chunks...

Feeling pretty happy right now. Had an okay show last night. Got some laughs. Felt like I contributed to a show. Actually, what I wanna say is I saved the show. A little bit. In our journey to better ourselves in our work and build a following, the main thing is to focus on our own journey and not get distracted by other people's journeys. But it's also an easy thing to say but hard to do. Yesterday, my friend told me that they get a bit envious of other comics who are getting featured in many shows at the local comedy clubs. I told them it's just inside their head and advised them to just ask if there are any shows they could be featured in or maybe even pitch some show ideas to the bookers. I know that sounds like good advice and it makes me feel like I'm like the wise old man but to be honest, I know what they feel because I feel it too. I'm always not too far from falling into the self-pitying trap myself. Anyway, I told my friend to just focus on things they ca...

I recently went down this deep Youtube rabbithole. I discovered this Youtube channel called Hiding In My Room, and it's really simple. It's just a young man, named Daniel, basically complaining about his life into his camera. It's probably the laziest, most low production value Youtube channel I have seen ever, but I was hooked and I watched almost all his videos. He complains about living in Japan, living in England, being in Malaysia, about being single, about being married, about being divorced, about all his relationships, about his then wife, about missing his ex-wife, about having wasted his 20s, about catching Chlamydia, and the only common factor for all his problems is himself. He is soft spoken, and doesn't yell or anything in his videos, and he says he avoids confrontation, and I believe this is true, because I can see it but he is obviously lazy, unmotivated, entitled, inconsiderate, spoilt by an easy life and some people have said that he might be a sociopa...

About 2 months ago, if you asked me what I wanted to do more than anything else, I wanted to be a Youtuber. Specifically, I wanted to be part of the Youtube maker community - these people who are building all these interesting things and uploading their creations on Youtube. I had an interest in woodworking and RC cars and I knew how to mod Nerf blasters and I was learning wood carving, and this maker tinkerer thing was already kind of my identity on Twitch anyway (although I had and still have very few viewers). That was what I was going to do. I was sure of it.  And then we came out of lockdown and comedy was a possibility again. At first, I thought, well, I'll get back to comedy of course, but I wasn't emotionally invested in it. I was not sure if there was going to be an audience, I wasn't sure if I still knew how to do comedy, and I wasn't sure if I'd still enjoy it (because I was feeling kind of jaded before the pandemic), and I wasn't sure how I felt abou...