Recovering from the recent L

State of the Wavetro (June 2024)

UPDATE: Throughout this newsletter, I mention "a new travel video" that I anticipated being busy with this July/August. Please note that it did get delayed to September at the earliest, with no new date actually confirmed yet. Not sure what my new plan for the summer is now!

Welcome to the June 2024 edition of the monthly wavetro update! As you can see in the picture above, the summer season is off to a bumpy start.

However, I’m still alive, and I still have new things on the way. Let’s get up to speed…

The YT subcount is probably doomed forever

It’s so joever. (Sourced from viewstats.com/@wavetro)

Remember when I said I should be fine with switching up what I do on YouTube, as long as I eventually commit to a video format? Yeah, guess who just undermined his entire progress towards 100k again.

What essentially happened is that I did two more episodes of Call Wavetro before cancelling it anyway, completely contradicting my previous desire to “be consistent” and “commit to something.” The underlying issue here was that I actually started Call Wavetro for completely misguided reasons.

If you’re familiar with YouTube, you might know how anyone who’s a streamer (or adjacent to one) will have several different channels that can pump out videos nearly every single day, short or long, forming a massively addictive backlog of content. Even if the videos have artistic value and aren’t just ad space to milk the viewers dry of money, the constant churn of “slop” is still hyperaddictive by design. For some reason, I saw this type of creator last month, and thought that I should regularly churn out slop as well, except that I would only do it to have an audience ready for when I make my actually fun videos instead of chasing streamer money. You can see how unsustainable this idea sounds, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I do now.

I’d rather not make long, bloated videos anymore.

(While I don’t think the authentic voicemails and messages of Call Wavetro are “slop” on their own, the series was still primarily designed to trap lots of viewers into increasing my overall watch time. I think Call Wavetro dying early and only being a few hours long actually makes the episodes and individuals on the show more meaningful now.)

I know it seems silly that I once again forgot the rule of “only do what you love,” but I sometimes wonder if there’s other creators like me that still fall into the slop-making trap like I did out of the terrifying fear of being completely abandoned by the algorithm. I am extremely lucky to be where I am right now, as the thought of making things and not having a single other person see or react to them haunts me. There are much healthier ways to be happy, but this is the one I’m obsessed with. I do this because I love people loving my work and how far I’ve gotten with it.

I’ve also realized that I never needed to spend years beating myself up for not finding and committing to a project. Sure, it sucks that I made so many things that died after two episodes, but I still constantly want to make other new ideas that also have lots of effort. The spontaneity keeps my work fresh, and only now do I realize I need to lean into this strength rather than to try and unlearn it. Maybe I’ll find something that clicks with me again (like Stickmen 2020) and I’ll finally be consistent, but there’s nothing wrong with me if I never do.

This realization has been the most fulfilling thing I’ve realized in the past few years, so I’ve been in an especially good mood recently.

I just wish I could’ve learned all this faster. But regardless, we trudge onwards.

Some cleanup is necessary

These videos got banished to the Unlisted Realm.

Unfortunately, having another video talking about my struggles is yet another stain on my catalog that confuses new viewers, despite it being very interesting to existing fans. Those vulnerable videos make my channel human and show that this really is just a genuine hobby, which is great! But with this newest upload, it’s all starting to get too much for newcomers, and I want to make better first impressions.

While I don’t want to make all my weaker videos completely unavailable, I have decided to unlist a bunch of uploads and store them in this playlist. New viewers can watch my other stuff first, and THEN come back to this playlist to see the other stuff if they’re really interested. The videos I decided to unlist are videos that got too personal for a new viewer, and videos that seemed too long or bloated in general.

Future videos may end up in here too, though I would like to keep Call Wavetro public for now, despite my strong desire to only focus on projects that viewers watch actively with no time wasted.

The new videos page is here!!

Okay, let’s talk about something I actually finished this month. The new Videos page on wavetro.net has been completed!!

For comparison, here’s the old one. It’s a long stack of everything that just keeps going on and on and on…

Old and boring Videos page…

And here’s the more-interesting NEW page!

NEW Videos page!!

It has more of a Netflix feel to it, grouping all my videos into shows rather than throwing everything at you all at once. Colorful tags help you find the type of videos you’re interested in, and my best work (Stickmen 2020) is displayed front and center, finally being more visible to new visitors. There’s also a nice hovering animation on the thumbnails if you visit the page from a computer.

Example subpage of Videos

The video subpages themselves are pretty similar to the old page, but they now have color tags for each video AND dividing lines between the entries. Shoutouts to my boy ThatGuyNamedAndy for suggesting the lines- it does make the list easier to read.

You can check out this new page right now at wavetro.net/videos, and if you poke around enough, you’ll find out the title of that mystery travel video I’m making next month…

Brief fun fact

SHAPIENS LORE!

Before we continue, here’s a weird piece of trivia: did you know that my current mascots (the shapiens) were actually going to be the successors to the stickmen of Stickmen 2020? Had my prototype video format actually panned out, I was going to make comedy videos with the shapiens, which were initially designed as these 3D-printed pencil puppets seen above. Wow!

Unfortunately, my 3D printer has been collecting dust these days- I just haven’t really found a new use for it ever since the idea to make those puppet videos fell through. All the printers from Bambu Labs are still crazy good, but I’m probably going to donate my P1S to someone soon anyway. These things are a nightmare to resell, but it’s on me for buying one in the first place…

Music?

I wish I picked this program up sooner…

This section should really be called “sound design,” but regardless: I just recently finished the entire demo of Syntorial. It’s really fun. As someone who has tried and failed to learn how to use synthesizers for nearly a decade now, Syntorial feels like the only realistic way to learn this stuff inside and out. Pair this with the music theory video from Andrew Huang and a dash of micro-tutorials from synthet, and I could be off to the races soon.

However, I need to pony up $130 to get the full program, and I’m not sure if I can fit that in my budget yet since I’m gonna be spending money making that new travel video next month. Even if this music stuff gets put on hold again, I just wanted to reiterate: this is SUPER promising so far.

But as usual, don’t have high expectations yet.

The main event: COMICS!

I totally get it if you scrolled all the way down here instead of reading everything else. Let’s talk about the possible savior of the Stickmen 2020 legacy and the wavetro name: how’s the Teddy & Ben comic going??

Good! It’s going good.

A rare peek into my notes setup for writing all my ideas and stories. (Zettlr)

Hey don’t read the text in that image yet! Stay focused on me down here.

Anyways, I’ve started on the general story and writing, since you can’t have a good comic without putting effort into those things. After I had Call Wavetro blow up in my face, I realized that I really shouldn’t go into this project trying to do a multi-part story that could end on a cliffhanger if I get bored of making it. With this realization, I decided to throw away the idea of Teddy & Ben doing a big road trip across America. It would really suck to not see them finish it.

I need to start using something I’m gonna call Emergency Exit Design. I know it’s a dumb name, but the idea of emergency exit design is that whatever I make next, it should be able to stand on its own if I suddenly cancel it and move on, like a guy running to the emergency exit. Lots of things I’ve made actually pass this test, though not so with the bitter cliffhanger of the unfinished Cavefolder.

With this in mind, the better play is to make this Teddy & Ben comic something more like Stickmen 2020: each “episode” of the comic should be self-contained and enjoyable in any order, rather than an overarching story that spans across many volumes. I didn’t want to just pick Teddy & Ben back up from their abandoned animation though. They lived in an apartment in New Jersey because I was still living with my parents in New York City at the time. I’m out in Texas now.

I could go on and on with how much I love the risky life decision I made to suddenly move halfway across the country to this scorching hot (and controversial) US state, but the sense of adventure I’ve been feeling from that is best felt in those vector pieces I made last year.

Regardless, even though I’m no longer living like a New Yorker, I think there’s still one part of my new daily life that I can tap into…

The mighty gas station. (I never drove a car in New York, so this is new for me.)

Circle K is a large-scale gas station chain in the US that is mostly found in the Sun Belt: the warm states that range from Southern California all the way to Florida. I think it’s in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic too, but I don’t see it mentioned a whole lot there. So what if we made Ben a Circle K employee in Texas, kept Teddy as his roommate but have him constantly showing up to his job to bother him while occasionally going on B-plot adventures, and then added another character or two to the gas station Ben is stuck working at.

Make a few comics, gather some voice actors and sound effects to make an audio track, and then release the two together into finished videos on YouTube. I smell a winning formula here.

So right now I’ve been making a giant list of story ideas for these characters to experience. I’m also trying to figure out what kind of characters would be funny to have interactions with Ben, the one who just wants to do his job and go home. I’m only now realizing that I’m basically ripping off the famous dynamic Spongebob and Squidward had at the Krusty Krab with Teddy and Ben at this Circle K. With this in mind, I’ll do my best to not rip off Mr. Krabs, but there might be a Patrick lol.

You know, Squidward really carries that show now that I think about it. He doesn’t get enough credit for being the relatable miserable adult that shoots down everything Spongebob does, so I think going forward, I’m gonna temporarily call this project Ben & Teddy. It’s different enough to show that this is something completely new from the original animation pilot Teddy & Ben, while still showing that the same characters are here to stay. It would make sense to call this show Teddy & Ben if it was mostly Teddy moving the plot along, but I think chaining Ben to a Circle K provides interesting constraints for me to approach this project. (Yes, I know it doesn’t sound as good when Teddy’s name comes second, and I also know there’s already some jazz album with the name Ben & Teddy, but it should be fine.)

Ideally, I want to start making the gas station set next month, as well as flesh out some actual comic plotlines, and possibly bounce around some ideas on what the other employees at the gas station could be. HOWEVER, I will be pretty busy with that new travel video, so I might not get a whole lot done.

But overall, not only am I extremely excited to see how Ben & Teddy could turn out, I’m also thrilled that this project can exist on its own OUTSIDE of YouTube, since it’ll also be a static comic you can read on Newgrounds or even in a physical book offline someday. Holy crap I’m so glad I actually have a project I can upload to Newgrounds again, and one that’s actually as interesting as my old animations.

(If this goes well, I could even try that Cavefolder revival idea through comics! Though I think something episodic like that should probably be ENTIRELY finished before being posted online at all. Emergency exit design or something.)

Okay I’ve got work to do, so I’ll go disappear into my lab again. See you in July!

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George (wavetro)

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