Deliberate Procrastination

As we've been promising all week, today's post (well, Tuesday's post, originally) was supposed to be a recap of our whimsical journey to Comic-Con. It may come as a surprise to no one that tomorrow, or possibly Saturday, will be Recap Day.

This happens to me with my Mega Man YouTube videos all the time. People get excited about the next installment, and I start making estimates for their sake and to help keep me on a timetable, and then I overshoot the deadline by three months.

Are we that bad at estimating, or is there more to it?

I concede that meeting the deadlines we promise is always well within the realm of possibility. It's a matter of what's more important--keeping our promises, or delivering material we're satisfied with? Or, as a third possibility, going to bed before 3 AM.

With my videos, there's a certain point where no amount of "just a little more time" is going to make a significant difference. Practice makes pretty good, as they say, and the rest is just luck and the ability to skillfully enjoy playing through a stage for the umpteenth time. I go with whatever take makes me happy enough and let the perfectionist in me deal with it.

Writing is a little different. I need to be "in the zone" to write. Even if I'm tired or just having an "off" night when working on a video, there's always a chance that I could nail a recording on the first try. Trying to write when my mind is elsewhere is fruitless, and whatever fruit I might produce is usually boring and poorly written. There is nothing like boring and poorly written fruit.

I write because I can channel my thoughts and enthusiasm into another format, one that I can go back and analyze, or share with others. Sometimes it's good to just get it all out of my head (not that it's ever very crowded in there). Forcing myself to write for the sole purpose of meeting a deadline is often like trying to pour water from a bucket that hasn't been refilled in a while and only has a few drops inside. I write when it feels right, or else I stare at a blank screen for hours and try to squeeze literary blood from a stonelike keyboard.

In short, our Comic-Con recap post will be ready once we've had the time to really sit down with it and enjoy writing it. Not that you needed any excuses from us--we just celebrated two years of being contemporarily irrelevant. All the same, I appreciate being kept in the loop when plans around me change, and it's the least we can do to explain, in a cleverly disguised filler post, that we'll be back on track soon enough.