As I sit here working on my blog today, I can only smile as everything this week has come together. I have written the first couple of articles for the content creation guide, a book I began in 2018, worked on extensively in 2020, and then left by the wayside until a few weeks ago. Of course, many people, ok many people in my community have seen it over there years and some have even said it was helpful. The truth is that a content creator guidebook from 2020 might as well be from June of 2011 when Twitch was born. The content creation space changes quickly, and oftentimes creators find themselves living in a different world at the end of a show from the one they were in when they first pressed the start stream.
It was only after I began working on a different project that I realized that I had done three articles already for content creation, but I hadn’t produced any videos for them. I immediately began to scramble to think about how to do videos for them and then I paused. I don’t need to do videos for them, not everything needs to be a video, despite what some creators are pushing right now.
The world we are in everything is a bite-sized, macro, 15 second burst of information that is meant to help people build discoverability. The problem is so much of that information is factually incorrect, and not by a little bit, by a giant margin.
The Trump TikToks
Case in point, this week I did a pair of TikToks on Donald Trump. One was a response to Dean Love and calling Donald Trump a “violent offender” and the other was a follow up to that video for all the people who posted things that are outside the realm of reality.
Donald Trump is a convicted felon, despite apparently what the MAGA of TikTok believe. Yes, just this week his $350 million judgement was thrown out, but that was for his civil case. Apparently so many people don’t understand his civil case is different than his criminal case, it makes me wonder if we aren’t living in 1984 and Big Brother is going in and changing the internet articles so people only read one narrative.
It seems people can’t accept the reality that something is a fact, and you can not like that fact, but you can’t make it not be a fact.
> “He shouldn't have been charged with a felony.”
You may very well be right, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was a felony.
> “They didn’t prove the underlying crime.”
You are correct, and the judge should have tossed all of those charges then. The judge didn’t.
“His case was overturned at the Supreme Court.”
> This case hasn’t even made its way out of the Appellate Division of New York yet, then it has to make its way to the New York Court of Appeals (which is basically their Supreme Court), and only then can it make it to the Federal Supreme Court.
Enough about that, but I bet you can guess for a moment what my political article for the week is on.
The Name Change
Anyone who follows my streams, and if you don’t but you read my blog then let’s talk more often, knows this week I changed my Twitch and Kick account names from Paradox_Gaming_Network to jahlonpgn.
To be honest this change has been a long time coming, and it should have happened a long time ago; however that is spilt milk under the bridge as Jeremy Irons in Margin Call would say.
A few months ago I started a rampant upgrade of paradoxgaming.net, pgnmusic.com, jahlon.com, and this week saw archeage101.com added to the list.
I have a goal for some projects I want to do, and those projects take money, and well I need to provide value in order to get anything from people. Ironically, tomorrow morning I will be publishing the Content Creation article on value, which is what has been focusing on those things now.
In case anyone is interested, the first big project I’m working on is a collection of stories from single mothers who can’t get child support from absent fathers, but still have kids to feed. I want to be able to buy their stories since I don’t believe in handouts. My eventual goal is to get some of them to write papers, essays, stories, so that we can start to put faces to the horror of how much family court in this country is failing. However, to buy hungry kids groceries takes money, and to make money I need to create revenue streams. Hence, the motivation to get this serious again.
For years I had an idea that was the Paradox Gaming Network, and the organization name is not changing, but the idea is long dead. The original idea for PGN was that there would be several streamers all working on the same main channel (Paradox_Gaming_Network) but then simultaneously building their own brands. Well, Twitch has changed, hosting is gone, and now I’m beginning to move more and more into politics, current affairs, news, etc. Friday I decided to pull the trigger on the name change, rip the band-aid off to speak. That gives me about six weeks before my next break to build up the audience, and then when I am back from my fall vacation, I will be in a position to blaze a trail.
The Irony of Needing to be Paid in Exposure
Imagine you are the lead singer in a band. You go into a bar to see if the bar needs live entertainment. The bartender says sure, but he can only pay you in exposure. You laugh and say “I can’t pay my landlord with exposure”
I laugh at this irony, but right now exposure is the payment I need. Yes, I just mentioned that I have some projects that I need to fund, but growth is more important to me right now than exposure. This is where I am terrible at being a content creator. I can promote other people and give them 17 great ideas for marketing and growth, but when it comes to me I don’t even like to ask people to subscribe to my channel.
I’m asking anyone who reads this, to share my webpage https://paradoxgaming.net/ with three people. Just three people. Tell them something nice about me, tell them to join in on a stream sometime, or watch a video, or read an article, or go straight to PGN Music and jam out to a lof-fi track.
I would honestly welcome that more than $100 tip, mainly because money doesn’t even work for marketing anymore, although that $100 would buy some groceries for some kids so I guess I’d take either.
How can I help you?
One of my favorite things is helping people with projects, advice, direction, etc. If I can be of any assistance for your goals, reach out to me. I have plenty of time to listen to your projects.