Hello, it is 2020, Happy New Year!
To celebrate reaching 1000 subscribers on YouTube,
Thank you so much for the support by the way, it's wonderful to reach this milestone,
I said that I would do my first ever Q&A and here it is!
It's a new thing for me, it will be fine.
Thank you to everyone who sent in questions, so let's start, shall we?
Phil asks how have things changed from your initial concept to where you are now?
You're right that live-streaming wasn't part of my original plan
But I did start thinking about live streaming long before I actually started
Incorporating it into my YouTube stuff and also starting a Twitch channel.
I generally have a tendency to think quite far ahead
And think of where I'd like to go
And then just sort of baby step my way in that direction.
So for example, before I started my YouTube channel
I had the plan of having each day with a different theme
And not necessarily having videos on the same day of the week every week
But having it where if I'm uploading a video on a Tuesday, it's a review.
But if you look at the early videos on my channel you can see that I didn't do that when I started off.
It took a while before I actually started doing that.
So I guess my answer to your question
Is that my content tends to not look like my plan in the short term
But that I get there in the long term.
Salman asks if I see myself as an optimist, a pessimist, a realist, or an opportunist.
I would say that I'm generally an optimist
But depending on my mood I may be prone to bouts of pessimism or realism.
What were your favorite toys growing up?
I used to have quite a lot of cuddly toy dogs. I still have quite a few of them.
And I would play with them a lot.
And also I used to have Puppy in my Pockets
Which are like little tiny dog models of different breeds.
There was just a general dog theme.
Time and Chance asks what are the best books you have read that first appeared in the 2000s.
I found this question quite interesting and difficult to answer and it surprised me a bit.
Many books that I consider to be quite recent are just slightly too old to fit into this category.
But I've lucked out because my favourite Discworld book was published in 2002
And that is Night Watch.
I haven't read it yet in my Discworld Discourses reread, it's coming up soon,
So I'll be interested if it is still my favourite after that, but I suspect it will be.
Apart from that I looked through my bookcase to find some more books to mention
And I came up with the Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children series which I loved a lot when I read it.
And also Stuart: A Life backwards by Alexander Masters.
So that's quite a varied list of books there.
Do you have any brothers and sisters?
I do not. I am an only child.
Rob asks: your web series Six Characters shows these six different characters.
How did you select the individual attributes
And was the number six intention or coincidence?
A very specific question.
If you don't know, Six Characters was a little web series I made quite a while ago.
I didn't know what I was doing. You can find it on my YouTube channel if you want to see it.
I made the whole thing over the course of a week and released it over six days, one episode for each day.
Each episode was a minute long and it focused on a different character, all played by me,
And their stories all intertwined together.
It was quite a long time ago so my memories of it are a little vague
But I know that I was making daily videos at the time
And I know that I wanted a little break from making daily videos
So I figured that if I made a whole bunch of videos at once
And then release them one a day then that would solve the problem.
At the time I was making My Weekly Geekery weekly,
The show in which I talk about what's been going on in my geeky world over the past seven days,
And I think it was on Wednesdays then,
But it meant that I had one video that was definitely coming in the next week,
So the series had six episodes and six characters because that was the amount of days left in the week.
But also there is a play called Six Characters in Search of an Author
And I loved it, and I still like it now, and you should look it up if you can,
But I imagine that that also tied into why there were six characters and six episodes.
But in terms of choosing the characters and the attributes,
That was mainly just through figuring out the full story
And the individual little different fragments that would have to make it up,
And also the order that the characters would need to be introduced in so that the story would make sense,
And also the very specific constraints that I made for the episodes
Because each episode is exactly the same length to the frame,
And there's a transition in each episode where we start off with the character in front of a mirror
And then we move to the actual proper scene with the character
And I'm pretty sure that that transition happens in the same frame in every episode as well?
That was a lot of talking about Six Characters there!
Did you take part in any Christmas plays at school and if so what part did you play?
In my primary school, the system for the yearly Christmas play thing
Was that each class would have its own five minute or so long segment
And they'd all link together to make a full story
Or as much of a story as can exist when it's like 4 to 11 year olds.
And then the school choir would be at the front of the stage throughout
And they would sing between the segments.
Anyway, all of that was to say: I was in the choir.
What is my all time favourite film, TV show, and book?
I've been saying, whenever anyone would ask me, for over ten years
That Back to the Future Part 1 was my favourite film.
However I haven't seen it in a very long time
So it may have been surpassed by something in recent years
But I don't really know until I watch it again.
But for the moment we'll go with Back to the Future Part 1 being my favourite film.
TV show-wise, I love Peaky Blinders.
I love the direction and the script and the cinematography.
So many of the things in this show are amazing.
But again there are a lot of TV shows that I really love,
Merlin, Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The West Wing, probably quite a few others that I've forgotten.
And book is slightly easier, it's Les Miserables.
I think part of the reason why I love it is because
I was surprised at how much I loved it.
It's really long and it's got essays in it.
Before I read this book I thought that I would be bored sometimes
So it really surprised me how much I loved it.
It's got so much drama and humour and it's got great characters.
Eponine and Javert are two of my favourite book characters in all fiction
And they're both in this book.
And finally, do you remember the first time you filmed yourself talking to camera and what was it about?
I do because it was the first video that I ever put on this YouTube channel.
It's not there anymore but some of you will have seen it if you've been here for quite a bit,
It was called Underemployment and it was basically me listing things
That you could do with your time when you were unemployed or underemployed.
So there you have it, my first ever Q&A!
I hope that was interesting, I guess?
I'm really sorry if I didn't answer your question.
I hope that everyone who asked questions got at least one of their questions answered.
But if I missed your question or you want me to answer something else
Feel free to put it in the comments below and I will try to answer,
If I can, I can't promise anything!
Thank you so much for the support, thank you for the suggestion of the Q&A.
And let's move across to the end screen!
If you'd like to see my latest video or some episodes of Thoughts on Thursday
Then you can do so below me here.
And if you'd like to subscribe to my channel or visit my website then you can do so beside me here.
And if you fancy checking out my Patreon page then the link to that will be in the description below.
I hope you have a fantastic day and I will see you soon!