In the past, I’ve talked about various mental health issues that I have that have made Mutant Standard generally difficult, but I haven’t really talked about issues I’ve had about the project itself.
Even though I did want to work on Mutant Standard less in a planning work/life balance sense, I’ve been working on it less than I actually wanted to for these reasons. To make sure that I’m not talking about the project under a lot of influence of these issues and therefore talk about Mutant Standard in an irrational light, I’ve waited for many months until now to actually attempt to talk about it.
Also other things I said I would do, like streaming, have been caught up in this for the same reasons, and other external reasons too.
[CW: mental health talk in this post.]
I’ve been anxious about this project for quite a while, from things like projecting imaginary expectations from other people on it, scared about the fact that I don’t really have a clear plan of where to go with the project (even though it’s sort of been par for the course) feeling like my work isn’t as good as it actually is or being overwhelmed about the increasing scale of the project.
I’m also really just not used to doing long-term projects like this, or one like this where there are people watching it, using it and are invested in it. These are legitimately good things and I wouldn’t want people to stop, but my brain can kinda parse them down bad ways or just crank up anxiety with them.
And last of all, my continually unstable life situation wears me down a lot, and just makes everything worse.
Overall, this has left me feeling bad (but irrational) feelings about the project, and I’m experiencing immense difficulty starting anything. And I didn’t feel like I could reasonably talk about it as long as I was feeling these bad irrational things to some degree because I’d be highly liable to say incorrect and regrettable things about where I think Mutant Standard is headed.
Streaming difficulties
Throughout the entirety of Mutant Standard’s life, I’ve had graphics driver problems. I use a Hackintosh (a computer that isn’t a Mac but is made to run macOS) for a variety of reasons, and in recent macOS versions, there have been driver problems that have lead to my graphics card wasn’t working well, resulting in a lot of serious, persistent glitches. The only solution to this is to replace that graphics card.
This made streaming very hard. When streaming software is run, the glitches become more frequent and severe, and it would frequently cause my computer to stall, crash, or be forced to restart, so it became practically a bad idea.
I was also having audio issues when I’m using a mic and kind of honestly, I don’t feel confident enough to have permanent VODs of the streams.
Once again, I was too anxious to talk about all this and to have to possibly revise a target/reward for the project, and it has taken me until now to talk about it.
Some ways forward
Clearly, like I just have a lot of mental health problems and there isn’t some easy fix for them, but I’m starting to take various necessary actions that I know of to deal with them.
New hardware
Thanks to a relative, I was able to get a new graphics card this week, making it practical to stream again. (It also just makes working suck a lot less, It’s kind of amazing how I have normalised the routine issues I have been dealing with throughout the project’s entire development.)
Doing things with a little bit of force
I’m trying to get back into working on the project in more routine ways (ie. making/editing emoji even though the project is still unorganised and I’m not capable of publishing these changes).
To reduce the anxiety factor, I started yesterday/this morning with an emoji stream, I’m gonna try to do more of them as streaming is a space where I can motivate myself better to just do stuff and therefore, feel less anxious about working on Mutant Standard as a whole because it just becomes normal again rather than a distant, difficult thing.
Adjusting expectations for streaming
I’m gonna make it a thing that there won’t be permanently-available stream VODs, just the temporary 2-week VODs you can get on the Twitch account (at least for now).
Like with other parts of the project, because I can’t plan in advance, streams will no longer be arranged quite in advance; they will just happen when I feel able to do them, I’ll still aim to do them at least once a month.
I’ll try to let you know how I’m going, it’s easier now that I feel like I’m actually able to talk about my mental state, since it’s what’s preventing a lot of progress right now.