Today's early morning trip to the old family home in Quezon City certainly left me in a rather emotional state. Naturally being back in the neighborhood where we grew up added a strong tone of nostalgia to the day, and I might as well lean into that.
When my sister and I were much younger, most of our days were spent with our grandmother as both our parents worked full-time jobs. Our grandmother had a history of being an educator, and that always came out in how she cared for us, I think. She had no shortage of platitudes and morals to impart ranging from bits like "a place for everything and everything in its place" to the ever-classic "the idle mind is the devil's playground. Thus one of the biggest sins of our childhood was appearing idle for too long or making the dire mistake of announcing that you were bored. Bored kids are given something to do, and for us that meant chores.
Today I got to see the old house, which included the wooden dining table that had hosted many a family event. It was a particularly familiar fixture for me as one main category of chores - wiping all surfaces (ibabaws) meant that I had become intimately familiar with that table. While its round top was pretty simple as any table should be. But its legs were particularly intricate and formed into the shape of three-toed feet. And that level of detail meant that I couldn't just quickly wipe the surface and call it a day. The carved feet had surfaces of their own and somehow crept into the "ibabaws" definition. Thus I had to take the time to carefully wipe across every curve and shallow of each leg of the table time and time again as part of my chores.
The table seemed somewhat larger than life growing up - something that was probably reinforced by the fact it was in a rather dark dining room that had limited access to natural light. Thus to wipe it I could, at best, turn on the aging chandelier above it and trust that the incandescent bulbs' warm light would be enough to guide my cleaning. But when I had almost overlooked it today as it was no longer in its old place and it felt so much smaller than I remembered it to be. But such is the way of childhood, I suppose. Our youth acts as a particular lens that filters our memories and redefines the truth of those years. It makes the reality of things a bit more jarring.
In unrelated but tangentially related news, I have a weird YouTube snafu. You see, part of my O Bar video processing is to do a batch edit of all uploaded videos to align them in terms of various YouTube metadata items including the recording date, the category of the videos, the usual hashtags and disclaimers I include in the description, and of course the tags that I apply to all of my O Bar videos. The system includes many warnings every time you do any sort of batch edit with reminders that this cannot be reversed and by now I think I've gotten very good at this process.
This was not the case with the videos from last weekend's O Bar event night. I am fairly certain that I had only selected the particular batch of videos of the night that I had just uploaded. But whether due to an error on my part or some random glitch, those video default metadata modifications ended up being applied to ALL of the videos uploaded to my YouTube channel and not just those particular O Bar videos. This means that all of my videos now share the same 14 January 2024 recording date along with their descriptions mixed up with the boilerplate content. It's a huge mess and my efforts to seek a solution from the YouTube Partners team were for naught as all they could say was that their tech team confirmed that nothing could be done and I'd have to edit each video one by one. The only other "consolation" they offered was that this mistake was somehow a "great opportunity" to provide feedback to YouTube via the link within Creator Studio to potentially contribute to future improvements to the platform.
Sigh.
It's very annoying, but I've never been one to shirk away from detailed work like this. I have over 1,000 videos in my channel including 300+ Baduy Pride live streams from the lockdown years. I'm going to have to edit each video in order to correct all these mistakes and set my channel back in order. It won't be something I can do in a single weekend - that would just melt my brain. So I'll just continue to attack this steadily in the days, weeks, and months to come until I get things settled again. I've already processed some of the more niche content that I have there consisting of things like videos of YouTube, excerpts from concerts Tobie and I had attended together, and various travel and pride-related activities. That still leaves the bulk of the O Bar and Baduy Pride content to figure out, which may take me the rest of the year to work on here and there.
It's certainly an upsetting situation but I don't want to overly dwell on it. Feeling bad about it won't change anything and all that's left is to roll up my sleeves and get back to work. This chore isn't going to resolve itself.
But man, what a mess.
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