Episode 101 Post-Show Assessment

It's a formal title for an informal post, these will just be my thoughts on Fridays after each episode. I have to say I'm in a pretty good mood today. This week I felt more pressured and energized than I have in a long time, and it's nice to be looking forward to next week too. My relationship to doing this kind of work is a lot like running--I'm having a very bad time while I'm doing it but ultimately it feels good for me. Truthfully I've probably gotten a little mentally flabby.

- It seems like a big portion of this post will be dedicated to Kaitlin. When I was thinking about the premiere episode being "how crazy things have happened but nothing feels that crazy" my first idea was that it would be funny for an impartial computer algorithm to just give me the answers. This turned out to be nearly identical to a bit I did on The Final Bosman, where I had a computer that could plainly define what is sexist or not. I thought, "No way bro (I call myself bro a lot in my thoughts) no way you're repeating a Final Bosman bit in the first episode."
So then came the idea of making it an Alexa-like personal assistant, and then came the idea of me having to build it, so it would obviously look janky, so it could be "old", so it could be from the last time I made The Final Bosman, so it could also be a meta commentary on how I can't be the same. Just a convenient flow of thoughts.
Kaitlin herself is a big dumb cheese ball tub stuffed with Christmas lights. I was super lucky--the prop was going to be about the size of a bottle of water but then I glanced at this giant cheese ball tub my sister gave me for my birthday (which was in January). Pretty sure I screamed "oh yeah baby" out loud. Kaitlin's size is half of the funniness to me now. The night I made her she was sticking together nicely but the tape was definitely falling apart by the time I was shooting. For better or for worse, I'm going to have to restock my arts and crafts supplies.
A dumb trick I do for naming people in scripts is looking at baby names from particular decades, Kaitlin was next to Alexa in the 90s.

- I actually bought the backdrop from a photography website. At first I was looking for the lasers background I always wanted for my middle school photo, but as I searched through hundreds of weird portrait backdrops I figured this might be a nice aesthetic. I couldn't get the necessary width without it also being super tall, so I had to bring this huge 9'x12' sheet to my parents' living room just to have enough space to cut it in half.

- For next weeks video, I have a few things I want to improve: better audio from the lav mic, no dandruff on my shoulder, and more visual variety. And at least one good joke.

That's the post for now. Let me know what you'd like from these in general, if this was too long or casual or whatever