I wasn’t always big on watching Youtube, but during the pandemic lockdown, it became one of the things I enjoyed doing, along with making candles and miniature houses. I don’t remember what I first really started watching, but I do know that having my nth viewing of J. Lo and Shakira’s Superbowl halftime show interrupted by an ad was what made me decide to get Youtube Premium. Super worth it.

I wandered into the video essay and commentary space somehow, watching the works of Contrapoints, Jessie Gender, Princess Weekes, and Alice Cappelle, among others, eventually adding Swell Entertainment and münecat to my subscriptions. I also became heavily into drama channels and could recount in exhaustive detail what happened between Gabbie Hanna and Jessi Smiles, and Colleen Ballinger and Adam McIntyre. I was there when Hbomberguy eviscerated plagiarists and witnessed the rise and fall of iilluminaughtii. I also watched the Try Guys drama unfold. I’d known about them for years, but tuning into the drama made me a regular Try Guys viewer and now a Second Try subscriber.

As I got deeper into Youtube, I started entertaining the thought of having my own channel containing video essays on various topics. I’d joke about it every time Miss Universe season came around. I’m very interested in beauty pageants and a few years ago, I felt like I had plenty to say about it from a feminist and sociological perspective.

Then in January 2023, I just decided I was gonna go for it.

I’m terrible at naming stuff, but I ended up going with “late-night chips” to refer to my habit of late-night snacking. And maybe as a nod to chewing on a memory, an idea late into the night.

My first video was about the movie The First Slam Dunk, which I wrote, recorded, and edited in a hurry the moment I got home from the movie theater. Afterwards, I made videos about probably quite niche topics, like the long-gone Manang’s Chicken, the 1980s young adult horror book series Twilight: Where Darkness Begins, and the 1990s movie Baby Love. My most popular video is the one about the Miss Universe 1994 semifinalists and what happened to them after the pageant. It has more than 52,200 views so far, which should tell me that I found a potentially popular niche to work with, but I absolutely insist on posting about other things 😀

I’ve written a bunch of stuff I want to make videos about, but I’ve unfortunately not gotten around to recording them. I do everything for my channel: research, writing, narrating and recording, and video editing. It’s a lot of work, but I get a lot of satisfaction doing it.

Have I achieved Youtube fame and made tons of money from my channel? Heck no. I need 1,000 subscribers and I’m not even halfway there, and thousands of watch hours, which I definitely do not have.

Recently, I started making videos about SB19, a group I love and admire. None of the videos have cracked 1,000 views, but it’s all good; the channel has been idle for months, and even having a few hundred people watch my work and listen to me talk is already huge. It’s been fun because it’s testing my ability to write quickly and produce a video mere hours after a bit of SB19 news came out. And it’s bringing my channel back to life. I’ve even gotten started writing something I’ve put off for half a year.

This project is pretty big for me because I’m painfully averse to being perceived, but perhaps there’s a part of me that’s not because I’m perfectly willing to put my writing out there and use my actual voice.

I have to admit that my ultimate goal here is to have a modest following and to earn a bit of money too. For now, though, I’ll settle for having 100 views per video.

Nothing more to it than what the title says. I’m looking at my old blog via The Wayback Machine and I realized I wrote some pretty good stuff back in the day. I think some of them still deserve to be read, so I’m putting them here as well. Enjoy.

There, I said it. There are some days when there’s more work than I can handle and some days when barely anything is coming in, and if I have to be honest, the latter is happening more often than it used to.

Chalk it up to some clients perhaps giving AI a shot at editing their work, or maybe money’s so tight nowadays that some people are deciding that they just don’t want to spend extra for editing and proofreading. It’s not ideal. It’s scary, even, but that’s where we seem to be at these days.

I’m going to sound like someone on LinkedIn by saying this, but this situation is why it’s important to build a good working relationship with clients and to always make sure you turn in excellent work. Even in the tightest of crunches, they’re bound to remember that your work helped make theirwork look good, and hopefully, they also see you less than someone who renders a service and more as a partner in what they do. And then hopefully, you have this kind of relationship with a large number of other clients and then they can tell other people in their network about you and the great work you’ve done for them.

God, that last paragraph sounds like it’s written by someone from another fairly recent era, when life and technology seemed to make more sense.

Anyway, all the uncertainty that I and lots of other people are feeling about our careers makes me wonder why so many people who are infatuated with AI are cheering for the death of industries and jobs. And if we’re all going to end up losing our jobs to AI, what other ways of earning a living can we do, and who do they think will be buying all their products and services if no one isn’t making any money anymore?

Huh, I thought I was going to write a calm, measured post about how you can set yourself apart as an editor, but this turned into an anti-AI rant (because fuck AI).

And in yet another installment of “You can really just do whatever on the Internet,” I present to you CreepyLink, a funny take on URL shorteners, except this one actually makes them longer in some cases and MORE SUSPICIOUS in all cases. This is what I love about websites like this one. They don’t HAVE to serve any other purpose other than to make you say, “Haha that’s so cool I love it.”

Almost 10 years ago, I started a Quezon City-oriented blog called QCitizen. I had big plans for it—so big that I got overwhelmed and ended up not doing anything for it at all, save for the occasional post here and there.

Last year, I decided that, because I keep harping on about how much I miss the blogs and websites of old, I should start working on QCitizen again. The posts are still sporadic, I admit, but there’s a lot more there than there ever was, and it looks the way I want it to look—still a blog, but more of a magazine, with big, clear images. It’s one of the projects I’m proud of working on in 2025, and I really want to keep it going for a long time.