I honestly have no idea how to even begin this one. You would think after a decade and a half I’d know exactly where I’m going and that I’d have a solid idea of what I’m doing, but the fact of the matter is…I’m lost.
I’m not going to lie, it’s been a busy past three years, and I honestly had no clue sometimes about my schedule or what one week to the next would bring. However I think it goes deeper than all that and I started to scratch the surface of the problem way back in the end of 2020/beginning of 2021. When I started my Facebook live streams I talked a lot about the old me meaning the way I was about thirteen years ago and the new me which was me post major 2020 events. Later on towards the end of those live stream events I talked more about a present version of me because there were factors from both the old and new me that would make up the present me. To be honest I think subconsciously I was talking about the war going on in my head when it came to making content online. Now when I say war I want to clarify its not an on going fight or struggle between the two voices, it’s more of a confusion of “what do we do from here” and both sides are holding different methods to the current situation.
To give you a good idea of the mind set let me explain this out a bit. Imagine that you start creating content, right, and you have your ways. Maybe because you’re a rookie at things they aren’t the best ways but everyone is happy and things grow and progress slowly AND you’re learning all at the same time. Now let’s pretend one day that life changes, so much so that for a decade it’s like your watching your life play out like it was a movie. You’re sitting there watching but not as in control of decisions or anything like you were before. Lots of mistakes happen in this ten year period, decisions from all across the spectrum of decision making. Now remember content creating is still going on and being learned but now there are outside influences telling you what you should/shouldn’t be doing or that it needs to earn you something or it’s not worth it. All of this is coming from your family, friends, and fellow community members. Totally changing the mindset we started off with at the beginning, however things start to not work out the way they were before…burnout starts because you start to feel like “I’m not getting anywhere or earning enough…I’m doing something wrong”. Changes are attempted, series ended; restarted, ended again, new concepts come and go, some in literally a blink of an eye. Then one day major traumatic events happen and you have to just stop for a while. You wake up from the movie, but the movie was reality and now you’re back in control and left to pick up all the pieces alone. So because of that all content stops all at once, no warning, it just stops. Time continues to move on days, weeks, months, years. Then you make the decision “I want to go back to this! It made me happy, people loved my content. This time nothing and no one is going to hold me back or tell me how to go about things”. Now you have two methods floating around in your brain and they’ve been there for so long together you have a hard time figuring out where to start, if you should start with any of that, or just to start fresh once again which to be fair because of all the time that’s passed no matter what it’s going to be a fresh start.
Dark Avenger holds a lot of history with me; I could sit here and list things for hours that came from me starting my own channel. I remember my goals were pretty straight forward, review comics, inform, and above all else entertain. So going back into the channels I asked myself again what are my intentions and goals. Right away I identified a problem! Yes I still wanted my media channel to be all the things it was before but I noticed additional stuff popping up in my goals. “To prove certain people wrong”, “to prove other things I was told were asinine and to create skits about it within vids”, and that’s just to name two major things. Rebuilding a channel on revenge or to prove people wrong is not a stable way to start back up again. I don’t want that to be me or how my channel is remembered in its “last days” because that is exactly what it will be if those are my reasons; my channels last days. I’m sure this post is going to get people from all across my social circles to come out to read “what’s up with Chris, what’s he posting about now, and/or does he reference or poke at me in this”. I bet that’s a few of you right now, surprise I moved on. For a while I let that take up a lot of my brain space wanting to get “justice”, I’m just over it now. While it would be easy to sit there and point the finger and blame every one of those people, the truth is this is all on me. I take responsibility for what I have and haven’t done and that’s just why I have just don’t have the free time to care about stuff that shouldn’t matter anymore. I messed up, now I’m going to fix it myself!
I have always said is success is not measured in how much you earned but how much of a difference you’ve made. I’m not going to lie if I’m able to make money to support the hobby awesome, or if I’m able to make an actually job out of it all great. Unfortunately Youtube and Twitch are filled with aspiring content creators because everyone at one point or another dreams of being a big youtuber/streamer/podcaster. We all dream that’s going to be us but sadly the reality is most content creators don’t make it to that one million sub mark. Don’t let that last sentence discourage you though, I always encourage people to try! Why though, why are you pushing people to try then Chris, well the answer is simple; regardless how many subs you get 10-100-1000-10000 you build a community. To most of these people your videos and content/friendship/community means something. Stick to you content though, don’t keep trying to chase a bunch of different things on and off to try and catch that one thing that “takes you off”. I definitely fell into that trap and I know a few people that fell into that as well. So those shitty goals, they can’t be there if I want my channels to reach their full potential in my eyes, I’m just going to do my own thing my own way and I’m just going to slay it the only way I know how!
Now the next issue and I’ve had this one since before taking a few years off. As a lot of you know after my 500th comic review episode I took a break from reading more than a handful of comics a week. This was I believe a big mistake on my part because slowly I started to lose track of everything, I would stop reading books completely about a year after that. So jumping back in has been the biggest issue for me. I must admit seeing videos and news on how both DC and Marvel have been going downhill FAST with fans doesn’t exactly help. What I noticed was there are people who will say everything is doom and gloom, and that forced agenda has destroyed everything. Giving the impression that both companies are going to be shut down. Then there’s the other side of the coin where people portray everything as sunshine and rainbows with perfect representation and things couldn’t be better. Sales definitely show Marvels been doing a bit better than DC, which hurts me as a DC fan. However sales are still not the best for either company. I like to see the in between, there is definitely an issue here with people looking for more twitter likes than good stories…least that’s what it looks like to me. However not EVERYTHING is bad, there is good along with the bad. I even made a short talking about how I’m not going to sugar coat stuff nor will I say everything is burning and the end is nigh. So I keep saying I’m just going to jump in at some point, I know DC will be rebooting (yet again) soon, Marvel will just have to be when a story has a good jumping on point…I had to do that once with Marvel I can do it again.
My goal still is the same; to get back to where I was when I started on Dark Avenger and go beyond that. I had my direct and was planning to start stuff this past fall but IRL things came in as they always do, but it’s my fault I forgot I had a few things that needed to be dealt with first and they now are. So a fresh start, and a fresh mindset this is how I need to go into this. So I’ll be starting slow with random content on both channels (Media formerly DarkAvengerC86, and Dark Avenger Entertainment), so if your not subscribed please do today. There will be new fresh titles for certain series; some titles will still be the same because of the legacy behind their names. I won’t be doing a newsletter for now; I honestly don’t see a need for one. I know a few of you have been asking about my stories and writing, for now I’m still going to be keeping that on hiatus, which I’m sure a few people are sad about. Any type of group stuff for now will be very minimal, I say minimal because I am working on a gaming group project I’m working on with close friends on my discord.
The past is the past, we’re in the present and I’ve wasted enough time doing nothing. We just move forward, no more returns, no more announcements, and no more reference to the past or people, just ACTION.