User blog:Concernedalien11780/Hello, Let's Play Wiki!

Hello, Let's Play Wiki, this is Concernedalien11780. I have been a fan of Let's Plays ever since I was fourteen and began to learn about Chuggaaconroy and his Runaway Guy friends, such as NintendoCapriSun, Proton Jon, Josh Jepson, and all of the rest. Much to the chagrin of my parents, watching Let's Play videos consumed my life for much of that time. I only had four friends at that time, only one of which was actually in my grade- one was an adoptive cousin, one a similarly socially disadvantaged boy who was the son of one of my mom's friends (that friend of my mom's I became wary of later in my adolescence because I felt like she was extremely entitled and kept her son too sheltered to know how to properly deal with teenage situations, even though I think he does now, he was just a little late at it, and so was I, but my issue wasn't a result of helicopter parenting, I just had an Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis that held me back for a little while longer than most, and I became very sociable by the end of 11th grade, even though most of my friends are two grades below me, but that's OK, because they're a lot more open and friendly than most of the people in my graduating class turned out), and one a young man a grade above me also with Asperger's Syndrome, albeit with slightly different symptoms, and extremely near-sighted legal blindness. I aspired to watch all of Chuggaaconroy's videos, play all of the video games he played, and become a Let's Player as an adult, thinking that it could make a realistic amount of income.

Unfortunately, my preference for Let's Play videos over people (actually a whole derth of other issues) made my parents send me to an all-boys theraputic boarding school for 9th and 10th grade. It was not a good place, keeping teenage boys away from teenage girls at the time in their lives they needed to learn how to talk to them in order to learn how to value them as people the most, trying to censor adolescent male brains to make them meet an unrealistic "ideal", and most likely creating more problems than they solve. And yet, it did do some good things for me. It made me realize what I really want to do for a career (something in the realm of animation) and helped me become more sociable so that I could make many friends in my last two years of high school back at a traditional public school (it wasn't a dirty inner-city school, it was a very good school, in fact, it was considered the 35th best in the country according to the Daily Beast, but its social dynamics might still be too difficult for someone more introverted to manage).

I still watched Let's Plays, but that wasn't the only thing I did, and to this day I keep subscribed to Chuggaaconroy and all of his friends and know about their personalities despite only watching them infrequently. In the animated series I'm making, one of the main characters is even loosely based on Proton Jon. If I could, I'd even get Jon Wheeler to voice him. I have a YouTube channel that I've considered doing something with for a long time, though due to a long process I've been partaking in that is nearly over after months of blogging on wikis, I haven't known what I should make the channel about, though making it a Let's Play channel has been a major option. Unfortunately, while I know a lot about video games, I don't own very many because of how you kind of need to give up buying almost everything else worth buying in order to have a reasonably large and current video game collection and because of how I'm not very good at video games. I couldn't properly grip a Game Boy until I was nine, and I couldn't properly grip a normal controller until I was ten, and due to not buying many video games, I really haven't improved much. I'm actually pretty decent in turn-based RPGs because of how they have a set series of options for actions to do and (usually) all the time you need to do them, so I might have a channel worth watching and keeping up with if I was solely an RPG gamer, but due to lack of time in my life, I would have to wait until after leaving technical school to do anything like a YouTube channel, and even then it would just be a side-project to something that can decently pay the bills. I wouldn't try to be PewDiePie or anything like him and become a multi-millionaire from Let's Playing alone. I'd just try to have a little fun and MAYBE make a friend or two along the way. I'm not saying it's wrong to turn it into a career, but that's just not what I personally feel right doing for myself. Regardless, I'll see where this pattern ends up taking me and what I'll do for a YouTube experience, if anything.

For better or worse, Let's Plays are a new art form. I think that art is any human activity done for any purpose besides survival or reproduction, so even if something doesn't have the serene grace of traditional "art", I still think that it can be art. Due to the somewhat culturally contentious nature of Let's Plays in general outside of the circle of those who enjoy them, I felt the need to disable comments on my post for this wiki. If you want to talk to me, please do so on the chat section of my userpage. Thank you for reading, and perhaps I'll see you on the wiki or on YouTube.