Category: banpei

This is a more personal posting than anything informational on cars and other things that interest me. Like the title says, I picked up blogging again. As you may recall the blog posts became less and less frequent and that was because of a reason.

When I created my first proper (edited) videos back in 2015, I never intended them to take over the blogging. I reckoned it would be additional information to the blog because I would be able to add more information in the videos. If I would have to explain each and every variant of the 4A-GE and what their differences were, I would end up with a 30 minute read and it would look more like Wikipedia than a blog article. A video would give me the little edge to make it visually and transfer knowledge quicker, like this video on the Carina A60:

My earlier videos were all kind of experimental to see what would work and what not. As time progressed, my videos started to become more professional over time. I could say I’m a perfectionist and I really hate it to see some error I made in a video. This meant that creating informative videos would take more and more time from me. I would say my video about the Toyota AE86 Sports Package probably took me about a month to produce. Naturally this wasn’t full time as I was doing these videos in my spare time. However, total number of hours spent on that video would easily be 40-ish hours. That’s a full work week for me!

Like I said earlier, I’m creating these videos in my spare time. When I started doing them, I was working as a freelancer and had plenty of time to spare. When I returned to my ordinary desk-job again, I had to travel back and forth between home and the office for about 1 hour one way by train. This meant I had about 2 hours of time per day to dedicate to create videos and other projects. I could write the script during commute on Monday, record the voice over in the evenings and then edit the video the remainder of the week and post it up on Friday or Saturday. Then Covid-lockdowns happened.

As soon as the first lockdown happened, I was stuck at home with my kids and no “spare” time left. This meant I couldn’t post videos for a while and have my channel lose its momentum. I was able to churn out maybe one video per two or three months. How hard I tried, every consecutive video I posted got next to no views.

I did create my videos to share information with others, help others and hopefully make people smarter. Having next to no views at all isn’t very motivating to continue to make more. Naturally I started to create less and less videos. I made a total of 172 videos so far, but I have taken down many of them in the past months because they were either silly, too personal or I thought were of too low quality to remain online.

At the same time, as a side project, I decided I should better invest my time in writing a book and share my knowledge on the AE86. I started writing about two years ago and this coincided with the biggest churn in posted videos. I think I’m at 80% done with the book, so don’t start searching on Amazon yet!

So you may wonder why did I started blogging again? That’s a good question! The main reason is knowledge sharing. Stupid, weird or bizarre stuff I run into on a daily basis. Preserving information that otherwise might get lost. All these things could be turned into a video, but investing 10 hours on a 2 minute video that nobody will watch is a waste of time. It takes me perhaps 30 minutes to write down my thoughts. Another 10 to 15 minutes to re-read, re-write or re-phrase. So therefore I blog. I write down. I hope you all appreciate it.