I'm on the brink of coming out of a creative hiatus that's gone on for over a year.
Before I get into a too-long-winded explanation of where my creative head has been at, support the new projects with a follow! The re-branding is in-progress at time of publishing this post, but I always appreciate the support. Expect some changes in the coming weeks to design, content offerings, and subscriber incentives on YouTube, Instagram, and Patreon.
Writing has become really difficult for me in the last year. But I'm really excited about the projects I'm working on. The short version of this post is that I'm creating written and video content around one of my favorite hobbies: walking.
Now, here’s the long version:
The end of OversharingAlex.com
I began OversharingAlex in March 2022. I had the idea of a written blog that could serve as a place to talk about the impending birth of my son and death of my mother. I wanted to hash out some college papers I had drafted in my mind. I wanted some kind of tool to catalog exploring the city I had just moved to.
And by March 2023, I had accomplished all of that; I wrote about all of those things. I had written 25 blog posts in that first year, comprising 36,399 words. I wrote every single one of them. (This is important to me).
I wrote a few more large blog posts after that anniversary, and I had big plans about what was coming next for the blog. One of the last posts here, The Ska Syllabus, is one of my favorites on the site.
But by June of 2023, I started playing around with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The service was about 6 months old at the time. I played with prompts and refined the bot’s responses. I asked ChatGPT to write essays and blog posts that I hoped to write someday, but also asked it to finish incomplete projects. I even went as far as having it recreate other writing projects I had previously finished.
I was very satisfied with the chatbot’s output, impressed beyond my wildest expectations. For the first time in my life, I was scared of a technology. I didn’t know how it worked, and I spent a lot of time mentally juggling the implications that this tech was going to have over art and writing and science in the immediate and distant future, both for myself and society overall.
I thought to myself, “this is what the free version of this software can do, just six months after release? Why the hell am I even trying to write anything original?”
That might sound a little extreme to some people, but it is how I felt then and it’s kind of how I feel now. I could write more about this, but I won’t. I’m just glad I’m not in college now.
Writing is a lot harder for me these days, knowing that ChatGPT is just out there looming, writing content at least interesting enough to compete with whatever I can put down.
I mean, why would I do long division by hand when there’s a machine that can do the same thing much faster and effortlessly. Process be damned, I feel like I just need the result sometimes.
But from that roadblock came my next creative endeavor, a project I’m temporarily (and maybe permanently) calling PortlandWalkingGuy.
The birth of PortlandWalkingGuy:
Twelve months ago, I moved back to Portland, Oregon from Orange County, California.
And I realize that I'm not breaking news when I tell you that a walk-able neighborhood was at the top of my wish list when I relocated. I am a millennial, after all. Thus, I chose to move into the heart of the city, in spite of the fact that the employment I had secured was well in the suburbs, a 17 mile drive away. The Walk Score of my current address is a nice 87/100. My previous places of residence had scores of 48, 36, and 29.
During the pandemic lock downs, and in spite of those relatively low Walk Scores, I explored my surroundings every single day. It started as just exercise for my dogs, but transformed into a hobby for me. In fact, since 2020, I’ve logged over 1,600 miles on the Nike Run Club app. By another measure, enough mileage to cover a visit to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix in a single walk.
In the beginning of the pandemic lock-downs, I walked very purposefully. For example, I used Google’s My Maps to fill in every sidewalk I trekked down. I explored everything from the quiet residential subdivisions, to apartment complexes I didn’t live in, schools I never attended, and suburban arterial roads with speed limits of 50+ miles per hour. I wanted to experience everything in my “backyard.”
And since I’ve moved to this spot in Portland, I’ve been on one walking project to the next. In one project, I created a spreadsheet of how many businesses were within a mile of my place. In another project, I took a month to walk exactly 30 minutes in every single direction from my apartment door; the result was a cool wagon-wheel-radius map and a true sense of how far neighborhood landmarks were. And an ongoing project is to log a walk in every one of Portland's 90+ neighborhoods.
What's next for this channel?
goal of weekly live streams
goal of bi-weekly new videos on YouTube
goal of monthly self-guided walking tour instructions on Patreon; then collecting those self-guided walking tours into an Ebook publication; also goal of monthly bonus walks that won't go onto YouTube.
website will be overhauled with maps and data from these walks; also, goal of monthly blog posts about walking
goal of setting up paid walking tours on travel sites like Airbnb Experience.
For the first time, I'm thinking hard about how to design, execute, and create video content.
I’m now planning out several video and written series that explore the Pacific Northwest, and I'm brainstorming in-person meetups as another mechanism for exploration.
I want to make first person point of view walking tour videos that showcase the vibrant history and culture of neighborhoods and cities in the PNW. Some detailed routes, text on the screen, and local history deep dives will be a must with these videos. (I’m really inspired by some of the walks done by the YouTube channels like ProWalkingTours, among others).
I want to make short form videos that explore the food and attractions of Oregon for Reels and Tiktok.
I wanna make slow cinema of Oregon’s and Washington’s natural beauty (I’ve been thinking about the idea of "slow cinema" and experimental films like 13 Lakes by James Benning).
I wanna publish a book (eBook or physical, maybe both) of walking self-guided walking tours in Portland. I had the idea of an audio book accompaniment, so that people could walk and listen in real time.
I want to start a walking tours company.
I want to start community urban hiking groups.
Maybe all these grandiose ideas will come to fruition this year. Maybe they won’t. But I’m having fun starting a new hobby. Because, truth be told, starting hobbies is my real hobby.
Commentaires