Hello all! I hope you have all been enjoying the vast amount of content you have been getting from the Here’s Johnny Podcast these past few weeks. There have been two interviews with horror directors, most recently with Ben Rock. You are getting two blog posts a week, one from each host. You are getting weekly streams on Sundays. The first Patreon exclusive episode drops soon, reviewing Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House”. But sometimes, when producing all of this content, things fall through the cracks. What I am referring to currently is two-fold, this blog post and my attention to our next game for review, “Deadly Premonition”. So I thought for this week, I would talk about a true horror I deal with in my life, procrastination.
I want to caveat this by first saying that my procrastination is restricted mainly to my personal life. When it comes to work and BIG things (like my soon to be realized move to Utah) I have been told I am annoyingly proactive. I had my job lined up in August, apartment by September, and my uHaul reserved by the end of October. When it comes to work, I manage a five person team in charge of ensuring experiments for a 90 person lab go smoothly. But when it comes to my personal life, I suck! I think that I can trace this back to middle school. I realized pretty quickly that because I was smarter than the average bear (not trying to be pretentious, but I was and it plays into this) that I could slack off and do things last minute and pass with flying colors (I graduated with a 4.0, no weighted grades back then). But it certainly added a lot of stress. Doing homework in the locker room before class, staying up all night to write, edit, and finalize term papers, realizing I really screwed the pooch and throwing together a science project (board and data included) the day before it was to be turned in. It never affected my grades and my teachers never seemed to notice. The same went for high school and when it came to college, I was able to skate by to get the grades I needed to graduate. But man life was stressful, especially in college. I specifically remember camping outside the door to my 6am Ornithology class studying bird calls after hanging out at the bar with friends until 3am (I got an A in that class by the way).
I think it was my success doing this that entrenched procrastination into the fiber of my being. Even though I always pull through, the amount of stress that I drop on myself is starting to take its toll as I get older. Pulling all-nighters cannot happen without at least two Monsters and maybe a five hour energy to make it through the next day. I am going to put this into context by what has transpired over the last 24 hours. Justin informed me that we are reviewing “Deadly Premonition” this week last Thursday. I knew it was coming up, but not that quickly. I was about four hours into the thirty hour game at that point, having been distracted by “Rogue Galaxy”. Worst part was that I was traveling all weekend, surprising my mom for her 50th birthday and stopping to see my fiancé’s family on the way. So that meant I could not start back up on the game until Sunday evening. When Justin informed me just what kind of mess I created (there were side quests I couldn’t skip due to the difficulty of the final boss and the items importance) I strapped in. He and I streamed “The Forest” until midnight (that being our next game to review after DP) and I began. I played until about six in the morning, crashed for four hours, and dove back in. I had a few errands to run during the day, but I am happy to say that I am only about an hour away from the final fight. It will definitely be done by recording on Thursday evening. My lovely fiancé reminded me about thirty minutes before I began writing this that I also had to write my blog for tomorrow. I ALWAYS deliver my content on time, so here this is.
How is procrastination horror related? Because there is a very true fear realizing how well and truly f****d one is when they have a procrastination problem. Knowing you have like forty free hours to complete a thirty hour game is terrifying. Knowing that there is an audience who would be let down if you don’t pull it off is torturous. And knowing that you have a cohost relying on you to not drop the ball on him is as much pressure as I care to candle. Moral of this story dear reader is to stop procrastinating while you can. Because no matter how good you think you are, eventually you will get screwed. Or…. If you are awesome like me just live with the stress and always come through like an absolute boss!
Larry