WHAT I DID ON MY HOLIDAYS BY STUART HARDY AGED 28 AND 11/12THS

Hi everyone. So I’m back from holiday now and JESUS I NEEDED THAT!!

Yeah, if you’ve never been on holiday on your own before: try it. Its scary at first but then as you go round doing stuff and you realise that you’re your own tour guide and you can do whatever you want and go wherever you want, it becomes a really freeing experience and its made me wanna change things and change the way I’ve been acting.

As said in that video I posted a couple of weeks back, I do want to combat my mental health problems head on and that is gonna take time, but this week away has been like a rebirth for me. I feel like a new man, and a lot of my thoughts on how I want the future to look reflect that,

As far as the present/near future looks, these are the projects for the channel as they stand:

13 Reasons Why Season 3 now has a release date. I have until August 23rd to get this video on my problems with the show and how I would fix it finished. I’ve recorded the V.O bit, I did that before I left. I just have to draw, edit, and record an on-camera bit where I talk directly about my brushes with suicidal thoughts and self harm. Its very heavy. Not gonna be fun for anyone, but I need to do it. Because I’ve learnt a lot as I’ve gone through therapy and dealing with my mental health problems and the thought that this show could potentially damage anyone or set them back in getting better or make them worse makes me fucking furious. You have a responsibility to your audience when you make a show like this and there’s one particular scene that I’ve gone off on one about and focused on and surprise surprise: its not the suicide scene or either of the rape scenes - its a simple scene of two characters talking in a room and its possibly the most irresponsible thing a TV show has ever done and it turns my fucking stomach thinking about the consequences it could’ve had. But yeah, I’ll save it for the video.

Following that, I’m gonna release a brighter and happier holiday video. I’ve shot a tonne of short silly vlogs while in Lanzarote and did a Q&A via a tweet to fill it out with, so I’m gonna make a big long fast-paced compilation type thing. I think its gonna be a good video. I seem to have developed wanderlust and think it’d be cool to make a tradition of “Stuart goes to foreign location and is weird and sarcastic” videos. At least it would give me an excuse to have more holidays cause FUCK THAT WAS AMAZING. I cannot oversell it enough. Scuba diving in particular was fucking incredible. Fish come up to you and everything and I saw one that looked like it had a smiley face. That and the breathing noise is quite hypnotic. I pretended I was a big daddy from Bioshock. – So yeah, travelvlog/Q&A video, happening as soon as I get time to finish it.

Then of course there’s Class. I do still want to do Class 10 – black Mould, for Halloween, but maybe I’ll let Class 11 – History Project, take its time, I think giving myself until Remembrance Sunday to get 2x 10 minute (at the very least) animations finished is a bit much. I think I’m gonna end the series with Class 12 at some point in the new year – working title atm is “Going Home”, though I have had an idea for an extra, hideously explicit episode that I’ve only told Rob, Billy, Jon and Richard about so far...feel a bit queasy about it, dunno if I’ll end up doing it, I'll tell you what its about at a later date. (It makes the entire series look tame by comparison, yes that includes the nurse one)

So yeah, that’s all my plans for now. 

I am going to have to start rethinking how I operate cause as much as I love making Youtube videos, I want to confront my mental health problems, have a life, and also to have videos out more regularly.

I’ve been thinking about launching a strand called “Recently Watched” where I just switch the camera on and record me talking about a show or movie I’ve watched off the top of my head, like Nathaniel does. I’ve wanted to start trying all these new online-dramas on Netflix and Amazon prime, but y’know, there’s so many, who has time to sink a weekend into an entire series? So I was thinking doing first impressions of like the first episode of every Netflix original series. Like one or two a week maybe, depending on how I like the format.

Maybe make unscripted vlogs more regularly in the new year and scale my more intensive videos back to 1 a month. 

Again, this is all maybe. I just know I want to be healthier in every aspect of my life and the anal approach I have to my videos kinda clashes with that. I’m so anal when it comes to production these days that even just V/O Tv reviews take so long to finish that I let topics that I wanna cover slip by and they aren’t relevant by the time I get round to making a video. I missed a LOT of Bigfinish because of this desire in me for everything to be perfect, cause, y’know, those ones in particular take fucking ages to translate the audio into images. Still not sure if I’m ready to go back to it, despite the fact I know everyone wants me to.

So, yeah, that’s where I am at the moment. Shaky, but positive. Bright.

Any thoughts welcome as ever. 

Stu