So it's been a minute since I put up a regular video. My neck and shoulder have been acting up again. I've been prescribed some meds for it which have been helping alleviate the symptoms, but the underlying cause (which I am certain is arthritis) is obviously still there. I can play guitar in short bursts, but even holding a guitar and extending my left arm outward to press the frets results in pain. On top of that, my wife recently suffered a partially detached retina in one of her eyes. She woke up with a large dark spot in her field of vision which necessitated a surgery. She's still in recovery for that. So it's been a mess around the Guitologist house of late. Good news is I can at least film stuff that doesn't require me to play much at the end of the video and I can edit video. I have a couple videos in the can that need to be edited, so I'm back to work, at least partially.

In other news, my daughters both have music lessons in their schools this year. The eldest daughter is taking guitar lessons in her sophomore year. The class issued them shitty acoustics, but at home she has many more choices of course. When presented with the choices of which guitar to call her own, she shoved aside several options and chose a red sparkle Squier Telecaster that was sent to me years ago by a kind viewer of the channel. She's learned a few Nirvana songs already. Pretty cool. The younger daughter is in 4th grade now and is starting violin in the school orchestra. Not wanting to splurge yet on a proper instrument, I had Glarry send me a 1/2 Sized starter kit in exchange for a review. Yeah, I'm not above doing that. What I am above doing is lying in a review video. If it's shit, I'll tell you it's shit.

I have four amps in line for repairs and videos. And I still have a handful of video reviews for other products companies have sent me. As much as I have tried to avoid doing these in the past, I have to admit they help with the monthly bills and the videos, on the guitars at least, usually do very well in terms of viewership. So at least for now, the review videos will remain a small part of the channel direction.

The YouTube algorithm has changed a lot from what it once was. A few years ago, if I had to take a few weeks off for a health issue, the algorithm would still feed some of my older videos into people's feeds to keep the ad revenue ticking over. Now, it no longer does this consistently. In fact, if a video is more than a month old now, it probably won't be shown in anyone's feed at all. So this is something content creators like me have to keep in mind. If we don't put up new videos, the views dry up totally in short order. Of course, this leads most channels to focus on quantity over quality.

Speaking of YouTube, Google has finally admitted the Biden Admin was coercing them to censor and ban conservative content creators and also creators who didn't toe the administration line on COVID-19 related issues, election issues, etc. Announcements like this, and like Mark Zuckerberg's similar admission a few months back that Facebook had been forced to do the same during the Biden years, don't garner the attention they deserve from the mainstream press for obvious reasons. And for fans of my channel, of course, it comes as no real surprise, but the fact remains, those of us who were criticizing the ham-fisted response to that scam event were right again! We are completely vindicated on every front at this point - from the efficacy of masks, to the cooking of death statistics, to the involvement of our government in censorship of information - we were absolutely right! Even without the fanfare or parades we deserve, we can at least be assured we never bowed down to the pressure of conformity, and God has the record of events on file. That's something they cannot erase.