TOP 10 BEST MADDNESS MOMENTS OF 2017!!!
Right okay so this was originally supposed to be my video for the end of the year, but then I found out the hard way that the holidays are REALLY busy and REALLY stressful when you're an adult so it never happened. Now I feel like it's too late to make it into a video but that's okay, because that's why I started this blog, right?
Anyways, 2017 actually marked the first time since 2014 where I was actually able to release a new video every single week (except for my annual two weeks off for the holidays) so throw some confetti and pop some streamers! It's now time to look back on this momentous year and uncover some of my favorite moments:
10. Restarting Maddbooks….only to give up on it two weeks later.
Ah classic Maddness. This is more funny for me because I was SO STOKED FOR IT and then I realized all of my reviews boiled down to “this book is good, but you might not like it” or “this book is bad, but you might like it” so I gave up because it was a lot of work to set up the camera and lighting for it and I just wanted to read. I've decided to move any and all book reviews to this blog instead because how much easier it is, which is low-key a shame. I love my Maddbooks set.
9. Starting a podcast! …..and forgetting about it.
Ah Classic Maddness. Back at it again with the overambitious projects. However, unlike Maddbooks, I stopped Tuber Talk because of a lack of time. Each episode took an abhorrent amount of time and I made the mistake of starting it during my last month of undergrad so it got lost in the chaos of graduating, job searching, and other miscellaneous life changes. I'm intending to return to it eventually, I swear.
8. Mercenary music video hitting 1,000 views!
Now I love all of my videos equally, they’re all my beautiful trash children, blah-blah-blah. But Mercenary is my BABY. It was the first time I got to play director and actually pretend like I was in charge of a full scale production even though it was just me and my friends driving around the ice cold tundra of my college town in winter and I loved every second of it. So seeing it finally hit 1,000 views after all this time, I was like YES! YOU GO FAVORITE TRASH BABY, WOO!
7. This Comment
“Maddie, you get so many funny and nice comments from awesome people all the time! Feature one of those comments!” Nah I’m going to feature this comment from an archived livestream of me opening my best friend's package for me. It’s incredible. Truly the epitome of the YouTube experience and my favorite insult so far on my channel. Just take a moment to truly appreciate it, folks. Wow. So beautiful. I'm seriously in love with it.
6. Upping the Upload Schedule!
I’ve been uploading one video a week since 2013. Finally, in 2017, I felt confident enough in my video making abilities to up that schedule to….wait for it….TWO videos a week! Baby steps, fam. Plus I was finishing up my last semester of school and started working full time so, you know. It’s the best I could do and I’m proud of me for keeping up with it. There was one week where I posted a new video every day, but between that and my full time job I was so burned out afterwards that I could barely even manage one video for the next week so let’s not do that again for a while, m’kay?
5. FINALLY A VIDEO THAT ISN’T A REACTION VIDEO HITS THE TOP VIEWED LIST
Did I know when I made “Everything Wrong with Team Starkid” that it would get a lot of views? Maybe. Did I expect it to get past 10,000 views? Absolutely not. But it did and I was even more pleasantly surprised to see it start to overtake my old reaction videos that I refuse to delete because it’s a part of my journey as a YouTuber or whatever. So if it does ever become the most viewed video on my channel, I feel like I should do something because FINALLY my reaction videos from 2013 will be dethroned. Got any ideas that won’t cost me all of the money in my bank account? Let me know.
4. Presenting at My Local Comic-Con
Was it hecka awkward? For sure. Was it super underwhelming? For sureeeee. But did I learn a lot and meet a lot of other cool geeky internet people? Heck yes! Plus I got to ramble about online parasocial relationships and you know how much I freaking love that stuff. If I do it again though, I'm definitely rehearsing 20 billion times beforehand.
3. We All Pledge To Fight the Moon
Finally! What I’ve been dreaming of since I first started dreaming about starting a YouTube channel! A name for my audience! Annnnnnnnd I can’t say it out loud in my videos or else the video will get demonetized. Apparently pledging to opposite hug a giant orb in the sky is not advertiser friendly. Showing dead bodies and making fun of suicide, sure. But not pledging to fight something that CLEARLY deserves to be fought. C'mon, YouTube. Don't be a moon sympathizer. Let my Moonfighters exist.
2. Interviewing Gabby Londe!
I’ve interviewed a lot of people. Some people you know of, others...probably not because they were for school publications. I once interviewed an astronaut tho. That was cool. But Gabby was by far one of my fave interviews. She’s so smart and so insightful and I absolutely adored talking to her. You have no idea how thrilled I was to see it somehow got 2,000 views under my nose. I just want everyone else in the world to know how brilliant she is.
Also that video was awful to edit because the audio got off-synced so I had to manually sync every. Single. Word. So I appreciate the love, y’all. But also Gabby is awesome.
~HONORABLE MENTION~
I got a drawing tablet and made some animations, which is kind of fun but also super time consuming and I’m not very good at it but I plan on trying to get better at it. In the meantime, my thumbnail game has gotten, like, 600 times better because of it so cool. Way to go drawing tablet. You get a participation trophy. Thanks for showing up this year.
1. Hitting 1,000 Subscribers
This probably isn’t a surprise. I don’t wanna seem vain with this moment as my number one moment of my YouTube career in 2017, but this really was huge for me. Like two years ago at this time, I only had 300 subs and had pretty much given up on this channel. I still enjoyed making videos so I pumped out a copyright hell video about once a month, but I was convinced that I could never be more than an editor. That I could never be able to make original content with me as the face of it that people would want to watch .
But...holy cow. The fact that 1,000 people, over a 1,400 now actually, find my channel worthwhile enough to subscribe to...I’m still blown away by that number. I don’t care if it’s not a “big” YouTuber number. It’s big to a small town Kansas girl like me. If I could go back in time and show 2015 me all of the nice comments you leave on my silly videos and all of the awesome people who watch my stuff now….I could tell you right now, it’d make life so much better for my 2015 self.
So...thank you for watching and sticking around. I really do appreciate each and every one of you and look forward to your comments and reactions to whatever video I pump out every week. 2018 is going to be even better than 2017. Even with all of the demonetization issues and everything else that went wrong with YouTube in 2017, I still enjoyed making videos for all of you and I can’t wait to keep doing it throughout 2018 and beyond.
Cheers, Moonfighters, and I’ll see you next Monday!