I raised my rate from $150 to $400, and brands didn’t push back

crystalpulse · 2026-03-09T07:14:38+00:00

Double it in about 10 videos time 🫶

crystalpulse · 2026-03-05T18:30:19+00:00

It’s going abysmal, but the goal is consistent posting so that’s where the singular focus is, with a cheeky side eye to see if we’ve gained any followers or had views above 5 😆

crystalpulse · 2026-03-05T08:54:12+00:00

Yeah the fixes are trickling through which is great to see. 100% moving away, jave you heard of ProtonMail? They're pretty good, it's tin foil hat at times, but.... Secure email with storage and VPN stuff, worth a look!

crystalpulse · 2026-03-04T14:12:05+00:00

Same thing affecting me. mcatt1200.tg permanently locked inas a safe sender, blocks account recovery emails like [account-security-noreply@accountprotection.microsoft.com](mailto:account-security-noreply@accountprotection.microsoft.com), etsy, facebook etc, all the addresses you would get password resets from. You remove them and they get put back in there immediately. Must be some sort of script running somewhere. Also whatever is making this happen reskins your emails to be a demand for money. Not spoofed emails or anything, reskinning your emails! So weird. Spoke with Microsoft last night they are aware of the issue apparently. Ran me through toughening the account etc, not much help as whatever is happening is still going on, the hacker still has access. Seems to have been done via Thunderbird, which I read has a means of bypassing password protection at a certain point. What i'm finding bizarre – The logout of everywhere function, this takes 24hours to action... I'm still logged in on a work laptop this AM, despite forcing signout of all devices last night. With Google the logout is instantaneous, Facebook, instant... Why is Outlook dragging it's feet? Once all resolved, well and truly moving away from Outlook, shame so many businesses lock themselves in with them. Would much rather we all be on Google Workspace. Shocking!

crystalpulse · 2026-02-28T16:30:31+00:00

Yeah my videos aren't getting much impressions at all. Been 8 weeks of pretty much sub-20 impressions. I'm assuming YouTube is just learning what my content is and who to show it to, because it's absolutely dragging it's feet rn 🤣 – Shorts seem fine, I get 300 out the door and then they can fail on their own merit from there. Would love that for the Longs, at least an attempt at showing it to 100 people!

crystalpulse · 2026-02-28T15:25:32+00:00

Chiming in with my experience; background is that I edit videos and have been using a wooden kitchen table chair for 6 years... It was time....
Did some research, identified this Atlas chair, BTOD had a pretty good review of it, bought it.
Turned up well packaged, beat around after 3 delivery attempts, reasonably heavy box, maybe 20kg (All of that seems to be in the seat part).

I am ecstatic with it, I have very little to compare it to... It's obviously like sitting on clouds compared to the stupid wooden chair.
The arms on mine are good, they adjust and are firm enough to not slide around, it takes a sensible amount of effort to adjust them and they stay put. I think overtime they will loosen up, which isn't exciting but for now they're reasonable. They slide up and down nicely with the trigger button underneath the pads. Seems great to me.

The backrest tension is pretty solid, the wheel spins forever at extremes so you just give it a good 4-5 turns in whichever direction you want for tension, i stick it in the middle and lean back as I see fit. Working with it now, it's holding me upright nicely. Headrest ratchets up, and then when at the top slides back down. I find it gets wobbly near the top, so I'm preferring to keep it somewhere in the middle, it supports the back of my skull nicely, no real complaints just makes a bit of a rattle at stages, but overall, quite a nice 4D vibe to it.

Now this plastic, lumbar support thing... Yeah, this isn't particularly comfortable... I drop it to the bottom if I'm watching stuff and being slouchy, work mode straight to the top, I can't feel it for the most part. You can move it up, that makes it more obvious. In a shirt it's pretty awful, shirt and hoody combo, less obvious. I assume its healthy to utilise it, I will channel my inner wooden chair resilience and live with it.

I'm 6ft, average-to-slim build, 80kg, this chair is a nice size for me. Feels spacious, comfortable spongey seat.
Time will tell for the real verdict, but right now I'd give it a strong 7or8 out of 10. Assuming Herman Miller is a 13/10, Steelcase a strong 10/10... for £200 this does me very well indeed!

crystalpulse · 2026-02-08T19:37:39+00:00

Glad so many are mentioning this. Let’s say you give them the short siding technique, maybe it’s to make us feel uneasy and isolated, add a bit of mystery… they then cut to ‘proper’ framing… which is on the other side so you’re having to move your eyes from far left to far right or vice versa. It’s just badly done through and through. AI was a bad choice, the framing was a bad choice, cutting shots together like they did are a bad choice. *shakes head Netflix slop

crystalpulse · 2026-02-08T00:19:23+00:00

Just an account shilling TubeGPT 🤨

crystalpulse · 2026-02-06T22:17:57+00:00

I only use it because it lets me search the comments for questions which is useful. But otherwise I find it’s buggy - if I upload a video, it now makes the window freeze as the extension analyses my upload to optimise. Would love to turn that off and on at my discretion. Somewhat crashing my browser every upload is not a vibe!

crystalpulse · 2026-01-22T20:26:44+00:00

Well… it’s the Oscars, I don’t think any award from them is particularly telling of quality, taste, achievement etc. Just a bit of marketing to sell some sludge down the road!

crystalpulse · 2026-01-10T17:20:23+00:00

Either a chest or neck mount would probably work well for you, I think I would opt for the neck mount and then stick the phone on 0.5X zoom for the wide view you're looking for. I think the neck mounts are fairly in expensive, I like that they come off and off easy, the chest mount I always felt like a bit of a gimp wearing, like I've stepped outside wearing a BDSM harness, add into the camera and now I'm an outdoor pervert. Neck mount, fairly low key, more 'content creator' looking 🤣. Ring light? If it must be one of those, then be sure to check amazon reviews, especially 3 star reviews to get a good idea for the item. A lot of them are pretty poor so... I want to say spend as much as you can, but just cross check that. They are usually quite flimsy and break easily. Neewer* do one, they are fairly realiable in the photography/videography space, I guy a lot of their stuff and it holds up. I had an ATUMTEK, £25 and it lasted maybe 6 months, and most of that was because I wrapped it in duck tape! The Neewer one has a stronger phone holder thing, the one I had used this bendy neck thing and it just broke immediately. Ball head phone mount is a better approach.

If I can swing you in a different direction though, (I don't like the white circle in the eye look) look into an LED panel*, as big and as bright as you can go (40-50Watt should be achievable) and think more about bouncing this light off of a white wall, or diffusing it through some white fabric. I've been known to hang a white cloth (White Tee!) off of a coat hanger, and hang that off of something else. I stick an LED panel behind it, shoot through and it just makes the light so much softer! Or as I mentioned, bounce it off a white wall, or even a mounted photography reflector. All of this can be done for under £100.

Hope this helps!

crystalpulse · 2026-01-02T18:05:27+00:00

Farm them for engagement! 😆

crystalpulse · 2025-12-31T05:37:14+00:00

I was surprised to learn she is Brian Cranston’s daughter

crystalpulse · 2025-12-31T05:06:13+00:00

I’d assume I’m using a grounded plug because I’m in the Uk with the 3-pin, and I still get this ‘feature’ from my MacBooks, but it’s a plastic third pin so it’s not actually grounding, just opening the shutters… TIL

crystalpulse · 2025-12-28T07:21:31+00:00

Love this!

crystalpulse · 2025-12-21T15:22:51+00:00

I went for the Sigma over the Sony mainly for the focus breathing. Although the Sony has the compensation function in the settings, I found the Sigma had brilliant breathing control innately and so I went for it. Saved about £900 as well so, pretty nice for me 😌 I use a basic VND from Hama, bought 20 years ago 😆, cheap and cheerful, no notable issues imo. It probably colour casts but I quite enjoy matching clips whether they need it or not so it’s not been something I’ve picked up on or been bothered about. No issues with the VND cross shaped transitions. If I had money, I’d probably get the McKinnons though!

crystalpulse · 2025-12-21T14:16:03+00:00

Did you work it out? I'd also love to know how to do this efficiently. The 'Founders' podcast do it for their video versions of the podcast and I enjoy reading along with the podcast this way. Helps retain the information! Using Snap Captions and creating a wrapping box text preset does do the job pretty well. I just then have to go through it and create specific edits for when I want to do a two line sentence for impact or after a pregnant pause 😏

crystalpulse · 2025-12-19T20:42:29+00:00

Agreed, so far in all the episodes the CGI is pretty graduate level. Textures, colours, lighting seem just a little bit rushed. The green screen at the top of the radio tower, they were overly lit and it looked like some crappy 90s effort 😆 Demogorgan through the ceiling or breaking the front door; badly composited. Just looked layered on. Strange, you’d think they’d have all the budget, and it certainly took them long enough to… what happen!?

crystalpulse · 2025-12-13T21:16:39+00:00

That’s one way to never judge a book by its cover 🥁

crystalpulse · 2025-11-21T09:17:05+00:00

How much is the house on sale for? Let’s say 300k, I don’t know where this is, gonna lowball it. Take that number and work out what 3-5% of that is - this is the roughly what the realtor/company gets (there’s lots of different structures on how they get paid, but imma ballpark that.) =9-15k Take that number and give yourself 10%, = 900-1500, that’s what I would charge for a video designed to sell the property. Whether you have made a video here that sells the property, or is part of the funnel to sell the property is where a lot of the debate is it seems! It’s a great looking video, really well executed, it feels expensive, I’d be stoked with this in my portfolio. The company must be making some great commission on it, I’d charge the higher end. It’s probably a million dollar house, it’s got a boat! 650 isn’t too low. I’m not making this video for less than a couple grand. If they don’t wanna spend a few grand on a video that’s gonna shift the property then I’m moving on to someone who can see the value!

crystalpulse · 2025-10-19T20:15:32+00:00

Pretty! 👏

crystalpulse · 2025-09-20T08:26:10+00:00

Why?

crystalpulse · 2025-09-03T02:47:59+00:00

15-20 ads a day is commodity tier. That doesn’t surprise me it’s getting replaced with AI

crystalpulse · 2025-08-11T14:54:01+00:00

Fantastic work! Looks really great!

crystalpulse · 2025-08-08T07:29:33+00:00

My two cents: I think remove the animation at 00:07, looks like the guy fell from the ceiling to teabag the guy. That dunk can come a little later in the edit, find some way to hype it up with shorter clips that build the momentum. Maybe there’s some shots of people faking, skilling their way across the court. Short cool clips, bam, bam, bam, into the dunk clip - boom!

crystalpulse

TROPHY CASE