One final post

 Hello, everyone.

This is Cody.  The artist formally known as Stretch.

Before I continue, here is my new channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/CodyFullbrook

WARNING:  This Blogspot, and probably the StretchREVIEWS Channel will be deleted soon.

It's been a while, hasn't it?

I finally felt it necessary to make a video wrapping up everything to do with Stretch.  Here it is:

https://youtu.be/LKjE32B6Z04

It's a little brief, and I wrote everything down so I didn't stumble over my words.

Still, I thought I'd write a little something here...

I've been making videos on YouTube since Highschool, well over 10 years ago.  It's definitely been the most prominent thing in my life.  I was so inspired by the internet reviewers of the time and wanted to be like them.  And even though I never made it to 1000 subscribers, I was satisfied that I seemed to have found my own style.  I treated it like a business, even though I was beyond amateur at it.  I went out and bought props specifically for it.  I mention in the video that I was able to talk to Paul Anthony Romero and go to America (twice) because of Stretch.  Just writing this, I'm smiling.  Stretch was very fun and very important to me.  It's impossible to not see the influence it's had on me.  As an example, after stopping Stretch in 2013, I started to do a lot of theatre and eventually wrote a musical in 2018 that involved a long distance relationship between two internet personalities.

And here's where things get serious.

I wasted a lot of time with this endeavor.  It was so much fun, but I wasn't doing much else to build my life.  Stretch wiped out about 3 years of my life.  3 years in which I could have gained more skills, while still doing Stretch on the side.  This may be shocking to you, but I've never considered myself a gamer.  This may be obvious by the fact that I reviewed a very narrow selection of games, but I've never cared about the culture of games.  I played games because I never had much else going on in my life.  I was a kid.  I wasn't even 20.  I never looked to my future, and a part of me is surprised I made it to 29 now.

Here's my advice to anyone who wants to start making online content.  Don't do it to turn it into a career.  Do it because you want the content to exist.  A perfect example is my Kreia monologue on my new channel.  It's a 20 minute long monologue I practiced over the course of months and it only has a couple hundred views.  But, I'm perfectly fine with that because my goal was to make it exist.

I'm not a good enough writer to sum up how important Stretch was to me.  I'll just say thank you to those who watched, read, and were fans.

By the way, I've lost the green tie.