Current Mood
🌱
High Above drops TODAY. 5 days to Hades II. the week is building a perfect runway — soft landing, then launch.
Emotionally
Thursday. Five days to Hades II. High Above launches today — the rooftop garden builder you had on the radar. Soft, floaty, cute aesthetic with just enough progression loop to feel like a game, not a screensaver. Think of this as the runway the universe is giving you: a low-stakes decompression day, then the Clair Obscur weekend, then console Hades II on Tuesday. The gaming calendar is literally helping you survive the back half of your exit window. Use it. Also — here's the reframe for today: you're still technically inside MrBeast. That means you still have access to the backend, the internal data, the reference files, the context. Every day you're still there is a day you could be quietly capturing the stuff that becomes your portfolio, your case studies, your proof-of-work for whatever comes next. Not shadily. Just intentionally. Future Ryan is going to want numbers, screenshots, before/after frames, retention graphs, win rates on thumbnails. Past-Ryan had access. Present-Ryan has maybe 4-6 weeks of that access left. The quiet work you do now while you're still "in" becomes the loudest part of your next pitch.
What I'm Thinking
Exit archive — the 20-minute starter run. Morning thought was "start collecting receipts." Here's the execution version so your brain doesn't stall on "what do I even grab first." Open a folder called `exit-archive/`. Inside, make 4 subfolders: `01-top-shorts` (screenshot analytics for your 10 highest-performing Shorts — views, retention curve, CTR, avg view duration), `02-thumbnails` (before/after A/B tests you influenced — the ones that moved numbers), `03-previz` (any pre-viz docs, shot lists, or concept notes you wrote), `04-feedback-threads` (Slack/Notion/email threads where you gave creative direction — these ARE your Creative Director case studies). Pick ONE folder tonight. Fill it. Twenty minutes. Don't architect it, just dump files in. You can sort later. The friction-killer is refusing to plan the archive — just start throwing things in a box.
The Creative Director one-pager is not a reel. Your reel shows what you edited. A one-pager shows how you think — and that's what actually gets you hired into a CD role. One page. Three sections: What I believe about short-form (3-5 sentences, your actual POV — retention is psychology, first frame is a promise, etc.), What I've shipped (53B views, 2 Shorts over 1B, MrBeast Verticals lead, the raw numbers no one else can put on paper), How I work (pre-viz first, taste over template, viral mechanics as a craft not a hack). That's it. PDF. Ugly is fine. This is the thing you attach to a cold email that makes someone forward it to their boss. You could write this in 45 minutes. It's the single highest-leverage artifact for your exit.
Fruity Granulizer for digicore vocal chops. Free, stock FL Studio. Load any vocal sample into Granulizer (not Slicex — Granulizer), set Spacing to ~50%, Grain Size to ~120ms, and you instantly get that glitchy, stuttering, half-broken vocal texture that's all over Jane Remover, aldn, and 2024-2026 digicore. Play it up the keyboard for pitched chops. It's what the Songbook Vol. 2 tracks need to stop feeling like demos and start feeling like your sound. Zero purchases. Already installed on your machine. Try it on one phrase from one song tonight — 10 minutes. If it clicks you'll know.
Hades II: 5 days out. April 14. Block it on the calendar as an all-day event titled "Hades II" — not "free time," not "day off." Name it. Your brain treats named things as real.