September Update: One and Done

Hey team!

Making Robots Go Boom

This month has been eventful, to say the least. First, the semiotics of "cuck" got taken down after YouTube decided it was pornography. Then YouTube put it back up without telling me (but kept it age-restricted). Then Ragnar's video which I contributed to went public. Then I released what makes an fps arsenal good? (renamed from what makes a shooter arsenal good? because too many people thought it was about school shooters). Then, yesterday, the channel hit 300k subs.

And the new video has done okay! Not as well as the one where I talked about polyamory and made fun of conservatives, but solidly by CO-VID standards. And JP LeBreton said it was good so I can die happy!

Honestly, the best part of making it was just... it's the kind of video I've been watching a lot lately. It's my comfort food. And I've been nostalgic.

Deciding to be a video essayist wasn't an event; like most things, it was a process. But sometimes a process has a flashpoint, something that clicks and makes something go from a bunch of disconnected ideas into something real. For me, it was discovering the Errant Signal episode on BioShock Infinite.

Before then, I didn't know YouTube video essays were a thing. I didn't know there were intelligent dissections of games outside of niche blogs and books. I didn't know there was so much to say about first-person shooter design. The way Chris jumped across so many subjects, from immersive sim lineage to the history of FPS health systems to political centrism with regard to race to the trend of AAA games bringing up political subjects they have nothing to say about, all while keeping it tight and coherent and lasting just under 20 minutes... I loved it. And it had over 50,000 views, which seemed like enormous numbers in 2013! I'd wanted to do videos about games for a while, because video was my default medium, but I kinda figured no one would see it. It would just be me being weird and just getting thoughts out of my head. Chris made it look like a thing I could actually do, maybe even find an audience for! And from there I found Super Bunnyhop and MrBtongue and even caught the first Game Maker's Toolkit when it was new!

So playing a bunch of shooters and watching a bunch of videos about shooter design and suddenly noticing something I personally hadn't heard anyone say before, and getting to splash in the same pool as my inspirations and write about something I was finding very cathartic of late... it was good. It felt like getting back to my roots. I do sometimes really miss when I was just a gaming channel.

Pumping the Breaks

I mentioned in the last update that I was trying a three weeks on/one week off work schedule this month. The goal was to take 12 days making one video, 12 days making a second, and then have 7 days to rest before the end of the month.

If you're good at math, you'll notice I only released one video this month.

I had some technical hitches with the arsenal video - this was the first time I was recording on my new laptop, and it turned out my external hard-drive wasn't formatted to transfer files between PC and Mac. I've needed a new external drive for a while, so I got one and formatted it properly, but then discovered some weirdness about Windows defaulting to a 2048 allocation size and Mac not reading anything above 1024, so I had to transfer all the files off the drive and format it again. Also Premiere has stopped supporting the codec that my Mac screen capture software uses so I had to convert all the footage I captured there. Both of these problems took several hours to troubleshoot.

And then, as you remember, I uploaded a version with crap compression settings and missing the intro.

So the arsenal video went up a few days late. Womp.

Anyway, then I started on the next video, but I was moving really slow. The "three weeks on, one week off" plan was following a month that began with a week off and then three weeks on, so I was essentially doing 6 weeks straight without a proper break, and I was burning out. I got about half of a script (that I'm actually quite happy with) before the date I was supposed to start my break arrived.

So the question then was: do I shorten my break to get the second video up? Or do I push it to October?

And I decided the break was more important. I was fried. I needed some time off.

And this week has been great! I mean... it's been great personally. It's kind of hard to enjoy a week off when it's really starting to feel like US democracy is dying right in front of you. But I watched some movies and played a bunch of Dishonored 2 and even (gasp) worked on one of those passion projects. It felt really good to be writing fiction when I needed to escape the world.

It's been so nice I'm a little reluctant to get back to work tomorrow. But I definitely feel a lot less exhausted than I did a week ago. Getting this video done feels doable. And I think you're gonna like it. :)

Anyhoo, once again, I know none of y'all are demanding I make 2 or more videos per month and it's just a rule I set for myself, and I'm sure I'll hear as much in the comments! (Thanks in advance for that, btw.)

Next update will be right before the election. Good luck this month, folks.

-I