Desiring failure.

Alright, fine, I have made a video finally. It's only been four months.

I have come to a realisation about the times when I let other things take over and end up taking an unexpected hiatus from the channel, and it's always not long after this sort of thing happens:

I have success within my grasp and as I'm poised to reach more what crosses my mind is, "you know what you really like? Failure."

This makes me feel bad. In my community of peers, aspiring creators with channels of similar heft to mine, these are the results everyone wants to see. It feels churlish to be in a place where it's actually happening and have your immediate reaction be, "actually no I want to be a massive hipster bellend about it and make videos no-one enjoys about stuff no-one cares about".

No more. I hereby give myself permission to feel fine about this.

Much like I developed a knowledge of popular music that's the envy of my friends and then wasted it all on a musical diet that's basically impenetrable feedback and the Walker Brothers, I accept that my YouTube destiny is to become sorta kinda pretty OK at making videos, on a pure results basis at least, and throw it all away making weird shit about PC hardware interrupts that's too nerdy for anyone who likes entertainment and too disrespectful for anyone who doesn't. To have a channel with no coherent or logical theme that doesn't make sense for anyone to return to.

But also.

I also got about a third of the way into editing this one and just sat there as the clock wore on at about an hour per minute of completed footage and thought... "I can't edit like this any more".

This is a bit of an inscrutable statement unless you're really familiar with how a DaVinci Resolve timeline reflects the workflow of its creator, so what you're looking at there is a situation about 90% through the process of:

• Do the thing.
• Write a script about the thing.
• Record the script about the thing.
• Record video about doing the thing which vaguely fits the script.
• Realise there's a hopeless mismatch between how long the clips need to be to tell the story and how long the scripted narration is.
• Listen to a Jesus and Mary Chain album.
• Go for a walk.
• Inspect all the DIY projects you've been putting off.
• Eventually make a massive cup of tea and sit your arse down in front of the laptop on your day off with a resolution to not get up until it's finished.

And here's the thing - I sound like I'm describing the worst workflow since someone attempted to pick up a cheese by first rolling it down a big hill with many other cheese-desiring persons present, but this is an absolutely workable situation in which I could produce videos about late '90s and early 2000s tycoon games from here until the end of time.

It's not a workable situation if what I want to do is try to do low-level graphics programming for the first time in my life, or play an adventure game I've never played before, or go through the latest regrettable acquisitions of 45rpm singles.

What am I trying to work through here, in my usual habit of writing about my thoughts in the hope of trying to assemble them into some kind of coherent and actionable narrative?

I think the reason those big hits send me into a tailspin is that they come with a sense of obligation which a 900-view video about QBASIC doesn't. That's the real siren song of failure - it comes without obligations, you can just go and get a bag of tins off the corner shop at 11am and scull the lot down by the canal and no-one cares. If you're bad enough at your job there's a chance work might not even notice you're gone except for the unsettling feeling there's been a slight increase in productivity today and nobody knows why.

Here's the thing. If there is a path of feeling guilt over not being immensely happy for myself in doing well that results in me not making any videos, and a path of being a massive hipster bellend making shitty videos that don't seem to have any useful narrative thread to them then I think that maybe it's time to live in that second world for a bit rather than just writing about how much fun it looks from the outside, because that's the option which results in a non-zero number of videos being made.

In practical terms, what I need is to gather together all of my video-making technology in such a way that I can do something, I can record my doing of the thing while I do it, and I can have a camera within grabbing range to make asides to. Yes I know some of the things like the Black & White video and the First Encounters video look a bit like I'm doing that, but there's still a lot of post-hoc narration and scriptwriting in there.

Anyway, you can stop reading there and hassle me if we get three months down the line and I put out another video editing according to exactly the workflow I just outlined in bullet points and claimed I was done with, or indeed fail to release any videos at all.

Oh no.

Yeah, so there's another thing on my mind. There's a lot of people I genuinely love in the retro gaming and hardware scene, many of whom I've only met due to my involvement in it, and yet... I feel it's a space that's getting overheated.

This is not the same concept as "too popular" or "too mainstream" or other variations of "not hipster enough for me", so let me elaborate on that. When I say "overheated" I mean there is too much taking it very seriously indeed and a lot of angry back-and-forth flying across my timelines which I cannot be having with when it's just old computers, most of which were cack. Especially the ones I had.

I don't think this is uniquely retro so much as it's a reflection of how much levity is being squeezed out of modern life by an entire cast of malfeasants whose aims are made much easier when we're all miserable and sniping at each other. Everyone is way too serious online, and I include myself in that. They want us to be a bit grouchy and standoffish, because when we're doing that we're not making the kind of connections with each other that make us all realise most people are on some fundamental level not that bad, when you think about it.

One of the ways in which this seems to manifest is this thing where everyone's online persona has to be the smartest person in the room, because none of us particularly feel like trying to be the funniest any more. (I say that, as someone who was never particularly funny I'm enjoying the feeling of being #1 by default). The discourse becomes this competition where every statement has to be responded to with an approach of "ah yes, you might consider that an intelligent thing to say, but in fact I, with my superior intellect, can find an obvious fallacy through the simple act of entirely misinterpreting your intent". And I swear if I see another, "strawmen who possibly don't even exist keep saying x, but in fact it was y" I'm going to go and live in the woods and make videos out of stones and twigs for my new crow friends.

Retro is particularly vulnerable to this because it's so easy to make up plausible intelligent-sounding bullshit and while all of the primary sources to disprove it are available it takes time to dig them out and search for the relevant articles. If you do know the true story then even better, because you can act all superior to those dumb idiots who only knew the misconception. This means even those of us who should know better get so ground down by the constant glib parcels of smugness that we eventually lose it and snap at someone who was just trying to make a joke about Europlatformers.

If there's one thing I wish I could get across to as many people as possible right now it's that you do not have to be the smartest person in the room. Yeah, alright, maybe I come at this having spent most of the era in which our retro computers were current struggling with this concept so I have a head start but here it is - nobody cares, the most likely thing you'll do trying to prove you're so smart is make the space worse, which people will care about and not in a good way. Don't make the space worse.

I feel like my calling is not to make more slightly po-faced and lecturing videos, but to be an idiot, to fail at the most basic programming tasks, to be in front of a camera going, "I can do dumb things but as long as they're not wilfully furthering the downfall of Western democracy out of ignorance they're probably fine", and most importantly to have fun. Because that's what these old computers meant to us, right? They were fun, we had good times playing games on them and writing programs for them, and that's a spirit which needs to be hammered back in to a world which is doing its best to crush it out of existence.

You didn't have to read that bit, by the way, and probably shouldn't have. Enjoy the latest programming vid.