Odds and ends and that

The joys of invisible progress... it's been a busy few weeks since I looked at Iron Roads. Lots of background work and getting a decent backlog of video ideas into various states of readiness. I thought I might get an opportunity to record some voiceover and turn one of those into reality this week but that disappeared to a cold and spending the evening looking after a dog who has been to the canine dentist. And now we're looking at a stretch of 2-3 weeks of things which preclude using the filming space. Boo.

The good news is that while I can't film I do have plenty of time to work on more research, ideas, scripts and the like. The way things are currently going you should get a retrospective of early '90s car-based polygon-'em-up Car & Driver in early March, then something I've just started cooking up which promises to be an absolute epic ranging across multiple eras of popular culture (and doesn't even require the game to be something more or less than merely average, something which sunk a lot of my 2024 ideas).

I'm also working in the background on the Let's Play relaunch for later in the year. Some of the channel visual identity is done, and I've got an idea for an OpenTTD series which can run pretty much indefinitely (or at least until my CPU gives up), along with another game which should produce 100 or so hours of gameplay. I'm currently leaning toward the idea of much longer individual episodes but also with some of the repetitive or dull bits of gameplay edited to speed them up and maybe some inserted commentary if it makes things funnier. The idea is to use that runtime to make each session to have a coherent goal that is watchable in isolation rather than just "episode 8" or "episode 24" or whatever.

In the meantime I'm also trying to advance the "review the entire history of the UK charts" project - pop feels interesting again the way it did in 2017 and I'd quite like to catch up to where things currently are within my lifetime. This naturally takes free time away from other creative outlets like YouTube but is something I can slowly work on while I'm not able to film and you never know, I might find some new terrible music references nobody understands to make.

Finally I have also been playing quite a bit of Motor Town: Behind The Wheel lately after bouncing off it originally. Should I give that some sort of treatment? I think it needs an angle (i.e. title and thumbnail) that sound worth watching, and there's another video idea in the queue which will help set up one of the possible angles I could approach it from so... yeah, there's quite a lot cooking at the moment even if some of it's going to need a while in the kitchen.