Atari middle-aged Riot
Feb. 19th, 2024 21:45![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluelanderWell, it's been an eventful (glances at watch) two and a half weeks?! I didn't mean to go that long without a new journal entry, but I guess that's how eventfulness goes sometime.
Recently I was talking about Jeff Gerstmann's "Ranking the NES" series, and expressed interest in potentially doing something like that with the Atari 2600. My friend Mike, who I've collaborated on and off with for years, saw the entry, said that he liked the idea and suggested we could so something like that together. I was initially hesitant, because I didn't know how well it would work as a collaborative project, and was going to decline but suggest we find something else to play and record together instead (which may not have ever happened, you know how life can go.)
But I thought about it, and I realized that a second perspective could be just the shake-up that format needs. One of the best things about Jeff's series is watching him play a game he knows well and can explain in detail, both the game itself and its place in history; one of the other best things is watching him be impressed by a game he knows nothing about (whether it's impressively good or impressively bad.) With two people, we can get the best of both worlds for each game.
The idea is this: every week, each of us selects 3 games to bring to the show. For my games, I study the manual beforehand and try to learn as much as I can about it, and Mike does the same for his 3 games. We each play the games and record our local play session while talking about them over discord, alternating between one of his choices and one of mine. After each game (which we try to play for at least 10 minutes, but we can go over if we need more time) we switch to the shared google sheet showing the list of the best game ever made, and decide where it goes.
I was worried about this part too, since I wasn't sure how much our opinions would diverge, but it turns out that even when we disagree, it's fun to negotiate. We can state our positions, why we think the game deserves to be in Xth place on the list, and either persuade the other person or not. The stakes are so low that neither of us is going to get super heated, and it doesn't take long for us to find a compromise.
I think the format works really well, and I'd have fun with it even if we weren't recording for youtube, but I also think this is maybe the most entertaining thing we've done together and it'd be cool if we maybe got some more viewers. Mike's recording of our first session, by some mysterious blessing of the unknowable algorithm, has gotten 1,700 views, a number which is still slowly climbing up. He got about 10 new subscribers out of it, which puts him at around 90. I was more active on youtube in the mid 2000s than him, so I have 2,300 subscribers from sheer "right place at the right time" syndrome; I was doing "let's play" videos just as that was becoming a thing. It's a meaningless number though, since my videos still get on average about the same number of views as his. Nobody actually looks at their subscriptions page on youtube, they look at the homepage, which doesn't show you new videos from people you're subscribed to unless they're popular. Even "ringing the bell" often doesn't work; my spouse should get notifications, but she wouldn't have known about the new videos if I didn't tell her.
So Mike's recordings of the first two videos have gotten 1.7K and 73 views, mine have gotten 115 and 38. Not bad, considering our most recent videos before that have gotten somewhere between 10 and 30.
Of course, youtube doesn't recommend videos by anyone who isn't already popular except for the occasional weird fluke, so the only real way to get new viewers is to upload "shorts". Mike had the idea first, and he spent a long time cutting our first 2-hour show down to a 1-minute summary, for which he got a respectable 118 views. (note: I wrote this over a number of days, so as of this point the preceding numbers are out of date.)
I've taken a different tactic, uploading a larger quantity of simpler videos related to the main ranking show, which have gotten between 56 and 277 views. Nothing seems to have translated into more exposure for the real videos, but I can't focus on the day-to-day number or I'll go bonkers. Maybe after doing this for a few months, I'll see the overall trend line go up and feel more encouraged.
Not that my motivation ultimately comes from views; it would just be nice. The main thing I get is hanging out with my friend and doing something fun. However, I think these videos are pretty good, some of the most entertaining we've done. I like them, anyway. They're the kind of videos I'd want to watch. And it'd be nice if we could get them in front of the eyeballs of people who feel the same way. I know it's not for everyone, but there's a respectable number of people out there who would like what we do. But the algorithm doesn't care about niche potential, it just tries to put attention on whatever will get the most billions of views. Oh well, I'm still gonna have a good time and there's nothing they can do to stop me. If watching a couple old friends goof around with some even older video games is something you'd be interested in, here's my channel. If not, I get it.
A couple saturdays ago, I spent all day helping a friend of a friend get their apartment cleaned up to avoid getting evicted. I think it succeeded for now, but this person is in a dire psychological state and I'm very worried about them. The less said about this, the better.
I have a new psychiatrist and therapist. When I first moved from [home town] to [current town], it was at the height of the pandemic and telehealth was becoming more and more of a thing. So I was able to keep the same doctors I've had in [home town], which was nice. However, at some point they told me I'd have to have an in-person appointment for them to continue prescribing my necessary medication, so I had to start looking for someone local. I really should have done this a long time ago; the clinic administration was very disorganized and had messed up my prescription refills on multiple occasions, and I hadn't actually had a therapy appointment in a long time because my therapist there wasn't able to help with my current problems. I'm not upset with her, when I first started therapy she was very good at helping me process the trauma I'd never talked about, come to terms with myself as an adult and become a person I like. I'll always be grateful to her for that, and I guess since she was no longer able to help me, I figured I didn't need therapy anymore.
Obviously I do, and I was sort of in denial about that because I didn't want to go through the arduous process of finding a new therapist and having to explain my whole life history again, what I wasn't getting from my last therapist and what I need. Well, I asked my primary local doctor to help with a referral for a psychiatrist. There was nobody taking new patients, so I got put on an indefinite waiting list, which sucked, because I had to have an in-person appointment with my psychiatrist in [home town] in April or they wouldn't be able to help me anymore. Maybe my primary doctor would've been able to continue prescribing my meds in the interim, I don't know, but I didn't want to have to find out and I hated having a ticking timebomb hanging over my head like a mixed metaphor after a bender.
One day in December, I got a notification from my "health care app" (still a relatively new concept to me) that a psychiatrist in my healthcare system was taking new patients, and since I was on the waiting list I could make an appointment if I tapped "accept" within the next 30 minutes. If I was in the shower or otherwise not available during that 30 minutes, I guess I would've missed my chance and it would've gone to someone else on the waiting list. But I didn't hesitate, and they made me an appointment in January. It was still a month and change out, but at least I knew I'd be okay before the April deadline.
So I went in for an intake with the psychiatrist, and it was... a video appointment. The nurses took my vitals and led me to an exam room, where they brought in a little tablet computer with a zoom window open, and I talked to him like that. As it happens, he works out of [hometown]. Cue laugh track.
I understand why I had to come in though, it was for all the vitals stuff and for me to sign all the forms the government needs for me to keep getting the pills that make my brain work. It just struck me as funny, especially since nobody told me I'd be talking to the doctor on a tablet; so when I was in the waiting room before my appointment, my healthcare app popped up a notification informing me that my video appointment would start soon, and I could go ahead and join the meeting and the doctor would talk to me shortly. I went up and told the person at the reception desk what the app said, and confusedly said "uhh... am I supposed to be here?" They apologized that nobody told me and explained how it would work.
The actual appointment was fine. Medicaid only covers 15 minute appointments for psychiatry, so it was really just going over my meds, making sure I still need them, any side effects, need anything adjust, okay we'll talk again in a couple weeks. Most importantly, I said I wanted to start talking to a therapist again, and he made me an appointment with someone who was physically in that building, the same week as my psych follow-up. So I'd get to talk to him again via telehealth, but I'd have to go in the next day anyway. I didn't care. I was excited to get to talk to someone again. I didn't realize how much I needed it.
There's always that initial trepidation because I'm not sure what the person I'll talk to would be like—I looked her up on the clinic's website and it didn't have much information, other than she had a couple specialties that aren't particularly relevant to my problems, but they're good specialties to have and I felt optimistic we'd be on at least a more similar wavelength than me and my old therapist.
And I was right, she's great! She's closer to my own age and I felt like she understands the world much closer to the way I do than my last therapist, who was a decade or two my senior. Nothing wrong with that, but I was so happy when I told her I'm nonbinary and she didn't ask what that means or seem taken aback. I know this should be the expectation, but my country has one of the worst healthcare systems in the world and I live in the most backwards part of my country, so my expectations are in the gutter.
For therapy, we got an hour-long intake, and I was astonished that I was able to bring up pretty much everything I wanted to talk about and answer all her questions for the intake within the time limit. She's a much more efficient communicator than my last therapist, but not so efficient that I felt like I was being rushed. She was very engaged and seemed genuinely excited to talk to me. It was such a relief.
We scheduled weekly follow-ups, three telehealth and then one in-person. We've had one of the telehealth appointments so far, and it went fine, but it did make it a little bit awkward. I'm thinking of going back to in-person for all our future appointments, because I've since discovered that I'm allowed to stay late at work to make up time for doctor appointments pretty much whenever I want. I like having a low-anxiety reason to go somewhere besides work in the morning, and since our appointments are only 30 minutes now, it'll be nice if we can talk as efficiently as possible.
I played halfway through Omegaland again so I could capture the frames for my "ghost reading a book" icon when I post about books, but I unfortunately haven't read much lately. I tried to take Angela Collier's advice about finally actually reading Lord of the Rings in her video The Scourge of the Shire: I acquired the audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis. The thing is, he does have a wonderful voice, and I love listening to him, but reading it as an audiobook only amplifies the problem I had when I tried to read the books: they. Are. So. God. Dang. Slow. I don't care that the books are long, I don't automatically hate long books, but in the long books I like, they tend to be long because a lot of stuff happens in them. LotR seems to be long because every scene is 2-3 times longer than it needs to be. In the audiobook version, I listened as long as the entire length of Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring (theatrical cut) before we even got out of the dang birthday party. I dunno. I love The Hobbit (the book and the Rankin-Bass animated version) but maybe the full epic saga just isn't for me.
The other book I've been reading in fits and starts on my phone is a memoir, and it's interesting but I don't know if it's worth talking about because I feel like the majority of it might be complete horseshit. I'll talk about it when I'm done maybe.
I guess that's it for now. I'll try to remember to make bite-sized entries more frequently for ease of consumption.
Ranking the Atari 2600
Recently I was talking about Jeff Gerstmann's "Ranking the NES" series, and expressed interest in potentially doing something like that with the Atari 2600. My friend Mike, who I've collaborated on and off with for years, saw the entry, said that he liked the idea and suggested we could so something like that together. I was initially hesitant, because I didn't know how well it would work as a collaborative project, and was going to decline but suggest we find something else to play and record together instead (which may not have ever happened, you know how life can go.)
But I thought about it, and I realized that a second perspective could be just the shake-up that format needs. One of the best things about Jeff's series is watching him play a game he knows well and can explain in detail, both the game itself and its place in history; one of the other best things is watching him be impressed by a game he knows nothing about (whether it's impressively good or impressively bad.) With two people, we can get the best of both worlds for each game.
The idea is this: every week, each of us selects 3 games to bring to the show. For my games, I study the manual beforehand and try to learn as much as I can about it, and Mike does the same for his 3 games. We each play the games and record our local play session while talking about them over discord, alternating between one of his choices and one of mine. After each game (which we try to play for at least 10 minutes, but we can go over if we need more time) we switch to the shared google sheet showing the list of the best game ever made, and decide where it goes.
I was worried about this part too, since I wasn't sure how much our opinions would diverge, but it turns out that even when we disagree, it's fun to negotiate. We can state our positions, why we think the game deserves to be in Xth place on the list, and either persuade the other person or not. The stakes are so low that neither of us is going to get super heated, and it doesn't take long for us to find a compromise.
I think the format works really well, and I'd have fun with it even if we weren't recording for youtube, but I also think this is maybe the most entertaining thing we've done together and it'd be cool if we maybe got some more viewers. Mike's recording of our first session, by some mysterious blessing of the unknowable algorithm, has gotten 1,700 views, a number which is still slowly climbing up. He got about 10 new subscribers out of it, which puts him at around 90. I was more active on youtube in the mid 2000s than him, so I have 2,300 subscribers from sheer "right place at the right time" syndrome; I was doing "let's play" videos just as that was becoming a thing. It's a meaningless number though, since my videos still get on average about the same number of views as his. Nobody actually looks at their subscriptions page on youtube, they look at the homepage, which doesn't show you new videos from people you're subscribed to unless they're popular. Even "ringing the bell" often doesn't work; my spouse should get notifications, but she wouldn't have known about the new videos if I didn't tell her.
So Mike's recordings of the first two videos have gotten 1.7K and 73 views, mine have gotten 115 and 38. Not bad, considering our most recent videos before that have gotten somewhere between 10 and 30.
Of course, youtube doesn't recommend videos by anyone who isn't already popular except for the occasional weird fluke, so the only real way to get new viewers is to upload "shorts". Mike had the idea first, and he spent a long time cutting our first 2-hour show down to a 1-minute summary, for which he got a respectable 118 views. (note: I wrote this over a number of days, so as of this point the preceding numbers are out of date.)
I've taken a different tactic, uploading a larger quantity of simpler videos related to the main ranking show, which have gotten between 56 and 277 views. Nothing seems to have translated into more exposure for the real videos, but I can't focus on the day-to-day number or I'll go bonkers. Maybe after doing this for a few months, I'll see the overall trend line go up and feel more encouraged.
Not that my motivation ultimately comes from views; it would just be nice. The main thing I get is hanging out with my friend and doing something fun. However, I think these videos are pretty good, some of the most entertaining we've done. I like them, anyway. They're the kind of videos I'd want to watch. And it'd be nice if we could get them in front of the eyeballs of people who feel the same way. I know it's not for everyone, but there's a respectable number of people out there who would like what we do. But the algorithm doesn't care about niche potential, it just tries to put attention on whatever will get the most billions of views. Oh well, I'm still gonna have a good time and there's nothing they can do to stop me. If watching a couple old friends goof around with some even older video games is something you'd be interested in, here's my channel. If not, I get it.
Garbage day
A couple saturdays ago, I spent all day helping a friend of a friend get their apartment cleaned up to avoid getting evicted. I think it succeeded for now, but this person is in a dire psychological state and I'm very worried about them. The less said about this, the better.
Garbage day for my brain
I have a new psychiatrist and therapist. When I first moved from [home town] to [current town], it was at the height of the pandemic and telehealth was becoming more and more of a thing. So I was able to keep the same doctors I've had in [home town], which was nice. However, at some point they told me I'd have to have an in-person appointment for them to continue prescribing my necessary medication, so I had to start looking for someone local. I really should have done this a long time ago; the clinic administration was very disorganized and had messed up my prescription refills on multiple occasions, and I hadn't actually had a therapy appointment in a long time because my therapist there wasn't able to help with my current problems. I'm not upset with her, when I first started therapy she was very good at helping me process the trauma I'd never talked about, come to terms with myself as an adult and become a person I like. I'll always be grateful to her for that, and I guess since she was no longer able to help me, I figured I didn't need therapy anymore.
Obviously I do, and I was sort of in denial about that because I didn't want to go through the arduous process of finding a new therapist and having to explain my whole life history again, what I wasn't getting from my last therapist and what I need. Well, I asked my primary local doctor to help with a referral for a psychiatrist. There was nobody taking new patients, so I got put on an indefinite waiting list, which sucked, because I had to have an in-person appointment with my psychiatrist in [home town] in April or they wouldn't be able to help me anymore. Maybe my primary doctor would've been able to continue prescribing my meds in the interim, I don't know, but I didn't want to have to find out and I hated having a ticking timebomb hanging over my head like a mixed metaphor after a bender.
One day in December, I got a notification from my "health care app" (still a relatively new concept to me) that a psychiatrist in my healthcare system was taking new patients, and since I was on the waiting list I could make an appointment if I tapped "accept" within the next 30 minutes. If I was in the shower or otherwise not available during that 30 minutes, I guess I would've missed my chance and it would've gone to someone else on the waiting list. But I didn't hesitate, and they made me an appointment in January. It was still a month and change out, but at least I knew I'd be okay before the April deadline.
So I went in for an intake with the psychiatrist, and it was... a video appointment. The nurses took my vitals and led me to an exam room, where they brought in a little tablet computer with a zoom window open, and I talked to him like that. As it happens, he works out of [hometown]. Cue laugh track.
I understand why I had to come in though, it was for all the vitals stuff and for me to sign all the forms the government needs for me to keep getting the pills that make my brain work. It just struck me as funny, especially since nobody told me I'd be talking to the doctor on a tablet; so when I was in the waiting room before my appointment, my healthcare app popped up a notification informing me that my video appointment would start soon, and I could go ahead and join the meeting and the doctor would talk to me shortly. I went up and told the person at the reception desk what the app said, and confusedly said "uhh... am I supposed to be here?" They apologized that nobody told me and explained how it would work.
The actual appointment was fine. Medicaid only covers 15 minute appointments for psychiatry, so it was really just going over my meds, making sure I still need them, any side effects, need anything adjust, okay we'll talk again in a couple weeks. Most importantly, I said I wanted to start talking to a therapist again, and he made me an appointment with someone who was physically in that building, the same week as my psych follow-up. So I'd get to talk to him again via telehealth, but I'd have to go in the next day anyway. I didn't care. I was excited to get to talk to someone again. I didn't realize how much I needed it.
There's always that initial trepidation because I'm not sure what the person I'll talk to would be like—I looked her up on the clinic's website and it didn't have much information, other than she had a couple specialties that aren't particularly relevant to my problems, but they're good specialties to have and I felt optimistic we'd be on at least a more similar wavelength than me and my old therapist.
And I was right, she's great! She's closer to my own age and I felt like she understands the world much closer to the way I do than my last therapist, who was a decade or two my senior. Nothing wrong with that, but I was so happy when I told her I'm nonbinary and she didn't ask what that means or seem taken aback. I know this should be the expectation, but my country has one of the worst healthcare systems in the world and I live in the most backwards part of my country, so my expectations are in the gutter.
For therapy, we got an hour-long intake, and I was astonished that I was able to bring up pretty much everything I wanted to talk about and answer all her questions for the intake within the time limit. She's a much more efficient communicator than my last therapist, but not so efficient that I felt like I was being rushed. She was very engaged and seemed genuinely excited to talk to me. It was such a relief.
We scheduled weekly follow-ups, three telehealth and then one in-person. We've had one of the telehealth appointments so far, and it went fine, but it did make it a little bit awkward. I'm thinking of going back to in-person for all our future appointments, because I've since discovered that I'm allowed to stay late at work to make up time for doctor appointments pretty much whenever I want. I like having a low-anxiety reason to go somewhere besides work in the morning, and since our appointments are only 30 minutes now, it'll be nice if we can talk as efficiently as possible.
Books
I played halfway through Omegaland again so I could capture the frames for my "ghost reading a book" icon when I post about books, but I unfortunately haven't read much lately. I tried to take Angela Collier's advice about finally actually reading Lord of the Rings in her video The Scourge of the Shire: I acquired the audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis. The thing is, he does have a wonderful voice, and I love listening to him, but reading it as an audiobook only amplifies the problem I had when I tried to read the books: they. Are. So. God. Dang. Slow. I don't care that the books are long, I don't automatically hate long books, but in the long books I like, they tend to be long because a lot of stuff happens in them. LotR seems to be long because every scene is 2-3 times longer than it needs to be. In the audiobook version, I listened as long as the entire length of Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring (theatrical cut) before we even got out of the dang birthday party. I dunno. I love The Hobbit (the book and the Rankin-Bass animated version) but maybe the full epic saga just isn't for me.
The other book I've been reading in fits and starts on my phone is a memoir, and it's interesting but I don't know if it's worth talking about because I feel like the majority of it might be complete horseshit. I'll talk about it when I'm done maybe.
I guess that's it for now. I'll try to remember to make bite-sized entries more frequently for ease of consumption.
