bluelander | Entries tagged with let's play

Youtube

Now that I'm more active on youtube again, I have to resist the self-destructive compulsion to constantly check my analytics page. Like many algorithmic validation machines, it's a lot like a slot machine for feeling bad about myself. Every time I "pull to refresh" is another pull of the lever. I stare at the view graph, hoping a few bars will pop up. Usually they don't, but sometimes they do, and I feel a glimmer of hope. 5 views in 5 minutes? That must mean youtube is showing my video to people! I refresh again, hoping for more. Sometimes they keep coming, and I keep pulling, but I'm inevitably let down. No likes, no subscriptions, no comments, no indication that any of those people watched more than 30 seconds or whatever the minimum amount of time is to count as a view.

And my brain knows that this is fine. The videos I make appeal to a narrow niche of people. The odds of a small handful of views containing people who fall into that niche are very low. But the part of me that desires validation can't help but feel like I'm doing something wrong, that my videos are bad and I'm wasting my time and I should give up.

This isn't true! I'm having fun with my friend, of course it's not a waste of time. But the social media content machine is designed to make us feel worthless and unimportant, so we get addicted to trying to do better, so the subset of the population most vulnerable to that addiction do more and more harmful and outrageous things to please the algorithm and get ever more validation while churning out content that makes the corporation as much ad revenue as they can generate. Shit's fucked.

I've mostly managed to eliminate this sort of algorithmic bullying from my life. I stopped using twitter years ago. I moved to the fediverse, which isn't perfect but is much healthier, and has tools that help me use it in a less stressful way. I don't post on facebook and mostly use it to look at what my spouse posts and communicate with her. I intentionally use a journal platform where I have no idea how many people are reading my posts. I don't want to know! But if I want to play TV presenter on the internet, and have any hope of the people who want to watch it finding it, youtube and their obsessive analytics are the only games in town. Oh sure, I could find a peertube instance that can accommodate a ~4-500MB weekly upload, or just upload them to archive.org, but that means even the small number of viewers I get now would drop to approximately zero. A rounding error. I'm grateful for my fans that would follow me to whatever platform I posted on, there are a couple of them, but like, I think this new series could potentially appeal to at least a couple thousand people in the world. Not enough to quit my day job, but enough to maybe get a few nice comments on each video and possibly bring in a little extra money each month. I always rejected the idea of making ad revenue from videos, but having a job where I don't make a living wage has made me a lot less precious about it. I'm still going to block ads, and I have no beef with anyone who does, but there's a sizable number of youtube viewers for whom ads are normal and just the way internet TV works—kinda like how watching 22 minute shows with 8 minutes of ads per episode was how it worked when I was growing up. I can't imagine going back to that.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that I started playing Cookie Clicker on my phone.

Cookie clicking

I played Cookie Clicker on the web when it was new. I liked it at first, but I ended up hating it because it turned me into a greasy little optimization goblin who would obsessively micromanage everything for optimum cookie output. I would, like, sell old buildings so I have enough cookies to buy new ones, I'd look up forums and websites where people talked about cookie clicker strategies, leave it running on my computer with an autohotkey script to continuously click while I was AFK, I got up to like the octillions or nonillions or something when I realized that I hated myself and every second I spent looking at clicker. I deleted my save and vowed to never play it or any other idle game again.

Since then, I've chilled out quite a bit, and I realized that Cookie Clicker could be ideal for preventing me from constantly checking my analytics, and other things on the internet, while I'm at work and should probably look like I'm working most of the time. I leave it running in a little stand on my desk, screen brightness turned down pretty low. I have an app that lets me rotate my screen 180 degrees, so I can keep it plugged in, and I set the screen to never turn off when it's on power. I mostly keep the stats tab up, so it doesn't look like I'm looking at a big cookie to anyone who glances over my shoulder. Occasionally, a yellow dot will pop up on the cookie tab to let me know that a golden cookie spawned. I click it, and usually I don't have to do anything but go back to the stats tab; occasionally it's a click frenzy or cookie storm, which requires me to furiously tap my phone for 15-30 seconds, but otherwise I just let it go back to doing its thing. I occasionally take a short break from work to do some building management (always buying, never selling) or buy upgrades and research. It barely takes any time at all, helps me stay on track with my work, and still provides little bursts of excitement when I get a nice golden cookie combo. It's maybe not the healthiest thing, but it's certainly better than refreshing my youtube stats over and over. You see, the number can only go up.

Hundred dollars

I found a hundred dollar bill on the way to work. Weirdly, this isn't the first or even the second time I've found money during my walk; I walk through a relatively middle-class part of my neighborhood, and past houses where people can afford to be careless when digging their keys out of their pocket or purse, and it's not well-lit enough at night that it'd be easily noticeable, especially if someone was hurrying to get in from the snow or rain. But $100 is definitely the most money I've ever found from a single windfall, and I thought it was worth celebrating. My spouse and I are going to treat ourselves to something, but we haven't decided what yet.

Button sticking

The button on my headphones started sticking. I love them: the brand is 3M Worktunes Connect, and they're rated to provide 24 dB of noise protection. They connect via bluetooth, but there's also a 3.5mm headphone jack you can use with just about any cable. I always use them wirelessly though. It's been life-changing. I can't express how much better quality of life I have not having to hear the noises of everyday life that overstimulate me and wear my brain down. The wirelessness is secondary, but also nice: it's quite freeing not needing to be tethered to whatever I'm listening to.

That said, I've never been a fan of the "one button does everything" UI philosophy. There's one button. You hold it for a second to turn them on or off. You double-press it to pair them with a new device. You press the button to pause or resume playback. You double-press it to either skip to the next track or skip ahead a few seconds depending on the app's settings. You triple-press the button to skip backwards, but not every app respects this. Needless to say, in the 3 years I've had this pair, the button's been put through its paces.

It's rubbery, and used to make a nice "click" when pressed, but it's lost its click ever since it started sticking. When the sticking started, the headphones would continuously turn themselves off and back on, because it was like someone was holding in the button. I managed to dig it out with an unbent paperclip, but it's not trustworthy. I no longer feel like I can do single presses with it. I think I can get by with just holding the button in to turn them on... it's already paired with both my devices, so I don't need to activate that function, and they turn off when I plug them in to charge, and I can use the controls on my phone or computer, it's just more of a pain in the ass... so as long as I can hold the button in to turn them on in the morning without breaking it, I shouldn't need to replace them. Crossing my fingers. If I was the cynical type, I'd make a comment about finding $100 and then my $50 headphones immediately breaking, so even when I catch a break I can't catch a break... but I'm trying to stay positive. Even if I need to replace my headphones, I'm able to now where I might not've been before, and an extra $50 on top of that is still way better than nothing. Still, it'd be nice if everything in life didn't have to come with a caveat, you know?

Dreamwidth's crappy trigger-happy auto-filling tags

Sorry if you got a premature notification for this post. I was entering tags, and for the second time, thought that I could press "enter" to accept the tag that was currently auto-filled, since that's how it works on most UIs with this sort of feature. But it turns out the "post" button still has enter key priority, causing me to fire off the entry before it was ready. What, I'm supposed to press the right arrow key? I guess so. Maybe now that I've written about it, it'll stick in my brain.

Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Mates of State - For The Actor

Well, 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.

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.

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: V.Snares - A Giant Alien Force More Violent & Sick Than Anything You Can Imagine

There are lots of youtube channels I get excited about when I see they release a new video, but the only thing I consider "appointment viewing" is Jeff Gerstmann's Ranking the NES series. I don't consume nearly as much video game content as I used to, and Jeff's the only ex-Giant Bomb host I kept watching after that whole thing imploded, but his solo old game videos were my favorite thing on GB after Mario Party Party, and I'm really glad Patreon is allowing him to continue doing what he does. Every Friday for the last 6 months, Jeff's been playing and ranking game for the NES, licensed and unlicensed, with the goal of eventually ranking every game released in the US. As of today he's ranked 178 games, an average of 7-8 per episode. He streams them live on Twitch then uploads the video to youtube. He streams while I'm at work, so I don't get to watch live, but I wouldn't have 3 uninterrupted hours to watch anyway. It's always the video I look forward to watching when I get home from work.

He doesn't play every game to completion, but he plays enough to get a feel for them, at which point he ranks them on a list. It always feels like he gives every game a fair shake, and he tries to be as true to his own taste and intuition as possible. He's been let down by games he remembered loving as a kid, and pleasantly surprised by games that are legendarily bad. For example, Spelunker, a game famous for being shitty, made it all the to #110. So far. It's sure to go down as he ranks more games, but he found something to appreciate in it. It sucks, but I like it.

I'm not really watching to see if he agrees with my opinions though, I'm watching because he plays everything thoughtfully and has something interesting to say about each game. I'm also discovering a lot of games I missed. The NES was my first game machine, and I had a shoebox full of games at one point (until the power supply died and my parents sold all my games 😢) but I came nowhere close to seeing the full library; even now, 30 years later, there are games I've never seen before, there are games Jeff has never seen before, and it's always exciting when he uncovers a good one. You can see the full ranking list at 8bitnintendo.science (maintained by a fan) if you're just curious about the rankings.

My favorite NES game is The Guardian Legend (I named myself after a character from it.) He hasn't played that one yet, but he has played Gun-Nac, an incredible shmup made by the same developers that I was previously completely unaware of. I knew the name, and I assumed it was a shmup, but I had no idea it was so good. Jeff was coming to it as a sequel to Zanac, a game he loved as a kid, so we both appreciated it from different angles. I don't know if he'll end up liking TGL; the action-adventure segments might not be his thing, and that'll be fine. I'm sure he'll appreciate the craft that went into it, even if it doesn't rank that highly.

I've been thinking of stealing the idea and doing a ranking of Atari 2600 games. I never had an Atari as a kid, and when I played at the homes of friends and family, it was always just the handful of big hits, so I don't have much nostalgia for it, but it might be interesting to watch someone look at them with fresh eyes. I have a full 2600 rom set (which isn't hard, it's only 20MB; everyone should have one!) and I poke at it occasionally, and I've found some hidden gems. One favorite Pressure Cooker, an activision game that set the template for high-pressure cooking games like Diner Dash and Overcooked, and I still think it's a lot of fun today. Another one I like is Cosmic Commuter (also by activision. They made a lot of great games in the early 80s. Not so much today) where you pick up passengers in a space bus. There need to be more games about mass transit.

Would they rank higher than Pitfall! and Yars' Revenge? Probably not, I'd have to do the science to be sure, but if not they wouldn't be far behind. Most people probably think of the 2600 as having a couple good games and mountains of trash—E.T. was turned into a literal mountain of trash—but I think the library deserves a closer look. (In an emulator, with a real controller. Let's not be silly.)

I got back into LPs for a little while last year but kind of petered out. I was in the middle of Magic Knight Rayearth for the Saturn, which is a cute game with great music, but unfortunately I found playing it a lot duller than I remembered. Maybe I can dip my toes back in by ranking some 2600 games. They could be a lot shorter than the NES ranking videos, and shorter than the kind of stuff I usually play. Maybe I could find time for like, an hour a week. Shrug

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Misha - This Is How It Must Begin