Things I was doing on my YouTube anniversaries

I'm an anniversary man, ladies. *wink*

I like to be doing something special when that special day comes around. I've recognised that some things I've done are worth noting, so I'm about to run through the stuff I did on my YouTube anniversary. If there was another anniversary to be happy about, I would probably be talking about it as well. Unfortunately, there is not.

17th of April 2011 - One year of YouTube anniversary
It was a Sunday, so I couldn't use the computer. Off to a great start. Later that year I remember comparing my success to Chuggaaconroy's when he reached his one-year anniversary that year. I thought it wasn't a big deal. That isn't to say that I disagree with that now.

17th of April 2012 - Two years a YouTuber
Three videos were at least rendered. Each from different Minecraft series. One was about my custom maps. One was the Bathroom episode of Mine Craft Building Stuff. The third was the Minecraft Seedscribers episode in which I look at the seed "ihasnotomato", which is the alias of my best friend. I guess that more than makes up for 2011's day of nothing. It was a Tuesday, usually a day of great progress for me.

17th of April 2013 - Three years of Tubing
I did a recording session for my Let's Play of Assassin's Creed. The last episode of that recording session was also the last done on my previous computer, which slowed down and died.


17th of April 2014 - Four years of now-greatness
In February I left my channels to work only on AIM Industries. I did nothing on this anniversary on my blog, AIM's blog or even in making videos.

17th of April 2015 - Half a decade of looking to the stars
So this was a big one. I recorded some episodes of my yet-to-be-released Let's Play of Bioshock, there was an AIM Industries recording session of Sonic Adventure DX, and I rendered episode 24 of that series. I also took a picture of the recording setup on that day.

we is reerding som mor sanic advento today :DDDD pic.twitter.com/OPfXrdfWTk

— A.I.M. Industries (@AIMindustries) April 17, 2015

17th of April 2016 - Six years doing YouTube
On my six-year anniversary of making videos for YouTube, I announced to the world that I was discussing the creation of a new collaboration channel with Mickell Pickell and Angrove. This would become Pickle-shaped Peanuts, which has recently been launched.

Thinking about starting a group channel with @MickellPickell and @theangrove.

— Mabeanie Beanie (@MrMabeanie) April 17, 2016

I should remember to do something special this year on my seven years anniversary.

Fun facts about Pickle-Shaped Peanuts

Man, I've been working hard. I'll take it from Ihasnotomato. I don't need a job right now because of how much work I have to do. At least for now.

Anyway, onto the Peanuts!

• I started organising the unnamed project on my 6-year anniversary on YouTube. 17th of April 2016.

Thinking about starting a group channel with @MickellPickell and @theangrove.

— Mabeanie Beanie (@MrMabeanie) April 17, 2016

• The first video would have gone public the day after New Years, but Angrove didn't upload it.

First video on Pickle-Shaped Peanuts is about to go live! pic.twitter.com/WeBGP6RzuN

— Mabeanie Beanie (@MrMabeanie) January 3, 2017

• There were two attempts at a meeting before the channel was established the third time lucky. The first attempt was Friday the 2nd of December, but I couldn't do it because I had to drive someone around. The next attempt was for Thursday the 15th of December, but Mickell Pickell cancelled because he got sick.
• The actual meeting took place on Tuesday the 20th of December 2016. The channel was established that day and we recorded Crash Bandicoot. We also recorded Gran Turismo 3, but our voices didn't get recorded. 
• Mickell Pickell made the channel profile picture, channel art and thumbnails for the first two parts of Crash.

There. Now wasn't that fun?
Thanks for reading.
See Ya!

YouTubers I'll be watching out for in 2017

I don't know about you, but there are some channels that will probably be taking some turns this year for better or for worse and I think it's best to keep an eye out for what they do next.

KSic Games:
Struggling for the gain he'd drawn in 2014, KSic has started 2017 with a different approach to running a gaming channel. Since the 'I quit YouTube' video began the newly replenished KSic channel's year, KSic's videos are all connected as part of a big storyline about KSic being forced to play all sorts of virtual reality games by his nemesis, Patricia. At one point, KSic was my favourite YouTuber and, after years of helping others gain subscribers and views, he's focussing only on himself. He's being "the dick [he's] always wanted to be". It's a very emotional song at the end that delivers the message that he is going to be very committed this year so, if you're like me, ignore the click-baity titles and watch the videos because that's where it's counting.

DangyDood:
KSic's younger brother Shady has risen and fallen by the influence of his sibling, but because of KSic's new plan for the year, Shady will be striking out on his own for 2017. He'll be using all of the knowledge he's gained from his brother as well as his own experience to bring about the channel he thinks will best them all. This is a guy who has rebooted his YouTube career several times, but he's hoping for a fresh start this year. Whatever he produces will be interesting to see and will determine whether he makes it or not as a YouTuber. The content already on his channel shows promise that the content this time around will be different and perhaps higher quality than what he's done in the past.

ChimneySwift11:
I've always hoped that Chimney would find a way to make his channel more disconnected from its old Minecraft days and I think that time has come. He's faced a lot of decline in subscribers and views in recent years, but things may be lightening up. His 'Santa answers your questions' video suggests that things will be different this year and that he's ready to change. His 'annoying astronaut' video shows a lot of promise and I'm looking forward to seeing what he produces next. It's for his sake that everyone who's supported him for so long is hoping he'll restore the strength the channel used to have.

Game Theorists:
Has anyone else noticed that the videos MatPat has put out have been less thoughtful than in previous years? I've noticed videos have been uploaded covering topics that have already been touched upon on both Game Theorists and on Film Theorists. Maybe not as ambitious as my other watches, I think there will be some change in MatPat's YouTube Empire this year.

Ihasnotomato:
Maybe it's a bit obvious for me to support my best friend this year and claim that he's somebody to watch out for, but last year's end-year changes have shown that 2017 will be a big year for his revitalised YouTube career. Ihasnoleek on the Ihasnotomato blog has said that while some changes are not completely explained yet, there is much to look forward to in the ways of Let's Plays and series such as TF2 Update History and Ihasnotomato's story telling series. Because the channel hierarchy has changed, it will also be interesting to see what happens with IhasnotomatoMk2, as no videos have been released on that channel concerning the new changes. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Channels I didn't mention:
My own projects on YouTube maybe don't show as much excitement for 2017 as the YouTubers I've mentioned so far. AIM Industries is showing more vision of a foggy year, because for the first time we're striking out on our own, with no clear vision of where things are going to end up. This could be because we haven't recorded much for this year yet, but so far we can only make our own year.
Obviously my promises of returning to my personal channels in 2017 suggest that my return will be dramatic, but as the man behind the channels I have more skepticism about my own return. Will my return flop massively? Will I be able to reclaim what I had at the beginning of 2014? I don't know, but I can only hope that it will happen.
This year I have begun another group channel with Angrove and Mickell Pickell. It's very experimental and a careful venture because we don't know what will come of it. Mickell Pickell's dedicated audience and Angrove's absence for the best part of the previous year suggest that we're jumping into a rocky boat. Uploading our first video has proven a thing that Angrove is not very interested in. It's in publishing limbo.

I hope this list of YouTubers I'll be watching this year will peak your interest.
See Ya!

YouTube Email notifications aren't effective

I just watched John Green's video talking about 10 years on YouTube and he said to press the bell icon to be notified when new videos come out. This got me thinking about whether the email notification service is effective.

In my experience it is not.

When it started, I chose to be notified by a bunch of the channels I was subscribed to at the time and was interested in seeing their next videos. Over the months of having this enabled, I got sick of seeing the same people uploading new videos that I didn't want to watch. If a channel is so good that you might consider being notified by email, why would you need to be notified at all? If it's such a good channel, you would be checking that channel occasionally and looking at your subscription feed periodically for new videos.

The worst thing about the notification by email update service is that you end up not watching specific channels because you were notified so often of what sort of stuff they were uploading. If their content was often more of the same, you'd get bored of it and eventually disable the notifications. Then you wouldn't even know if their channel had improved or that the stuff you actually wanted to watch had started being uploaded to that channel again. Do you see what I mean?

It's just like when you subscribe to a newsletter and it gets sent frequently, you eventually get sick of it and unsubscribe. Maybe you lost interest in that newsletter's content. Maybe your reason for subscribing in the first place had changed. My point is that if the information keeps being force-fed to you, you will probably end up intentionally avoiding it just because it was streamlined to you for so long.

If it's really good and you love it to pieces, there's no reason to ask for updates because you update yourself.

Why do we celebrate New Years?

It seems pointless to celebrate something that could be perceived as being inevitable.

2017 will come and it will be roughly 365 days long.

What is there in a new year to celebrate?

A new beginning? A person having another go at life. Can't they just fix their problems when the problems arrive rather than wait for the new year to magically fix them.

There are a lot of people on the internet complaining that 2016 was a bad year because famous people who were also not in their peak of health, and therefore suffering from something, died. That so many people failed to understand the American political system makes it a bad year? No. People simply launch into easy conclusions while observers watch curiously and come up with ideas to play with that ultimately are not supposed to mean anything. e.g. Hoping that Donald Trump was talking rubbish the whole time and that the American system would force him to fit into the cookie-cut President that has worked out so well over the decades.

A new year cannot fix your problems. Get over yourself. Take on your problems one at a time and stop relying on the 12-month calendar to reset your life to factory default.

If you expect things to somehow improve because it's a different year, you're doing it wrong.

A year is a period of time in which things happen. The length of the period does not matter. The moon returned to the same point it was 12 months ago. Nice job moon, we were hoping you'd do that again. Donald Trump's election would have definitely ruined the position of the moon relative to the earth.

Are new years made like new folders on your computer? Is it merely an effective way of organising your files?

It seems like we're just celebrating the creation of a new folder to dump stuff in. The calendar will be the same.

Returning to YouTube in 2017

Hey guys,

I know I've said a few times when I'm coming back and that it depends on how things at Uni goes, but after a few years of study I've realised that there is a way to do both. The problem in the past has been that, during a semester at Uni, I would come home straight after a lecture or tutorial. This would lead to being distracted by everything under the sun and not being able to perform at my best. The solution is longer hours at Uni to just chip away at everything so that I don't have to hand anything in at the last minute.

So I will be returning next year in November or whenever that year at Uni ends. I said before that it might be 2018, but I think that's overdoing it as currently there is only one course I would be doing that year to finish my degree.

Meanwhile, the group channel with Mickell Pickell and Angrove will hopefully launch before Christmas and we will start making videos. More details will come out when the channel launches and we've had our first meeting, which should take place tomorrow. This is the third attempt at organising a meeting, so fingers are crossed!

See Ya!

Disappointed with Civ 6 experience

The game itself plays fine. No problem with that. What I don't like is the fact that they thought it would be fine to release an unfinished product for some quick cash. Let's face it, they aren't short of cash. The Civilization series is very successful, Civ 5 was great (and still is) and two expansions was a good number. Civ 6 has been this: Game release with silly things missing (e.g. unable to name city), patch to fix what the developers thought was wrong (and make cities nameable), potential future patch to make the game more mod-able.

Religion is divine.

This is simply taking advantage of an industry that advocates half-assed games. It's easy to advertise the game like it's perfect, get people to pre-order it, release it without the necessary parts, and fix it up later on. I strongly disagree that this is a good idea. A reputable team like Firaxis know that some testing should have been done prior to release. Whatever testing was done was not effective enough to impress me. In fact, since the patch I've seen more problems. I actually had to force the game to close so I could get out of it. This was not a problem before the patch. It's lazy game development and shows that the industry (not assisted by Valve and/or Steam) advocates easy release of games. I payed $70 USD to get a game that was functioning fine, but the release of a patch which I had no choice to download led to the man-hole being revealed. Nice job Firaxis.

How long do I have to wait before the game works fine? Is it okay to pay this money for a game experience which is disappointing? Such an experience reminds me of when many people payed $60 USD for Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, a game that was not only unfinished, but rushed to completion. Luckily this case is only lazy, and disappointing to the point where I'm wondering whether I should even give them a second chance.

To be honest, I couldn't be bothered waiting for the game to fixed before buying it. I watched some YouTube videos and noticed how there was some disappointment in luxuries (like being able to name cities) being absent (as well as the presence of some unfair tricks (e.g. Spain's ability)).

Luckily I bought the game before it was patched so I can notice how awful the patch was. The game was not broken beyond being playable, but it almost is now.