9th Anniversary and General Update

Another year has gone by, and whoa what a year it has been! We basically had a double whammy of natural disasters here in Australia. First we had what would have to be one of the worst fire seasons I can remember, with what felt like most of everything burning. Then the Covid19 pandemic came and sent us all into lockdown, which is likely to have consequences for us all economically for the next year or so at least.

I feel exceptionally lucky that I haven’t really been affected all that badly by the events of this year (touch wood). Lockdown was an interesting experience, in some ways good and bad in others. It was nice to be home and be more relaxed, and get more time with the kids. However it made it difficult to socialise and communicate with colleagues and made home feel like work. Where I live things are mostly back to normal, the only real difference being some people wearing masks.

I started making youtube content this year, which has been quite fun. I’ve had mixed results, some of my videos are lucky if they get one view, which is kind of disappointing, while a few of them have had a small number of views.

I’ve been thinking about it and there’s a few possible problems that may be the cause. Firstly, it’s entirely possible that I’m not doing anything terribly wrong, just that it takes some time before people discover what I’m making. I had that experience to a degree in the first few years of writing here.

I’m not sure it’s a simple as that though, as there are quite probably some issues in what and how I’m making my videos that might be putting people off. I have the capture setup mostly sorted, although I think my audio quality could use improvement mainly by getting a better mic.

I think that most of the area I need to improve is mostly in my own “performance”. I’ve managed to make some videos in a more relaxed off script style, and other that are more scripted. I feel like I sound stilted and stiff in much of the audio, particularly the more scripted ones. The only real way I’m going to do better here is by practicing.

The last thing I thought may be a problem is basically the subject matter I’m picking. I think that GWBasic is quite a niche subject. Although my most popular video happens to be the one about Donkey.bas. I’ll continue making these as I feel like it’s something I like to talk about, and there isn’t really much of what I’d like to watch on youtube on this subject.

Old MS-DOS games as a subject are a bit more mainstream, I suspect that I just haven’t generated enough content in this space yet. Also there’s enough good content out there that it’s hard to get noticed.

I know that the main audience of my Minecraft videos is basically just my daughter. Which is kind of a shame because I really enjoyed making them and they took quite a while to make. I feel this is probably mostly because of the sheer number of people making content for Minecraft. I’ll probably still make these, but I might make a separate channel for them.

I haven’t had as much time for writing here, partly due to my youtube activity, but also because I’ve been busy, and feeling tired when not busy. I’m working on making some more time for myself, so I can hopefully spend some more time on my projects.

Speaking of things that have seen less activity it has been a few years since I last made a post about the old Sparcstation, the main reason being it’s taking a long time to rebuild all the packages I intend on trying/using. I’ve been using qemu to emulate a real system and have run into problems with emulation, I may fire up the old system to see if it’s quicker building on it or at least double up how much I’m building at a time.

I’m still sporadically working on Bob’s Fury, but I’m still stuck on the bug that causes it to crash on the microbyte 386 when the PC speaker is enabled. There is of course plenty of other work to do, such as creating the levels and eventually rewriting of the graphics library.

Finally, I’d like to thank anyone who’s been reading or watching my content. Whilst I do this as my hobby and for myself, it’s nice to know that others appreciate my efforts.