Happy 2026, folks!
This is an exciting year. The first video of 2026 officially marks the shift in the channel's focus, and I'm curious to see what you and the wider audience think. Speaking of that video, I mentioned in the previous post that the original scope I planned has expanded. Instead of focusing on a specific topic, I decided to broaden it as an topic began to emerge that I realised I wanted to cover. It's been a while coming, now that I think about it.
And speaking of video updates, I just finished the Phobos modpack for Doom 3 which marks the final playthrough needed to cover the video. That's 7 games, 3 expansions, and 1 modpack played for the video. Phobos was a surprise, I wasn't expecting it to take as long as it did to complete, thanks in part to the increased difficulty. It's a tough cookie and I highly recommend it if you enjoy Doom 3. More on that in the video ;)
Beyond the id video (that's how I'll refer to it, though "id" isn't the topic of discussion...), I have ideas for a handful more videos which I can jump straight into scripting once this video is done. That isn't by accident. I want to get more videos out this year, and playing games to generate talking points takes time. I'll still need to record footage, of course, but completing games won't be necessary, so it cuts 1/4 to 1/3 of the production time.
What's Blondie playin'?
I finished Metroid Prime 4 last week and was moderately disappointed by both the experience and the plot. Skillup was right about how awkward Samus feels as characters verbally exposit and she stands there like a mannequin, nodding her head on occasion. Painful to watch, and a clear indication that this should have been a solo adventure. The ending was godawful, and I forgot Skillup's advice before jumping into the boss fight. The game presents you with what appears to be a moral option right at the end of the game after defeating the final boss. It's clear what Samus would do in that situation, but instead the game forces you to do something completely out of character. If you "choose" the "wrong" option (the morally right option, the option Samus - as a character - WOULD have chosen), you die and are forced to repeat half the boss fight. Bafflingly atrocious design and an incongruent characterisation of Samus which made the end feel incredibly disappointing and anticlimactic.
Just started playing Hell of Fear Mind Breach (yeah, horrible name). It's a little indie game which punches for a System Shock-esque pseudo-survival horror experience. I'm really enjoying it so far but it's early days. We'll see how it wears after 10 hours.
Ambitions
Squeeze more blood from the stone? I'm trying to figure out how to get more productivety and time from each day. It'll come down to slotting things into the micro moments here and there, because there's little time left in the day for much else. I have reached schedule capacity, but that doesn't mean I can't optimise the time. Vague, I know, but it's honestly just gonna be fitting stuff in the cracks at this point, unplanned, opportunistic.
I also want to write micro essays this year (200-300 words, a few paragraphs on a specific topic). I've seen a system where someone wrote hundreds of micro essays on many topics, tagged them for easy reference, and used them as a source of inspiration or direct insertion into larger essay videos. I think this is a really clever system. It cements the knowledge gained by writing about your understanding of a topic, and it allows you to link similar topics to generate new ideas or dive deeper on existing ones. This is a system I'd like to create for the benefit of future videos. Initially this system will be for my benefit, but if the idea takes off and people are interested, I could publish an ebook of these mini essays on a broad range of game-related topics. That's off in the distance, but food for thought.
Personal ambitions
Running: I got a chest strap heart rate monitor for xmas - the most accurate HR measure you can commercially get for regular folk like us - and it's made a minor adjustment to the HR reported on my watch. My watch was over-reporting by a handful of beats per minute, which means I'm now working slightly harder for zone 2 and 3, but the change has been dramatic. My total run times have dropped by 2-3 minutes thanks to running at the adjusted HR zones. My VO2 max continues to climb, and I'm now comfortably above the 85th percentile for my age/gender. I'm glad all the VO2 max/threshold/sprint training is working because it's gruelling stuff. It'd be a shame to waste all that blissful suffering ;)
Food: I beat the first boss this year by refusing birthday cake. I'm making a conscious effort to cut as much processed sugar as possible in 2026, and to eat leaner when we eat out (Caesar salads, steaks etc). Not as fun as burgers, fries, and pizza - which I will have occasionally - but nothing changes if nothing changes, as the saying goes. If I want better fitness and health results, I need to cut the crap. I've been on this bandwagon once before, and it felt amazing when I wasn't eating junk, so I'm shooting for something similar this time. Oh, and I want solid ab definition. Because of course. I want to be around for my daughter's graduation, not a victim of a lifestyle disease. She deserves a health-conscious role model to guide her upbringing, and I know that's something I can be. Plenty of motivation to fuel this change.
A lengthy post this month, but it's the start of something big. Giddy up!
Until next month, posse.
Hey Folks, the video is finally done. Apologies for the late release, a few things came up near the end of the month which delayed release. I hope you enjoy it!
G'day, chaps and chapettes. July down, progress made.
The Doom/Quake horror video is now at 1hr 36mins. I had hoped to be closer to the 2hr mark by now but stumbled across more supporting material, and viewing/cutting it has taken longer than expected. I'm also making an effort to use footage which supports talking points, and because the script is loaded with talking points (and because the Doom 3 playthrough spans 18 long video files), finding footage to support even a single paragraph of the script has sometimes taken 30mins or longer. There was also another body of work I needed to complete for the Blondefire channel which was delayed by last month's IRL work, so July was very much a catch-up month all around.
The good news is that July was free of IRL distractions so I've made big progress on the video. I normally add the backing track after the footage and voice over is laid, but this time I've added it as I go. This means that the next (and final) pass only requires QA checks and audio ...
G'day, chaps and chapettes. What a crazy month it's been.
So. The video production is coming along nicely. There are a tonne of images, sounds, B-roll videos, interview footage and other miscellaneous stuff required, and sourcing it for a video this long and detailed is taking time. This is no different to other videos I've made, though it is compounded by having to cover a lot more games.
I've also hit an issue I've not had in previous projects. Well, I sort of had, but not to this degree. This video uses 4.6TB of recorded game footage. Terabytes, not a typo. Davinci Resolve, my video editing software, doesn't like loading lots of 2k videos into a project, and it has hung and crashed numerous times. I briefly had this issue with the Marathon and Jedi Knight videos - they're the longest ones on the channel so far - but only when the production timeline approached the 2 hour mark. This project struggles to copy even small clips into the timeline, and it would have been impossible to continue.
The fix? Proxy ...
