ncommander
patreon
So an update on what I've been up to
🕑 Added 2023-06-05 13:00:07 +0000 UTCSo, uh, yeah, it got quiet here. In this case, it’s part of my pre-YouTube content creation career catching up with me. For those who don’t know, long before I did YouTube, I helped create a fork of the 90s tech website Slashdot, known as SoylentNews (https://soylentnews.org), something I helped found in 2014.
My YouTube channel got its start from retrotech writeups I used to do, such as my explorations on Xenix: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/03/03/1620222, or Windows 1.0: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=20/05/10/1753203
SN has been a big part of my life for a long time. A lot of what got me here started there, and it's not everyday you get an opportunity to siphon a large part of the old guard from one of the few remainders of the early Internet.
If you want to read the full why, the original shutdown post is here https://soylentnews.org/meta/article.pl?sid=23/05/20/0343254, but to summarize, the site was unmaintained, and to say there have been problems among the staff is drastically understating the problem.
I had wanted to renovate SN as part of an ongoing streaming project. 90s Perl seemed right up the alley for a lot of people. However, a complete lack of help on even doing basic tasks, combined with a resistance to making even minor changes to help deal with the signal to noise ratio problems completely killed my motivation and ability to do it.
This also compounded the fact that no one wanted to take legal responsibility for it. SoylentNews is legally owned by a public benefit corporation that was put together by the original stakeholders of the site, myself and Matt Angel, who paid for the material costs of the site. Previous efforts, including a public call, to get additional help failed.
Left with only bad options, I made the very difficult call to shut it down. Let’s just say that shutting down a community is never easy. Especially because the problem was the lack of maintenance, not lack of activity.
SN is too large for one person to manage, and ultimately speaking, a swift end is better than a long drawn out one.
Then someone reached out to help. We’ve been making solid progress on starting to pay down a massive amount of tech debt, and we’ve had some pretty good in-depth conversations on what it's going to take to rebuild SN. However, to save SN means essentially rebootstrapping it.
At this point, I’m somewhat limited on what I can say just because negotiations are still ongoing, but I think if there is a chance to help save a community I helped found 9 years ago, well, it wouldn’t be right of me as a creator to just abandon it, especially if it can be saved.
This has been consuming a fair bit of my free time, and that combined with other life obligations have made streaming or making a video quite difficult. I suppose I should also follow that up with just a general status on other content.
On the video front, I have done some more work on the Windows NT/powerpc script, and about half way through a second draft. This one is much more scripted and choreographed since the first video kept managing to fall down the rabbit hole that is the NT history iceberg (and that is an idea that I probably should run away screaming from, but we’ll see).
That being said, burnout is a bit high. I think it was a combination of the stress of this situation, some other real life obligations ,and that of VCF that’s basically made me put everything up for the last month. A lot of this is just stuff put off from the pandemic coming due, and well, the only way out is through.
This isn’t helped that a lot of my B roll footage from VCF wasn’t usable, and to finish any PowerPC video, I’m going to have to refilm quite a few things. I’m still wilting away at this one, but I have no ETA at this point.
I have been filming some footage for a more experimental video that is considerably less taxing to work on, but I hope will provide interest to many here. Assuming this materializes into a viable concept, I’ll start posting snippets.
Streaming wise, well, again, I’ve been having a lack of ideas (and free time), but I did finally clean off the streaming desk, and I have the Compaq Portable 1 on it, which is a promising sign that some part of my brain is ready to create. I have a RGB2HDMI adapter *somewhere* that I can dig out, and I have a book from 1978 talking about programming in BASIC. Doing the full set of programming exercises on a variety of machines that can run BASIC might actually be an interesting challenge, although I only have a few machines that have BASIC built in.
