Lost Futures: Sony's Streaming Camcorder Laptop??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB-BRBmv34k

Hello. A couple things.

Yes, this video is done, and I'd love for you to enjoy it. Here's how that sentence originally continued:

However, Youtube broke something a couple days ago, and the processing... process, currently takes 2+ days to complete. I have no idea if or when this will end, it's been like this for a week. For now, it's in 1080, so if you only have a 1080 or lower display, now is a perfectly good time to watch it.

...but writing this post took so long that it fixed itself by the time I finished. Read to the end for some fun notes on that.

The video, well, it speaks for itself, I'm proud of it, please watch and enjoy. I think if it's your thing you'll be glued to your screen; I hope it's a lot of people's thing.

I'd love to say it's the culmination of years of work scrounging up facts on obscure forums before finally finding an actual specimen or something adventurous like that, but I really just heard about this thing in a Tweet, decided that it was one of the most "me" objects in the world, demanded auction donations from my discord folks while declining to describe the item in order to avoid being scooped on the extremely rare buyee listing (thanks for the blind faith everyone!) and then simply Did The Work. Turned it on, used it, tested all the features, researched every question it made me think of, and wrote down what I learned.

It's weird: You may notice this as you watch, but while I am enthusiastic about some of the quirks of this device*, I am not as passionate as in some other videos. For instance, I feel more for the DSR-50 tape deck than I do for this Vaio, despite the laptop being so monumentally my kind of thing. This device is objectively cool, but the DSR sparks joy. There's a difference, but I think it's explained simply by the DSR being something I can touch and use and enjoy, whereas this device... probably not such a great idea.

I didn't mention this in the video, but it does not feel particularly robust. I almost dropped it three times during the project and I'm positive it would have been reduced to free electrons. I suspect if I'd run 3D videogames for even a minute longer than I did, the GPU might have desoldered itself from the board. I probably got lucky that this thing even booted, and it will likely spend the rest of its life being looked at while turned off.

And that's really kind of a Nerd Problem I've always had - figuring out what I want to put on a shelf and have and turn on every six months to show to someone, and what I want to enjoy, personally, for myself. I've found that showing the DSR to someone is less enjoyable than simply using it, while the opposite is true for this tiny laptop, and many other things I own. Someday I will put better words to this distinction.

Maybe the best way to put it is this: I do not find that I love this artifact, but I love that it existed. It is a vehicle for concepts, it made me think things, now I have them inside of me, and I no longer need to touch it to produce any more thoughts. The documentation of the device was the act of passion.

* At least 3/4 of the things that made me yelp as I explored this device just did not fit in the video. As I've explained to anyone who asks and will listen, everything that I put in a video is something I cannot allow myself to not put in. This video contains almost an hour and a half of absolute necessities - this is after I cut it down. The original would have been two hours, and frankly dreadful.

I just make what I feel like making, and I cannot seem to get myself to make anything that isn't that, and sometimes that leaves me in a weird position where I'm saying to myself, "wait, my favorite things about this... don't fit in the script anywhere."

Not to say I didn't make a good video in my opinion, it's just that the entire piece is about the story of this computer, and that would be hard to consume if I spent significant time on the bits and pieces.

For instance, that "Cybercode" thing - I could do ten minutes on that, it's so wild, but in a very small way, one that would have trashed the flow of the story, turned it from a single beginning-to-end narrative, into a weird rollercoaster-paced mess.

This is yet another reminder, yet another, that I need, need, need to figure out how to get over myself and make videos that do not feel big enough for my ambitions; videos that are ten minutes long and not really about anything. Like shorts, but not disastrous. Wish me luck.

Another thing: My girlfriend suggested the unspeakably pleasant prefix "Lost Futures" for this video, and I liked it so much that I not only kept it, but became committed to putting the name in the thumbnail, and that led to a decision to revamp all my thumbnails and my overall visual style, and to come up with some "series" or "shows", Lost Futures being one. I will be retroactively applying this to some other videos, and proactively applying it to some (lost) future ones.

You know who I respect a lot? Jeremy Parish, whose retro videogame review series' (plural) were originally created under six or eight confusingly dissimilar names before being ratified and retconned into the cohesive Video Works. You should watch those, because they're extremely good, but you will see very clearly the process of coming up with a coherent style. I hear you, bud; the struggle is real.

I don't know Mr. Parish's work history, or him personally in any way, but as far as I can tell he just hit up Youtube one day, seven or eight years ago, with the breathtakingly hubristic idea of declaring that what he was uploading, that mp4, was the beginning of a series. You know, like television. Some who have followed my channel for several years know that I did not have much luck with this approach when I started.

It's hard to figure out what exactly we're doing on this website (which I ought to call that website, since we aren't on it right now.) At first I was just uploading files. Sometimes I would produce an .mp4, and that was about the sum total of my "routine" or "plan." I've done it via at least four distinct workflows in four distinct software packages, on three different computers and six different primary cameras, and most of that time I was running on pure id.

I have produced literally tens of terabytes of footage, yet every time I look back I go "wait, I made that video six months ago?" and up until that precise moment, had you asked me, I would have told you I made it in 2019. Google "slowfast: it feels incredibly bad" for my illustrated opinion on the 2020s. I would attach the image but there's already a video up there.

It's weird doing all this with no staff. I've never done it with staff either (don't dip your pen in the company ink) but I know that the difference between working on a team and not is whether you were personally privy to the failures that preceded each victory.

If I hired a graphic designer, I would not likely be aware of the hours they spent banging their head on the desk and mumbling "it looks like a potato chip bag what's wrong with me." They would simply present me with files named "A" through "D", dot psd, and ask me which I liked the most, obscuring the pain used to produce them. I do not have this luxury.

Every time I make a video, it takes me about two days to come up with a name, and the entire time I feel like Quark. If you've never tried to come up with A Youtube Name, boy golly, I recommend it.

It's like a little trip into Mad Men (I know nothing about this show) where you're listening to yourself just saying the worst things you've ever heard, and with each line you become more and more convinced that you've always sounded like a clown, always said only the dumbest sentences, and perhaps shouldn't be allowed to speak anymore. And yet, this is the job.

I used to hate youtube "clickbait" titles, but eventually I realized that I, too, will not click on a thumbnail under which the text caption reads "Sony DSR-50 VTR Review." And that acceptance becomes a rabbithole down which you tumble.

When you come to a rest, you see yourself, in third person, saying phrases like "Why did Sony make this tiny laptop/camcorder?" and "20th Century Streaming... Sony Style?" in an inquisitive tone of voice, back and forth, testing each one out, as if this is normal language; as if either one is any good; as if the decision really matters. Which of course it does, and that's the wild part. I keep having to make this decision, and, I don't know, I think I'm getting better at it.

Jonathan Coulton has a great album - that phrase might shock you but it's true (he's a great musician) - called Artificial Heart, and the prechorus/chorus of the opening track goes:

I don't need you to tell me
How it's done, 'cause I know how it's done

See all the accolades, sitting up on my shelf
I'm the man now, sticking it to myself

The last year has been about five years long, and suddenly, looking back (that's another JoCo album), I realize that to most extents that matter, I know how it's done. And it's still hard to do everything, every time, but I know where the hard parts will be now, long before I reach them.

That's why I know that naming every video will just about give me an ulcer, but also why I'm beginning to recognize some patterns in my work that might make sense to label and categorize, in order to produce some kind of long-term narratives, or at least interesting playlist titles. Maybe that's my thing, let's find out.

As for accolades on my shelf - well, I'll probably get an email saying I've earned a silver Youtube Play Button in about a month if my math is right, which I cannot really conceive of as a real thing that's probably going to happen. I doubt I'll receive the actual object until Christmas - this years', if I'm lucky - but even then, I don't know if I can point to that and say "I'm the man now." The optics on that seem bad? I can assure you that I'm sticking it to myself, though; if I wasn't, all my stuff would suck way more.

Postscript: Before posting this I went over and refreshed the new video to see if it had become 4K. It is now only available in 1080p and 240p; the others, which were working until now, have vanished. This is the horse I hitched my wagon to.

Post-postscript: I spent 20 minutes redesigning the thumbnail for the video, then refreshed. It's in 4K now.