I’ve mentioned before somewhere on this mess of a site that I have a couple YouTube channels. I think it was in the context of how I’ve slapped my face on just about everything for as long as I can remember. Because I’m dead serious about that; I’ve been using that same shtick for at least six years now. Jeez, has it really been six years? I don’t know how long it’s been, but I can tell you that many things have changed since then. Many, many things.
There’s a reason I bring this up now, though, and it has everything to do with that class I keep talking about. In my multimedia environmental communication class, we were supposed to be doing group projects where we put together an educational video about some environmental topic in our community, complete with interviews and B-roll and royalty-free music. It would have been the whole works. Of course, COVID being what it is, it’s a little hard to do a group project when everyone’s supposed to be staying far away from each other. My group’s was going to be on food production, but not anymore, because we now have a replacement project; vlogs. A field that I simultaneously have a good bit of experience in and hate with a passion.
I think a lot of that hatred stems from the fact that I have tried, and failed, not once but twice to become a successful YouTuber. It all started about ten years ago, when my brother and I first started watching YouTube in those early-ish years. Not quite right when it started, but at about the point where YouTube really started to explode. The early 2010’s, I think. And YouTube was such a wild west kind of place back then, with very little restriction of content, for better or for worse, though even then there was at least some sort of rudimentary filter on adult content. My brother and I, because we were young, new to the internet, and curious about the stuff our friends watched, quickly became weekly viewers of a couple different channels. Smosh. Annoying Orange. Tobuscus. A couple others I can’t remember. You know, the big ones.
We watched a lot of YouTube in general, and definitely watched a lot of YouTube that was not age appropriate for ten- and twelve-year-olds. My brother learned the word “pussy” from a Smosh video, and then when he used it as an insult on me (not really knowing what it meant), my mom overheard and was not happy. But, like I said, YouTube was a wild west to us children, back before things like COPPA and a version of YouTube specifically tailored to toddlers. Things were strange back then, but strange in a different way compared to now.
Of course, there were a lot of single videos that my friends and I would watch, too. Or shows that we didn’t keep up with regularly, but knew well enough. The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny somehow got brought up multiple times at my job in Philmont this summer. I think I was in a photoshop computer class in junior high when the Epic Rap Battles Bill Gates video came out. Charlie the Unicorn had slightly better animation and sound quality than Ultimate Showdown. Llamas with Hats exists, and it is literally right now that I realized those llamas and Charlie the Unicorn are made by the same people. Don’t Hug me I’m Scared is still relevant, apparently. I remember a friend of mine showing me Cool Guy at my 16th birthday, so maybe that doesn’t count. Cows Cows Cows gave me nightmares when my friends first showed it to me. And Game Theory is still going strong-ish, though I guess it’s mostly fueled by Five Nights at Freddy’s, which mostly just makes me uncomfortable. Hey Vsauce, Michael here; where are your fingers? And who could forget the History of Japan? Shrek gets Spooked. I love it. All of these videos are, amazingly, still around and still watchable, eight or more years after they came out (except for the Japan one, that’s just four years old). I remember watching some of them for the first time, and it does not feel like eight years ago.
Nowadays, I don’t watch as much of a variety as I did back then, but I actually watch more YouTube now than I think I ever have. Most of this comes from the fact that I can watch it while I run on the treadmill, which is nice, but also I actually keep up with channels again. After not watching almost anything throughout High School, I’m now keeping up with a handful of channels, and I actually really like watching them, despite the fact that I don’t like to watch TV or movies. There’s TED-Ed, which is a perfect balance of information and fun. Sam O’Nella Academy is a riot but also I’m super jealous because I think the dude is my age. I unfortunately like Vinesauce, both Joel and Vinny, though I don’t watch the other guys. Game Maker’s Toolkit is probably one that I keep up with most regularly. I am unable to determine if videogamedunkey is sexist or a troll or both. Vaatividya is where I go when I need even more Dark Souls. Jacob Geller is, honestly, one of my new favorite content producers. Lord Bung makes videos about the SCP world, which I’ve already told you about. Jaiden Animations has birds, which I really appreciate. Honestly, the list can go on and on, but most of what I watch deals with video games. Which I guess makes sense. I talk about them a lot.
Look, the point is that I watch a lot of YouTube videos. But back in the day, I used to try and make my own YouTube videos. In fact, I had big dreams of becoming the next hot YouTube star. My brother, along with my friends, and I were going to have a whole YouTube empire where we put out any kind of content we wanted, and people would love it, damn it! We were going to go viral and become a common household names. Yes, yes, the common household name of Nuthead1492. An absolute classic. Nothing could go wrong with a bunch of twelve-year-olds making a YouTube channel.
If you haven’t heard that name before, I don’t blame you; our most viewed video only has eleven thousand views and, before YouTube turned off commenting on videos with children, every comment on that video was either about how someone’s mom thought I was gay or that I wasted their time. But, for a while, this didn’t deter us. We kept putting out videos, and we made quite a few of them. Needless to say, at some point I think we realized that the content we were putting out wasn’t very funny, or good in any way. There was a reason we never got YouTube famous, and that’s because our production quality was literally a home camcorder and the Windows Media Player.
We had a lot of fun, though, and that was what ultimately mattered. My brother and I had a good time making shitty videos with our friends and family, and covered a pretty wide range of topics. We had a video that riffed on weight loss programs, and we creatively called it Weight Gainers. We had a Ghostbusters music video that somehow wasn’t flagged for copyright issues. There was a Minecraft-in-real-life bit where we dressed our friend up in a homemade creeper costume. And, of course, a bunch of other random nonsense that mostly just an interrupted shot of us screaming at each other and/or jumping on a trampoline. It’s kind of a trip to look back, because sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s just awkward, and on at least one occasion, it’s damn uncomfortable. But there’s an instructional video about attracting Gold Finches to your yard, so I guess my birds got started early.
My second attempt at YouTube fame had a noticeably higher quality of production, but somehow had even less success than nuthead1492. This time around, though, it was very much “my” YouTube channel, and it was a vlog channel called Sova Productions. Generally, I sat down in front of my camera and recorded myself animatedly reading a script I had written beforehand. The writing isn’t awful, I guess, it’s kind of similar to what I write here, but it’s still just uncomfortable to watch. Maybe that’s just me, since it’s literally watching a recording of myself. But there’s still some gold in there, after a fashion.
I tried to make it both a vlog channel and a gaming channel at one point, and I actually got my friends together to do a thing on a Minecraft map that I had made. That was a lot of fun to film, but it was not very funny to watch. I’m not sure what it is that makes gameplay videos so enjoyable (sometimes), but it isn’t full-length cuts of a bunch of teenagers playing Minecraft. I also used the channel as a really odd way of copyrighting my stories by proving that they exist. It’s a bit like that thing where you mail a copy of the story to yourself in a sealed envelope. It even has the exact same effect; jack squat. That stuff doesn’t hold up in court if someone has an actual copyright claim. That’s why Spectral Crown is copyrighted, so no one gets to steal my gay vampire romance.
By the end of Sova Productions’s life cycle, though, I had realized that I both wasn’t quite cut out for the vlogging life and also didn’t want to invest countless hours of time into something that I wasn’t proud of and didn’t bring in any money. If you’re embarrassed to show something to your friends and family, you might want to rethink what you’re doing. So I turned it into a repository for video projects I made in high school. I wanted to have an easy way to pull up my class videos to show my friends, because that was what we did at parties in high school. Some of those, though, I still kind of enjoy watching. But they’re also vaguely racist on at least two counts, so I’m not super thrilled with them. I apologize.
Then there’s my final and most recent channel, which is just called “Andy Sima,” like some sort of weirdo who didn’t bother to change the name from their Google chrome account. For once, though, I didn’t make this channel with the intention of putting out stellar content and getting famous; I made it with the intention of putting out stellar content and getting a good grade, because every video on that channel was a college project. And this is where we tie back into that communications class I referenced way at the start of this article, because now I’m posting those videos to YouTube. As a matter of fact, I just posted the most recent one. You can watch it now.
Originally, the channel was just going to have vlogs I was required to make for a spring break study abroad class that took me to Rome. I hated making those vlogs, though, because it forced me to sit in my sad bathroom-less hotel room instead of going out and ordering kamikazes at an Irish pub while listening to an Oasis cover band. But I kind of like having them now, since it’s a little time capsule that I can come back to in however many years and remember that amazing trip. Or, now, I can watch my nature vlogs in however many years from now and remember what kind of a fucking maroon I was.
It’s kind of weird to have so much of my life documented on the internet, both in the form of this blog and those YouTube videos. It makes me think of that one Black Mirror episode where they can recreate a dead person’s personality based off of their internet presence. I just got to wonder, what kind of a personality would it give me if it was based only off of whatever I have online? It’d probably be loud, crude, and a little all over the place. So pretty accurate, I guess. But it might also include material of me that I didn’t even publish.
I talked once about those camps I did with NIU, and the program I had there. Because of my prestigious position as “Teen Writer in Residence,” I actually got interviewed at my local library a couple of times for the NIU YouTube page. I won’t lie, it was pretty fucking cool to be interviewed about my writing, being asked questions by real people. I’m still proud that those videos exist. Even if I look like an absolute goob in all of them. I really should have dressed better for those videos. Also, little secret; I hadn’t watched Star Trek when I did these interviews. I still haven’t. It’s something I’m a little ashamed of.
But, at any rate, those are all the instances of myself on YouTube that I can remember. If all goes well and I become a published author, maybe one day I’ll be on there again, giving real interviews for real people. Hopefully I’ll be dressed better then. If not, I’ll probably still be writing about YouTube, and maybe I’ll do a video-by-video analysis of all the shit that I’ve pooped out for the world wide web. But probably not. Maybe one day I’ll get to do that think piece about growing up in the age of the internet that I want to do, and it’ll just be one long, continuous stream of memes. A meme stream, if you will. It will be my magnum opus.
Or, you know, I’ll just go watch some more YouTube videos. That’s good, too.
