Easy to Forget

Oh hey, it's been three months, maybe I'll post something on here for a change!

You know, it's funny; every few weeks something would remind me of KatersOneSeven, and I'd realize to myself how I went from watching her videos every single day, even looking forward to them, all the way to rarely even thinking or caring about her.  I checked her channel just now, and there's only been a dozen uploads since her big middle finger to the internet.  I can't bring myself to care enough to watch them, since I'm sure it would just be a lot more facepalming and eye rolling.  If anything relevant even happened, give me the cliff notes version.  Actually, in some of the comments here, somebody mentioned that she's pregnant and that they're going to get married, but I would question that solely on the basis of a) her not wanting to mess up her California girl image and career, and b) that costs money, which she would rather blow on her dog and herself.  But who knows.

I've lost interest in a lot of Youtube in general, actually.  I still watch some automotive and gaming channels though.  Since it's spring time, various motorcycle vloggers have started coming out of hibernation, but I haven't had quite enough time or interest to watch everybody that I was into last year.  I still enjoy people like Boogie2988 though with his opinions on various topics, along with his Francis rants of course.  And I've been facepalming quite a bit from the Yogscast guys, as a matter of fact.  If you haven't heard of them, it's basically a network of Youtube channels of people who play various games, with the core group having a focus that seems oriented on Minecraft.

That's as good a topic as any, actually.  Yogscast.  People who have over a million subscribers, are paid lots of money just to play games, yet they put absolutely no research into how to actually do it.  They've become so content in being able to just upload a video and get thousands of automatic views that they don't seem to really care what they film anymore.  I don't know if any of you watch them, or play Minecraft and/or its mods, so I'll try my best to explain this.  One of Yogscast's most popular series was Tekkit, based around the Minecraft modpack (a collection of mods from various developers) with the same name.  It had a good mix of humor, plot, and building, and lasted for almost a hundred episodes.  When it eventually ended, people had liked it so much that they kept asking for it to continue, or to start a new one of some kind. 

Around that time, they started a new series called Voltz, again based on a Minecraft modpack of the same name, both of which under the Technic umbrella of modpacks.  Voltz started out well, had some amusing episodes, until gradually it seemed like they were cheating and fibbing to orchestrate scenes for the audience rather than playing the game legitimately.  At first I didn't mind too much, because it could be pretty entertaining, but eventually I felt more and more like it was just being misleading.  It also became more and more apparent that they didn't really know what they were doing, and wouldn't check the various wikis out there which would have helped them figure something out within moments, bumbling around on camera forever instead.  But they still made pretty decent progress and people liked it.

Several episodes into Voltz, they introduced the new Jaffa Factory series, which was a direct continuation of Tekkit, but with a whole new modpack of their own under the FTB umbrella now instead of Technic.  This alone caused fanboys to freak out in comments, because Tekkit vs FTB is like ATI vs Nvidia to them, except that these modpacks are literally publicly-available mods developed by people not directly affiliated with either modpack, simply using different front-end launchers to start the game, making it a completely moot argument.  Yogscraft (their FTB modpack) used updated versions of all the very outdated mods from Tekkit, and various new ones. 

But suddenly the Yogscast gang were like deer in headlights, even with the mods they should have been familiar with.  They weren't making any progress, they couldn't figure anything out, there was no kind of plot development or plan, and every episode is basically twenty minutes of them trying to figure out how to make things and usually not even managing to do that.  Ten episodes in and they still had no shelter whatsoever, despite tons of items available (cheated in and otherwise), despite the original Tekkit series having had ten times the progress and having started from nothing.

Meanwhile, the Voltz series also seems to have been quietly migrated to an FTB-based server, probably a combined Yogscraft and Ampz pack, because despite still calling it Voltz, it has at least over half a dozen mods which don't belong.  With the addition of these extra mods, they're now a deer in headlights yet again, trying to use these other mods' features but not really accomplishing a whole lot.  But at least they're still motivated by the fact that it's one team versus another team, as opposed to one big clusterfuck like in Jaffa Factory.

It's all fairly frustrating to watch, to be honest, because a) how the hell can a group of people have played Minecraft mods for this long and still not know the basics, and b) how the hell can you get paid so much money and yet put so little effort into planning your content?  They still make some pretty funny content, such as when they play Garry's Mod, but it seems to all be becoming few and far between.  The only reason the Garry's Mod stuff is funny is because they're playing with stuff that they didn't even make, with their lack of prior experimentation resulting in some amusing results in that case.  The comments on Jaffa Factory, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly negative, asking for more Voltz or trying to tell them how to play the game.  I don't think they even look at comments anymore, though.  Why would you need to when you get that many views without even trying?

Anyway, enough about Minecraft.  Maybe somebody will actually know what I'm talking about!  Otherwise, all you need to know is that it's pretty much another case of success going to peoples' heads, as far as I'm concerned.