Hello everybody! I've got two new, shiny projects to share with you today. No need to bury the lede today. Let's dive into them.

MF Memory Card Banner-1080 Low MF Library 1080 Banner

While you contemplate the art above, let's talk about what these projects are and why I am creating them.

Memory Card is a real-ish time, raw, drip feed newsletter of my creative process for telling stories. It’s how The Thing™ gets made.

The Max Frequency Library is a new dedicated YouTube channel showcasing high quality video game capture with no commentary to be accessible and useable as a resource for creators, students, or anyone that wants to watch how I play a game.

So why do these?

It is all in pursuit of telling and sharing stories through essays.

This year I have created three video essays and am working on more. I love this medium. It's a great way to engage people into "reading" my thousands of words. I am actively producing multiple essays with my next major one being along the lines of "The Spirit of a Galaxy Game." This newsletter and YouTube channel naturally supplement the creative process of these essays while keeping me engaged and curious.

Remember That?

I am a huge fan and believer in sharing the creative process. After each major project and at the end of the year, I write big behind-the-scenes and retrospective posts. Memory Card is a regular, raw drip feed of my creative process and where I am currently at. It's how The Thing™ gets made. The big breakdowns will still happen, Memory Card is a more personal real-ish time version of those.

In the past, I would have tweeted these things out; just tossed them onto the never-ending fire of social scrolling. It would have meant nothing. Writing it down, sharing the thoughts, decisions, and having a form of dialogue on a platform that I own empowers me and respects the reader. Instead of amping up the noise, I am strengthening the signal.

So why a newsletter? Why not just a blog post? I say, why not both? With the newsletter, it feels like there is a correspondence. I suppose that is inherent in the name. I am writing to people that are curious. I make these things to satiate my own curiosity. This dynamic feels natural for newsletters.

Posting them on Max Frequency as a blog post will help people find the newsletter. Perhaps someone will stumble across them on the site and subscribe. It gives it a permanent home and a place for others to point to—both Max Frequency and Buttondown. Either one works! Why hide or restrict my work?

As of this writing, I have sent out 12 letters to a very small group. I'm ready to shine a light on this. You don't have to go back a read the archive, just start now.1 If you had to pick one to go back and read, I'd make it the first one as a deeper look inside the inspiration and motivation. You know what, I'll save you (most of) a step;

Who Knows What I'll Call This Thing, but Here I Go – Memory Card #1

The format is heavily inspired by Craig Mod's Nightingalingale — 21 Days; A Diary of Book-Making, which has gone on for...263 issues for the past few years...

This letter is for his members only and it is a real time journey through his creative process of making the book Things Become Other Things. From the research and walking to the writing to the edits upon edits upon edits upon edits upon edits upon edits upon edits. I think you get the idea. I find this openness about the creative process uplifting. I try to channel that into my own creative works.

I thought this approach would work well with video essays. I have a slew of ideas. I've entered a phase of working on a couple at the same time and think this sort of newsletter/diary could be advantageous to tracing my creativity. It has the benefits of keeping me honest, better documenting BtS posts, keeps me writing semi-regularly, and more. Most of all, it is an exploration of my ideas, motivation, and energy toward a these essays—whether they come out of not.

And like Craig's Nightingalingale, there's no committed schedule or length. It can be a few sentences or paragraphs. It can be whatever I want it to be. To me, that's liberating.

If this sounds like a cool newsletter you want to get in your inbox, go ahead and subscribe or check out the archive.2 I'll be sending out the next issue tomorrow.

Here's Your Library Card

As for the Library, it answers a couple of questions I ask myself on a pretty consistent basis...

"What do I do with all this gameplay footage?" and "How can help people with the tools and means at my disposal?"

The answer lies in the solution of providing clean, high quality capture of raw gameplay with no commentary, editing, or other post-production.

A clear example I have is the opening cutscene of Final Fantasy III from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, better known as Final Fantasy VI these days. Every time I went looking for this iconic moment on YouTube, I found some emulated, stretched, warped video from ages ago. This frustrated me. So I used resources in my office to record the thing myself and upload it. Sometimes you have to make it yourself.

The Library currently has 315~ videos sitting on my hard drive, totaling almost a year's worth of daily uploads—6 terabytes of raw gameplay footage.

I used to record full playthroughs for IGN Guides and Chapter Select.3 I always felt terrible deleting stuff for space, losing all those moments, memories, etc. Now I am in a financial and technological place in my life to keep, store, and backup that footage. I want it to be seen, used, and enjoyed. Maybe it will help another essayist without the means to capture a certain game or in the highest quality.

I have full playthroughs of...

  • The Last of Us Part II (Grounded Difficulty)
  • God of War (2018)
  • Outer Wilds and its Echoes of the Eye DLC
  • Pokémon Legends: Arceus
  • Pokémon: LeafGreen
  • Super Mario Galaxy
  • Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat
  • Death's Door

with Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Splatoon 3 incoming, and so much footage of other games that I have needed over the years.

I've spent the last few weeks uploading the videos in bulk and priming them for daily scheduling. Some videos are 15 seconds long and some are well over an hour. Some are in 1080p and others are in 4K60 with HDR. It runs the gamut. I detail which version of the game it was and the hardware used to play. I hope it is useful and enjoyable to you all.

You can check out the channel and please subscribe to help the channel grow and help me continue to make this content!

Off to Find the Spirit

So that's what's up and what's new. Two new pieces that make up Max Frequency. Both designed in pursuit of making video essays and telling stories; to be insightful, tools, resources, and keep me on task. They all happen concurrent to production and pour themselves into The Thing™. Check them out. And as always, I hope you enjoy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to figure out what the Spirit of a Super Mario Galaxy game really is. 🪐

Footnotes

  1. Although, I personally would and appreciate it if you do 😅 ↩

  2. That link is to the fancy Buttondown archive. You can find the Max Frequency version here. ↩

  3. I had so many games—The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption II, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Celeste, Cuphead, Tales from the Borderlands, TellTale's Batman, Just Cause 3, Hitman 2016, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Dying Light, Until Dawn, Horizon Zero Dawn, Metal Gear Survive, all the God of War games, all the Banjo-Kazooie games. All gone. ↩