With the publishing of Holding down RESET on an NES, I’ve hit one of my milestones: publish four explainer videos to YouTube. Time for some self-reflection on The Industrious Rabbit.

This project was initially started as a series of small, Instagram-targeted comics about my experiences working in and with technology, and I thought insights gleaned over my years in the software industry would be useful to others. But around July 2020 I chose to take a step back from trying to teach others and instead start teaching myself. I also stepped away from using social media to promote my work after realizing it would not be a good venue for what I was trying to do.

I had always wondered what NoFastMem did on the Amiga computer, and so I dove in, did the research, and wrote & illustrated What the heck is NoFastMem?. It was an experiment to see if I enjoyed digging into old computer topics that interested me and if I liked writing about what I found. Turns out I did, and I continued exclusively blogging and drawing on these topics until Summer 2021, when the itch of wanting to make videos got to be too strong.

I now consider that first run of blog posts Chapter 1 in the Industrous Rabbit story – “Is This Even A Thing?”. Like with my comics in the past, it was focused on storytelling, but it was storytelling that requires a lot of research and technical illustration to show how things that often have no physical presence works. And along with these technical descriptions, I wanted to include as many cartoon characters as I could, because I love drawing cartoons characters.

The skills I picked up in that first chapter helped immensely with Chapter 2 – “I’m Gonna Make Videos, Gosh Darn It, And I Don’t Care How”. I made the first four videos in a very sloppy manner, with directories all over the place and filenames all askew, simply because I was trying to feel out how these types of things seemed to want to come together. After 23 Year Old Code, I started to have a good sense on what I needed, since I had now used modern versions of every available well-polished open source art tool (Krita, Kdenlive, Audacity, GIMP, Inkscape, and finally Blender) to produce a video. Holding down RESET on an NES came together a lot faster and with more structure because of this.

So what’s next? Now that I have a structure that I like, it’ll be time to automate it in Chapter 3 – “Parallelize and Systematize”. I have three videos that are all related that I want to work on in parallel, and I want to take those structures I developed and write software to automate their generation. I’ll be building command line tools to generate directories and template files based on whatever structured inputs I can use, starting with the data in Kdenlive files, where I build my animatics from Krita frames and Audacity audio. This is something I’ve done with my comics in the past, creating build scripts to process Inkscape SVG files into print- and web-ready files.

After that, I’m not sure where I want to go. I have an idea to work more streaming into my schedule, most likely involving Amiga development. I do know I’ll be doing a series of videos on the Amiga soon, so if that’s your thing, subscribe to the PeerTube channel or to this site’s RSS feed for updates.

Thanks for coming along in this journey! I don’t know where it’ll end up, but I’m loving the ride, and I hope you are too.