the whole time i was listening to this album i was playing something of a game with myself. whenever a sample popped up (that wasn't obviously a home video or something i already knew the origin of (shoutout to that one instance of the bruh sound effect)) i'd try to find the origin of it in real time. this ended up being pretty funny, like at one point there's just an echoey tts voice reading titles off of then soon to be released ringex plaster albums?? i have terminal roxy brainrot so i was able to catch that almost immediately but i digress. all of a sudden this ever so slightly slowed down voice starts playing, i can't exactly make out everything it's saying but it seems to be saying something approximately close to "cat planet" a lot? so i immediately head to youtube and search that. all that pops up is a bunch of geometry dash stuff which didn't seem like it'd be it, but then i remembered the before:date function existed and found it near immediately.
and... it's an absolutely wonderful artifact of a video! it's a lets-play of this charming little pixel-art platformer from 2010, and this is immediately very exciting for me. one because that's already hilariously up my alley conceptually and two because i had never once heard of it before. the actual video itself is very entertaining too, specifically the line "get your own planet IN THE MIDDLE OF THE EARTH'S CORE" made me laugh really hard, whoever recorded this is clearly an eccentric little dude.
"so, mission success!" i thought, "while i'm here i figure i might aswell check out the rest of this channel too-" only to find that he uploaded 3 HOURS AGO. HUH???????
so yeah, turns out this guy has just been doing this pretty much daily ever since 2008.
this whole experience spoke to me on so many levels. here's the thing, roxy's art has always had a certain child-of-the-internet flavoring and it's long been one of my favorite things about it. i am gen z but she is older gen z, and as such i've found her stuff is sometimes able to rectify blindspots i might have previously had in a way i find deeply compelling. and, like, i have no idea how much thought roxy really put into this. for all i know it's just a video she remembered from her childhood that she just kinda threw in there on a whim, but that doesn't matter. finding the origin of this sample in real-time was a genuinely moving experience. it was a shocking reminder of how much i still have to discover, how vast the internet really is, and how many potential artifacts might still be lurking right under my nose. specifically it struck me how tons of people probably have a deep connection to this channel just by virtue of how ridiculously long it's been around and how i had no idea it existed. this thing would've completely slipped under my radar had i not gone on this insane listening journey. everything about this is a reminder of how easy it is to find beauty in unexpected places, everything about this is exactly the kind of thing i live for.
lets-plays are a bit of a lost art. back when they were at the height of their popularity they and the creators that made them had a reputation for being overy loud and extra, but there IS a type of lets-play that has a remarkable stillness to it, a type that feels like sitting down with a friend and just having an hour long conversation about whatever random stuff crosses your mind. up until this point i could only say
one channel truly scratched that itch for me, but with raocow i believe i have found a successor. i'd like to note that the sheer scale (and relative obscurity) of it all is undoubtedly contributing to this vibe, with videos being uploaded near-daily it's extremely unlikely that any one person has watched all of them, and in that way each video is somewhat of a mystery box. what random topics happened to come up across all those hours and hours of content? i might never know, and that is incredibly fascinating to me.
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ok, just for fun, i wanna highlight one more micro-example of accidental beauty i found here. specifically this one absolutely iconic video simply titled
"the sad video", where he talks about how he'll be taking a hiatus from youtube. and the whole time the background is just a timelapse of him drawing himself(?) in that one very iconic scene artstyle. y'know like the one with the big eyes? whatever. in any case, it gets even better. i scroll down to find that the immediate top comment is this:
"I love how the pause only lasted 3 days until he continued making daily videos. xD"
so if this commenter is to be believed, this ended up not mattering at all in the long run! what a funny detail to add to this incredibly fascinating artifact of a channel. god i love the internet.
