I love Irasutoya, which, if you don’t know, is where I get all the silly clip art that, in some ways, I’ve kind of adopted as a visual style for my content. Whether it’s good to use something generic like that or not is another question. There are some commercial restrictions, but hopefully, you could afford to move away from them at that point. Masahiro Sakurai briefly used them in his initial YouTube videos but has since moved to custom artwork. Either way, it has a massive database of images, a consistent aesthetic, and, most importantly, is very cute.
One of the ways I’ve used this art was to tell the story of Mayor Frogcar during our Napple Tale stream. Mayor Frogcar, in my stream narrative, got arrested, broke out of prison, and, if I remember correctly, maybe even died at some point. Was it funny? I don’t know. I don’t even know if I care. It was just stupid in the way I like things being stupid.
Like a lot of YouTubers, there was a time when I included a bunch of humor in my video. The AVGN effect, you could probably call it. But eventually, I moved away from this style since often I would look back at these videos and not find them all that funny. The Skyward Sword video was a breaking point since I think it only existed as a joke, rather than any sort of review. Since then, I’ve been kind of scared to put my toes into much humor due to worrying about how it ages, though on the podcast and stream, naturally, my humor will come out a bit more there.
I think Mayor Frogcar made me wish I did more of that stuff still, though. Ultimately, in a stream environment, it didn’t really make much sense to keep doing it anyways.
One of the last things I did when streaming weekly was the King of Fishing Tournament, a silly fishing mini-game ranking thing. I love the idea a lot.
I’ve been working on reviving King of Fishing in a non-stream format. But one issue I had was that in each video I needed to re-introduce the two basic rules of the tournament, not only as a reminder but for any new watchers as well.
Rather than remembering what to say off the cuff at the start of each one, I thought about making a stock explainer I could put at the start of every video. But I think that’d be kind of boring. So I kind of delved back into that desire to make almost mini-stories to introduce the ruleset. I’ve been working away at them for the last couple of weeks now in my free time. They’re not done, but I did get most of what I wanted finished in the Yakuza 3 fishing game intro.
Is it funny? I dunno. Is it stupid? Yes.
I’m hoping this will be a good outlet for that for now. Though with basically anything I’m working on right now, it’s up in the air when, or ultimately if, King of Fishing will return. And for that much, for how long as well. I only have so many fishing mini-games in my collection. I probably will put the initial videos out as a bulk release if only because I already have 5 pre-recorded from our past streams, and, instead of just reposting them week by week, I’d like to just jump right on up to 6 and have the other previous 5 videos just available already.
