↓Skip to main content

The New Year's Address

·3139 words·15 mins· loading · loading ·
Elwood
Author
Elwood
Writer, researcher

The Story So Far
#

Welcome to the Future!
#

It’s official, from Kiribati to Baker Island the world has said goodbye to 2024 and welcomed in the New Year, I welcomed in the future from the deck of the HMS Wellington (an old warship turned cruise ship moored on London’s Embankment) treated to an absolutely spectacular fireworks display.

2024 was for sure the best year out of my 21 on this Earth, I was nearly in tears reflecting at the station this morning as I waited to catch the first train home, happy ones because 2024 treated me so good and sad ones because she’s gone. Now we wade in new waters and decisions can ripple all over again, I wonder what kind of person I’ll be when we’re back here again in 2026, only time will tell!

But for now I want to start this year’s slate of articles off with a summary of the Entropic Domain, looking back at the story so far.

Fuck WP
#

What is now Entropic Domain rose from the ashes of cheecken.net, cheecken.net was Massi’s personal website that he started in 2019, including a few articles, blog posts and some links to the videos he put up on his main Cheecken YouTube channel, but it was updated very infrequently and was fairly underdeveloped. This was because, and I have a quote here, “WordPress sucks”, although WordPress is a very common go-to for website building, he just thought it was crap.

So around 2022, around the same time I started working on “Ukraine Narratives 2” (the script that later became MEGA: The Ukrainian Divide) he started planning a revamp he nicknamed “Cheecken 2.0”.

The Entropic Domain name started as the name Massi wanted to use for his freelancing company, it was actually the second name after “Framecock” (Cheecken, chicken, cock, get it?), which he changed because the name felt too video specific. He planned to roll this name out to his main channel as well, reflecting the fact that its content over the years has broadened and come to include projects that aren’t exclusively his anymore, like MEGA, but ultimately he decided to keep that channel as the Cheecken channel and experiment with splintering MEGA off into its own channel, so the ED name was taken on by the website instead.

As for the origin of the name, I’ll just let you hear from the horse’s mouth:

Entropy how I understand is the opposite of chaos and I thought about the concept of heat death when it crossed my mind, which AFAIK means that the energy in the universe gets spread out across space and thus the universe “dies”

And I associate that with how many different things I do creaticely on the freelancing side

Then I noticed this applies to my videos and writings and ot works very well for the website as it’s not just me using it

So there is flexibility with who gets to write on it and i did offer quite a few people that they could write for it

So entropic domain now is basically almost a label and there is a bit of a separation between entropic domain the “brand” so to speak and entropic domain creative services which is my personal freelancing business

Oh yeah and the name was partially inspired by the Berlin school project Kubusschnitt

We talked about the idea of me contributing to this new site quite early on, but things didn’t go very far at the time since the website was just an idea and hadn’t actually been developed yet. In mid 2023 I did put together a short article for the project, The Making of MEGA: Yeonmi and North Korea, which went over our first MEGA documentary project and some of the early influences behind it.

It was early last year that the wheels on ED really got turning, Massi decided to settle on the ED name and the idea of having multiple contributors and got to work building, on February 18th he came across what we could call the building blocks of the site. The first was a website generator called Hugo, something he noticed a bunch of the Linux and Tech YouTubers he followed like DistroTube and Chris Titus were using, then shortly after he came across a “theme” for it, Blowfish, being impressed with some examples he found of it in action, with his toolbox sorted he got to work putting the pieces together.

Early Days
#

He started small with a few articles ported straight from cheecken.net, some scripts of older Cheecken videos, my Making of MEGA article and Truth of North Korea (the unreleased script that later inspired my work MEGA’s Yeonmi and North Korea episode) and his first written article, an Addendum to his Quake 3 Arena video.

The site was originally planned to launch on Feb 23rd (my birthday!) but some technical problems led to it being delayed to the early morning of the 24th, close enough, it was still the 23rd somewhere…

After launch I quickly started getting to work. I instantly rammed straight into a technical hurdle as I couldn’t even download the repository of the site, after a bunch of troubleshooting we eventually realised the reason why, “forbidden characters”.

Forbidden characters are basically letters or symbols that you can’t use in your PC’s file structure, so that’s things like file names or folder names, Linux only has 1 of these, Windows has 9, and a bunch of them are common place symbols like colons, semicolons or question marks. Since his main PC is a Linux one Massi didn’t think twice about this while putting the site together, but when I tried to download the files it meant that Windows had an aneurysm, because of the forbidden no no words it just refused to download a bunch of the content, making it impossible for me to contribute to the site. After a bunch of attempts to weed out the characters from the structure we eventually decided to give up, my laptop runs Linux so we decided I would just use that instead. That adds a layer of inconvenience as every time I want to work on the site I have to go and dig out my laptop rather than just using my normal PC, but honestly it might be a good thing since it keeps me from constantly doing edits and becoming obsessive over them (even my most edited article only has 12 edits and it’s been out for just under 6 months).

The first thing I did when I got to work on the site was updating the MEGA entries for Yeonmi and North Korea and Ukraine Narratives. At first when the site was launched they had been taken straight from cheecken.net, meaning they just had a short description and an embed of the video rather than an actual copy of the script, I changed them to be more fleshed out written versions of those documentaries including the full scripts with changes to accommodate the format (like changing “thanks for watching MEGA to “thanks for reading MEGA) and some visuals added in. I also added the first MEGArundown entries, which until then had been unreleased.

Thanks to some random events cropping up I quickly found myself inspired to work on my first new articles specifically dedicated for the site. MEGA: Yeonmi and North Korea ended up getting banned in South Korea, prompting me to write the “Naughty List” article, and a friend of mine sent me Zoomer Historian’s clownish book burning video, which led me to write all about him and his methods for the first Study of Propaganda entry.

I released more and more original articles and added a bunch more older content as well, the as of then unreleased “Guide to MEGA” (a kind of mission statement for the series) then the MEGA Podcasts and our short form videos made for the Yeonmi and North Korea series: UFOs and Fake News and Fraudulent Video Reports; Since these were videos that were either recorded off the cuff or where I didn’t have the script to hand they were just video embeds with short descriptions I wrote to introduce them, but the idea was to put everything MEGA in one place.

Originally some of this older material was given the release dates of when we first put them on the site but I eventually decided to give them the release dates of when they were originally completed or when they first came out. For example, the original MEGArundown articles were first released on the 25th of February 2024 right as I started working on the site, but they were finished back in March 2022, I decided to go with the 2022 dates to avoid making it seem like we’d done more work than we actually had this year!

All In
#

Having done all this work I quickly realised that writing for Entropic Domain was actually very easy, I had assumed that working with the Markdown format (the text formatting that Hugo uses) would make things complicated but I realised an easy cheating technique, I just kept writing my stuff in Google Docs and then when it was ready to be added I opened Obsidian.md.

Obsidian is a note taking tool that also uses Markdown which I was introduced to by Massi as part of our work on the Ukrainian Divide series, and when you paste something in another format into an Obsidian note it does the conversion for you: Links, headings, etc etc, the only things I had to do myself were the adding the images and sorting out the background info every article needs: The “slug” aka the URL, the title, description, release date and so on, which was also super easy since I knew how to format it, I had Massi’s initial additions as a reference point.

And so I just kept writing, I’ve been writing stuff for years now but in the past I never really had a platform for it, my writings were just unreleased docs lying around or video scripts that I never ended up producing, it never went anywhere, with ED I had a place where I could really easily spitball my thoughts out with whatever I fancied writing.

I usually write for myself first and foremost, because I have a bunch of thoughts on a topic I want to get off my chest, but knowing that this writing could actually go somewhere and have an audience gave it a sense of purpose, even though I don’t really care whether a page gets 30 views, 300 or 3000 I do want an audience to address, I’m not really one for personal diaries.

The other big value of the site for me was as a coping mechanism for my frustrations surrounding video making, specifically the work on Ukrainian Divide.

Divide has had a difficult history of on and off development, where previous MEGA episodes had a very quick turnaround from writing to completion (just over 2 months for Yeonmi and North Korea and a single week for the Ukraine Narratives) Divide was a much more dragged out process, it was started in September 2022 and the first episode didn’t release until December 2023.

This was because of 2 main factors, a much bigger script (Narratives was 15 pages, 11 without the sources list, Divide is 261 pages, 164 without the sources) and an ebbing and flowing motivation, me and Massi found ourselves having bursts of enthusiasm to work on it at very different times, leading to a lot of frustration on my part as the project didn’t really move forward and as I wasn’t on the production side of things I was powerless to do anything about it.

When Massi picked up the project in late 2023 and we got the first episode out I got a lot more hopeful, but that was ripped away again after the new year, we pivoted to work on a documentary about Sweet Baby Inc and then, facing a wave of burnout, Massi went on a creative hiatus. All of the production resources (the project timeline, the narration, the visuals and so on) were on his end, so I couldn’t just pick up where he left off even if I wanted to (and sometimes I really did want to).

So rather than just lie limp I dived full throttle into writing, the good thing about writing for ED is that I can get everything done by myself, if I want something to be finished and I’m willing to put the time in, it will be finished, that’s all there is to it, all Massi needs to do is publish the site once all the changes are done (and of course he sometimes helps me out with troubleshooting, which I’m very grateful for).

This process also gave me the opportunity to revive the Terror War project, as I wrote in the foreword the Terror War series (now called The Holy War of Our Making) was a project I had been working on since 4 years ago, returning to on and off over time, I recorded a version of it as a script alongside my original narration for Ukrainian Divide and the idea was that the series would release either shortly after Divide or in between its episodes as a kind of shorter form stopgap, but once Divide turned out to be a much longer production than intended that plan went out the window and when we got to talking about future projects the Terror War series didn’t seem to fit in with our new plans that well, so I decided to just keep iterating on it and release it as an article series instead.

I originally planned to host Divide in the same way, first by cleaning up and finishing the Multimedial Article version of the project in Obsidian in May, but when hosting that became difficult I then moved to hosting them as regular articles in September, but with Massi picking up constant production on Divide again late in the year I shelved these ideas and only Episode 1 was released in this form.

I’ve been working on content for the site pretty much consistently throughout the year, while not every month sees an article release I’m working on articles every month, it’s just that sometimes they’re so hefty or complex they take a while before they see the light of day. Well, that and I’ve lost quite a lot of weeks to the gigging experience, partying is hard work you know!

After a few aborted attempts Massi has also released his first new articles to the site in the last few months: His first entry of Stepping Stones, released in August, talking about the obscure IRC messaging system and reflecting on digital infrastructure, and then the first edition of fumi, his article about Frank Miller’s Holy Terror, I have to say the Holy Terror article is no doubt one of the best articles this site has seen so far, period.

How he describes the dynamics of terrorism is spot on, and he did a really good job painting the imagery of a resistance to that terror too, invoking powerful imagery to dismantle hate, a really excellent emotional article that I highly recommend reading, I never thought I’d be brought to tears by a panel of empty squares, but there it is.

Here’s to the future!
#

Keep an eye out for ED, I have several projects planned/started last year that I’ll be dropping in this one, I have the last article of my addendum series that I’ll be working on and hopefully releasing very soon, The Gigging Experience addendum, many stories to tell there! 

The Ukrainian Divide is in the final stages of production and releasing this month, Massi has been working very hard to get it finished, working every day even on Christmas, New Years and all these other big holidays, I’m very happy with what we’re cooking up together with the edit and I feel it does the topic justice, article versions will release here shortly after the video editions.

To cap things off, here’s the stats on all the articles added in the first year of ED, broken down by the years we’ve tagged them under, I wish everyone (except for my opps) a happy new year!

The Breakdown
#

2019:
#

  • 5 articles, 6,285 words, 32 minutes estimated reading time

Consists entirely of articles ported over from Massi’s older site, cheecken.net ( Valve Doesn’t Care About Their Games, Quake 2 RTX, RAGE and the beauty of Megatextures, Simple but Fun: Trackmania and the TEKKEN 7 Review)

2020:
#

  • 2 articles, 13,287 words, 63 minutes estimated reading time (1 hour and 3 minutes)

Consists of:

2021:
#

  • 3 articles, 4,170 words, 21 minutes estimated reading time

Consists of:

2022:
#

  • 10 articles, 32,934 words, 161 minutes estimated reading time (2 hours and 41 minutes)

Consists of:

2023:
#

  • 4 articles, 37,261 words, 178 minutes estimated reading time (2 hours and 58 minutes)

Consists of:

2024:
#

  • 21 articles, 164,138 words, 782 minutes estimated reading time (13 hours and 2 minutes)

Consists of:

The total so far:
#

  • 45 articles, 258,075 words, 1,237 minutes estimated reading time (20 hours and 37 minutes)

Consisting of:

  • 7 articles ported from cheecken.net
  • 4 Cheecken channel scripts
  • 4 Cheecken video embeds
  • 3 unreleased projects
  • 3 internal documents
  • 3 written versions of MEGA documentaries
  • 3 entries from the War on Terror series
  • And 18 original articles

Related

The Democracy Followup: Voting Systems, Turnout Culture and the US Election
·13145 words·62 mins· loading · loading
Elwood
The Study of Propaganda - Adam Something
·6192 words·30 mins· loading · loading
Elwood
A Busy Day in Damascus
·6774 words·32 mins· loading · loading
Elwood