Alex turned 11 last September. Every other year he had done an interview with me on or around his birthday that I posted to YouTube, but in recent years he hadn’t actually been very cooperative or answered any questions, so I decided to skip it. Of course as soon as he found out about that, he insisted on doing one. That happened the day after his birthday, but of course I suck and didn’t get around to posting it for six months. Oops. Anyway, here is Alex talking (sort of) about turning 11. This time he is joined by his friend Kaylin. Alex made me keep the typo.
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We spent most of the evening thinking the trick or treat volume had been much less than last year. But we were WRONG. As it turns out, when I counted on the timelapse, we had 143 visitors last year, and… exactly 143 visitors this year too. How they were distributed through the night was a little different though, and made it SEEM like fewer people. Now, Amy points out that this year we had more repeat visitors, people coming back for seconds or thirds, but I figure if they come twice, they count twice. (And I counted the same way last year.) So whatever. As far I’m concerned, we had 143 both years. :-) The timelapse includes us setting up, all the trick or treating, and then the dragon flapping its wings for a bit until it started to rain, water got into the power strip we were using, the breaker tripped, and the dragon deflated. Good stuff! Anyway some stats:
And a histogram comparing 2017 and 2018:
I think the perception of there being fewer people this year was because we had more people before it got dark, and last year we had an hour long plateau where it stayed continuously very busy, where this year we had a sharper peak, and then a more rapid drop off, so it started feeling slow again earlier in the evening with a long tail with more people arriving even after we’d wrapped things up and gone inside, leaving our table with candy for the stragglers. Anyway, we had fun. It was our first year with dragons in the driveway. Only one is visible in the timelapse. Here they are both:
Taken just south of Everett, WA on Christmas 2017 (UTC). Snow falls, then mostly melts away again. My timelapses are normally at a dynamically changing pace depending on how much change is happening in this picture, but I readjusted this one to keep a pace of approximately 1 hour every 5 seconds, so 2 minutes for the full 24 hours. Yeah, second timelapse in a week, but we just had the first snow of the season. And the AbulCam was still pointed at the driveway and caught all of the snow falling… then rapidly melting again. It also caught me, Brandy, and Alex leaving for a trip to the east coast. So we missed the snow! Anyway… enjoy! Although I’ve missed a few, most years lately I’ve tried to do a timelapse of the trick-or-treat hours at my house. Here is this year’s. I think it came out pretty well this time! Some facts:
And here is the histogram of when people came based on analysis of the timelapse:
You can of course also see my family getting ready, going out ourselves, and cleaning up afterwards. Oh, and the 21 additional hours of November 1st (UTC) after all that was over. And of course, all this is possible because finally, about a year since it stopped being fully functional and I didn’t have time to fix it because I was swamped with electiongraphs.com, the AbulCam is back and better than ever. I upgraded both the hardware and software behind it in the last few weeks to be ready for Halloween. So enjoy and check by any time. It will probably usually be mounted in my home office, but at the moment it is still pointed at our driveway. Over time I may move it to other interesting places depending on what I feel like. :-)
We did the Duck Dash today… it was fun. :-) The latest big epic to be posted on Alex’s YouTube channel is a play through of the six existing parts of “Into the Multiverse“, a community test chamber series for Portal 2. There are six parts. A seventh is promised, but isn’t out yet. The full play through is 7 hours, 34 minutes, and 56 seconds spanning 23 episodes on Alex’s channel. The original playing of the game was from April 14th to May 31st of this year. I’m a bit behind on getting things posted. :-) Now, most people won’t watch the whole thing, but I encourage you to watch at least some of it and sample a few of the episodes. A lot of it is Alex and I bickering over various things. :-) The whole playlist is embedded above. If you hit play and stare at your computer for seven and a half hours, you will watch the whole thing. But it will start you at the beginning of Episode 1. I now present Alex’s new mega episode from his channel ALeXMXeLA.com. He is very proud of this. It is different than his usual gaming videos. There is no video game. Instead, he and Amy present some educational material about plants. Sorta.
Alex did a lot of the editing on the video (what there was of it) himself, adding scene transitions and choosing how to do the credits at the end, and making choices about how much to leave in and what to drop. He decided he wanted to include almost all of the footage we had, only a few seconds total were left out. And a few seconds of footage are actually included twice! So this is his longest video yet, over an hour. And while I may have cut some out of it if I was doing the editing all by myself to bring it under an hour, I admit to being amused by the sibling banter that winds its way through the entire episode. Enjoy! And subscribe to his channel! This is the 74th episode. We have 70 more “in the can” that have been recorded but not yet posted. I am trying to post several each week, but am having issues keeping up with the rate he records them! In addition to the gaming videos, he has been making some more of these non-gaming videos occasionally as well about various topics. :-) PS: Lets Plant 1 was an earlier video giving an overview of different sorts of trees that appear in the games he plays. PSS: I specifically had Alex choose some of the built in “use it anywhere” music loops from Garage Band for the credits to be safe on copyright sorts of issues, but YouTube still identified it as copyrighted music (although with the wrong title, so I suspect it may be an incorrect identification) and so ads were inserted by the the supposed copyright holder. Annoying. Better than blocking the video, but still annoying. You can just close the ads, but still… Update 2016-06-24 13:56 UTC: Had to upload a new version of this because a day and a half after publishing it Alex pointed out there was a place in the middle with an audio gap that escaped my notice despite watching it over and over again. I was able to fix it, and a corrected version is now posted and embedded above. Update 2016-06-26 07:09 UTC: It looks like the new version, with the exact same closing credits music, didn’t trigger the copyright warning this time. Good. Because it wasn’t the song it said it was anyway. Sigh. Alex’s full play through of the original Portal is now available as a playlist on his YouTube channel. He has a little help from me and Amy, but does quite a bit of it himself. You are going to watch the whole thing right? It is 11 episodes. They total 3 hours, 52 minutes, and 21 seconds of game play. I’ve watched all of it, so should you! Probably not at one sitting though… Alex’s channel is here: ALeXMXeLA We’ve now posted 10 episodes on Alex’s YouTube channel. There are 15 more that he has already recorded that I’ll be posting as soon as I can get to them. All the ones posted so far are Minecraft videos, but he’s been branching out into other games on some of the ones in the queue to be posted. Please subscribe, please watch, please tell your friends to watch. Especially ones with K-3 age kids who might enjoy watching a six year old playing games. He is really excited about doing these, so it would be nice to have a few people looking. I’ll especially call out Episode 8 here, because in it he requests that the people watching vote for who won the “Building Time” contest we had, and give suggestions for our next Building Time. So watch and leave your comments on YouTube! Here is Episode 8, which he titled “Building Time – Nala Part 4”: Thanks all! [Edit 15:24 UTC to fix typo.] |
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