About

Of late, the YouTube Algorithm seems to have decided I exist.  Why more sudden feedback now?

I’ve not suddenly done anything different.  But the past week I’ve suddenly been flooded with eager, enthusiastic, almost fawning replies to my videos.

I am honored, I guess thats the right word, if not somewhat perplexed.

Have I suddenly reached some pinnacle of exposure that propels me to the next quantum energy state of social media infection-ability?  Or has the Algorithm decided I generate ad revenue by some amount that has just reached the threshold that makes it worth giving more referral fuel to the fire?

I’m getting to the point in my life where I think about what I’ll leave behind, and what is the best way to give some continuity to what I spent a lot of my life collecting and striving for in my “spare time”.

I’m not sure how much the actual atoms are worth saving from recycling, but the one thing that is likely to endure and doesn’t require much care and feeding is words.

Second best is probably video, but I can’t convince myself that YouTube will exist as it is forever.

But then there are few if any permanent things in our lives.

I always hated math.  I’d have probably spent more time becoming a degreed engineer if I hadn’t dreaded all the math involved.  I went more the route of ham radio and practical ‘what you can actually do’ with electronics at an early age.  Working with Scanimate was the first time I could actually put my hands on and play with circuits that were actually math functions.  To this day, I still find a certain wonder to wiring up a formula and having it do non-obvious things.  A good example is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ejBXSCePGU&t=1s

So I guess I’ve decided that somehow getting more people to like and comment is the best way to Feed The Algorithm with the hope that that makes the joy of all this live on, maybe for a few more people.

I’ve collected a ridiculously large amount of electronic Stuff.  It all has value to me.  It impresses me because it was rare and incredibly expensive to buy much less produce back in its heyday.

A lot of my technology collection had its roots in NASA.   Not that it went to the moon but just that the moon shot really focused all our technology on getting that done.  Failure was not an option, and so literally engineers were fearless in designing and building whatever it took to get a job done. There is a failure thats an inevitable part of doing what hasn’t been done before and rethinking what didn’t work and why. 

So when you find something that was the focus of that kind of intense scrutiny on reliability and quality at any cost, all that goes through your head just looking at it.  Possibly millions were made, which is a miracle in itself.  Or like the Scanimate and the DeLorean, only a few rare ones exist, making the people who know how to keep them maintained and happy a dwindling number. 

I’m planning on including interviews with friends and people I’ve known over the years who have their own unique perspective on vintage tech and the world. And this material will likely not be available on youtube.

I’m hoping this sort of “members-only” approach will be a good way for those of us who find this sort of thing interesting to keep in touch, to exchange ideas, independent of concerns about YouTube or others suddenly changing the rules on us.

There is a small fee to join my pages here, but I plan on making a lot of my private collection of techno-junk and media archives available to members only.

So we’ll see how we like it!

I’ll probably continue to post youtube videos and welcome all comments, but I will feel more like speaking my mind here.

I hope you’ll join me.

Dave Sieg

Community Guidelines

Please respect the following community guidelines to maintain an enjoyable environment:

• Keep conversation respectful, without personal attacks
• Don’t blow up other members’ feeds. If someone isn’t responding to you, let it be
• No pornography
• Keep out behavior that could be seen as trolling/spamming
• Relax, be yourself, and enjoy