freaking cool brahkie moments !!!

I will admit to often having lofty ambitions for what I aim to accomplish in these articles. You will find no such ambitions here today. I simply need to show you something.

For those not in a position to watch a video at the moment, let me briefly explain. The above instructional video - “how 2 time travel IRL” - is striking for many reasons, not least of which that it is in a 4:3 aspect ratio. 4:3 was the primary aspect ratio for TVs and computer monitors basically since the invention of the camera, and only began to be phased out in the mid-to-late 2000s. This means if you see a Youtube video in 4:3, it is almost certainly from the early, early days of the site, as 4:3 was already well on its way out by the site’s founding in 2005.

The above video popped up into my recommended a few nights ago, and I assumed that the almighty algorithm had just sent me through a time portal, as it sometimes does. This would be appropriate, as the video depicts our host brahkie teaching us how to build a DIY time travel machine. The instructions she provides us are as follows:

1. Get a radio with a CD player in it.

2. Retrieve a genuine copy of Microsoft Windows 95. (“It may seem silly, but you have to believe in me,” she adds.)

3. Get one original NES controller.

4. Place your Windows 95 CD into the CD player and press play.

5. ”Plug” the NES controller into the antenna of the radio, and then enter the Konami code.

At this point in the process, my spider senses were tingling. This seemed like a pretty sophisticated shitpost for a mid-2000s Youtube video, and the video quality is just a little too high for a video from that era. It is at this point that I check the video’s upload date.

Aug 30, 2023

”Oh,” I say to myself. “I’ve stumbled upon a Project.”

I immediately begin investigating further, and upon doing so I discover that the project in question has been ongoing for almost an entire year, humbly beginning with peanutbutterjellytime.wmv in March 2023. As far as I can tell, this individual has created this channel with the singular objective of authentically replicating a golden age Youtube channel, complete with Windows Movie Maker transitions (volume warning!), console wars discourse, and Unregistered HyperCam 2.

It takes a non-trivial amount of effort to accomplish something like this. She presumably did actually have to install Windows XP to do some of these bits. The structure of the videos are extremely particular about avoiding any anachronisms that would give the game away, and she generally displays a Nathan Fielder-level commitment to character in every public appearance I have seen her in. Not only that, she clearly thinks critically about how to continue improving the authenticity of each shitpost. As proof, take a look at “I HATE FRED!!!”

As brahkie motions backwards to a collection of three deep-fried pixels that we’re led to believe is Lucas Cruikshank, you immediately notice that this video is even more 2007 than the previous ones were - and it was uploaded much more recently (only two weeks ago at time of writing). The audio and video quality are more authentic (see: awful), the PS3 controller and enormous CRT sell the time period more than even the radio did, and her cadence is much less modern and much closer to that of an actual fifteen-year-old complaining about FRED in the late 2000s.

All of this begs the question: how old is this person?

Possibility one is that they’re someone in their twenties who remembers this era of Youtube from watching it as a kid, in which case they’ve created a love letter to the bygone era of their childhood. In this case, their meticulous effort would still be enormously impressive, but it would be a much more conventional sort of parody-as-nostalgia project.

Possibility two - and the one that my cursory research has led me to think is more likely - is that this is an actual, current teenager who decided one day to create a near-perfect reconstruction of a cultural moment that occurred either in their infancy or before they were born, and succeeded.

In the sublime beauty of deathmatch, I talked about how as a kid I experienced a sort of anachronistic nostalgia for the retro PC games of the mid-90s, even though most were released before I was born. My nostalgia for those games and the online culture that surrounded them is not rooted in my wonder at experiencing the leading edge of the future, but in discovering the trailing edge of the past. This perspective gives me a uniquely sober view of those games, as I encountered them already knowing what “the future” was like, and was able to appreciate them as they were, rather than being overawed by technological or cultural novelty.

In brahkie, for the first time, I am seeing someone younger than me engage with the media and culture from my childhood in the same way that I engaged with the media and culture of the 90s. Unlike Half-Life or IRC, FRED hate videos and Windows Movie Maker edits really were for me, being created in real-time for people my age by people my age. I genuinely do not believe I could embark on a project like brahkie, because my vision of that time is way too tied up with those overawing forces of nostalgia to really get to the essence of what content creation in that era of the Internet was really about. In many respects, it seems like the very reason brahkie is remarkable is the same reason she is the perfect person for the job. She’s not remembering - she’s digging, and the stuff she’s digging up are things that we forgot we buried.