A wise man once said, “YouTube success is like sex, I’ve never experienced it, but in some cases I enjoy watching others experience it”. That wise man was me, welcome to the LOFOE interview with Accursed Farms.
In June of 2007 the iPhone was released. In January of 2009 Barack Obama, aka the 44th president, was inaugurated, and months later Grand Theft Auto IV (aka Grand Theft Auto 4) and Meal Gear Solid 4 (aka Metal Gear Solid IV) were released. Was this chain of events sparked by Accursed Farms March 15th, 2007, upload of Civil Protection: Aliens (Part 1)? To put it simply, yes. In this interview will I go on to back up my claims that Ross (aka Accursed Farms) is responsible for a groundbreaking phone that would go on to influence better phones not made my Apple, or that he installed the 44th president? To put it simply, no. It’s just a conspiracy theory, some may even call it “conjecture”. Speaking of conspiracy theories, rewatching his fantastic video on Deus Ex (for what may be the 50th time) immediately made me want to reach out to him to have a chat.
I am a longtime fan of Ross and his work. Years ago, I would watch his Mind of Freeman videos, a series where he role-plays through Half-Life as an ordinary dude who was running late for work one day and now must deal with a bunch of nonsense, and joy would be sparked within me. As it turns out while I was watching his videos all these years ago, he may or not have been living within blocks of me in an area of the U.S. where “Yinz” means “y’all” and “N’at” means “and that”. Thankfully he lives far enough away now that I can freely expose the truth behind Accursed Farms influence on the geopolitical system and the post-3rd pre-5th integer containing installments of games. Freely. Freeman. Mind of Freeman. Accursed Farms. Ross. Ross’s Game Dungeon. Dungeon. Punishment. Oh, no.
If this is the last time you hear from me, I own a ¼ acre on land on the moon and NFT of 1,000 Dogecoin, I leave it to my nephew. Enjoy the interview.
The Interview Begins
Yahoo: You’re one of the OG’s of YouTube at this point, you’ve been around for a minute and you’re still putting out good stuff.
Ross: I’m not sure if YouTube existed or not when I [originally] put out Civil Protection, the first episode, but put it like this: it didn’t exist on a level where it was seen as a viable way for people to view it. Forget about money, that wasn’t even an option then. I just started because I wanted to make videos just for people to see them. It would be like if you were to put videos on Vimeo now, but worse. Yeah, maybe a few people would see it, but it wasn’t convenient. You didn’t have embedding options or anything like that. I think 320 resolution was the maximum or something.
Yahoo: Is that what got you into all of this? Making Civil Protection and getting good reception?
Ross: The thing is, Civil Protection did get good reception and I liked it, but with Civil Protection each episode is like making a small mod for a game, the amount of work it took to animate it was driving me a little crazy so Freemans Mind was just an experiment I did to try to get something out faster and it ended up being probably the most popular thing I ever do, so it was kind of a runaway experiment.
Yahoo: You’re still getting good views on YouTube. I imagine you have a pretty good community, just looking at your Twitch chats they tend to move quickly, that’s usually a pretty good indicator. (Editor’s note: I don’t know how to talk)
Ross: I don’t even have a good reference; I don’t even worry about it. I just try to focus on having good videos. I think I could have a lot more viewers if I just get stuff out faster and try and was trying to cultivate it more. It’s probably a relatively solid base because everyone who’s gotten sick of it or left, they’re already gone. My audience is just everyone who’s left, I guess.
Yahoo: I mean, you’re still getting six figure views. I look at other channels and when they upload the VODS of their Twitch Q and A’s, there’s a struggle to get even a couple thousand views, and yours seem to still do well.
Ross: You know, I’m sure part of it is whatever YouTube’s algorithm wants to do at the moment and they can change that whenever they want. Right now, I’m experimenting with getting help on editing and one of the guys who offered to help, he’s quite promising. He sent me some videos he did, he actually animates too. I was kind of surprised he wanted to edit videos because the animation seemed quite high quality. I looked at his channel and viewed a couple of them and one had, you know, like the new ones had like 300 views, some of the other ones had 500 or 800. Then there’s one that has 11 million views. So, I was thinking that the YouTube algorithm just does whatever the hell it wants. There wasn’t a break in quality between the ones that get a couple hundred and he one that got 11 million.
Yahoo: When it comes to your stuff [on YouTube], are you extra careful as to what you say and in choosing your wording? In your Deus Ex video, you mention that you don’t like to get political, and everything you said was factual, I mean you showed charts and stuff.
Ross: I don’t want to get too preachy. If I have an opinion and I can back it up and I think it’s really relevant to the video I might do it, but I always try to look at it from the perspective of say somebody has been working at their job all day doing fast food or something and they come home and see a new video is out, I want them to have a good time. I can kind of veer off that and lose track, but that’s my goal. I want them to be glad that they watched the video and had something fun to watch. It’s not that I try to be careful, I realize that I have to be interested in the topic or feel relevant to it and have something to say on it because if I don’t even know what I’m talking about then it’s not going to help much but also, if this is going to make the video more of a downer then it’s going to make me thing twice about whether I want to discuss it.
Musk, the rescission
Bears, and redemption
Up to this point, both Ross and I were cruising down your classic interview road with our windows down and hair up listening to Sum 41’s classic album titled All Killer No Filler. It was never clear which one of us had their hands on the wheel as we drove down the straight and narrow, what is even less clear is who grabbed the wheel and yanked towards a road seldom travelled. I do not know the name of the road we barreled down, but what I do know is that gravity became subjective and the radio that once tickled our ears with future Rock and/or roll Hall of Fame sensation Sum 41 turned to white nose. Upon rolling our windows up the voice within the white noise became clear. It was the voice of a child’s ghost whispering “Yahoo, you’ve gone on this transitional tangent long enough”. The child’s ghost was kind of a jerk.
Ross: One thing I keep thinking of a lot is the Dupont company dumping chemicals into the water, and it’s poisonous. There are traces of it all around the world now. They’ve very arguably poisoned like hundreds of thousands of people. That’s not really a controversial topic, but the news is just not talking about that. It’s also kind of a downer topic.
Yahoo: Teflon, that’s one that has been bothering me.
Ross: From my understanding they’re still doing it (reference) but the compounds a little bit different and the EPA laws say that if it’s not officially on a banned substance list then the company can use their own discretion as to what the safe levels are until it… I mean, in a just world I think a lot of these people would be in prison.
Yahoo: In a just world more than one person would have gone to jail for the housing market crisis 14 years ago. He was like mid-level too. I think about that guy and I would like to see a documentary about him. Like, some of them [those responsible] wound up working in the White House, others wound up just rich, I mean can you imagine your luck? Being a part of one of the biggest scams in the worlds history and you’re the only one who went to jail and you weren’t like, you couldn’t see the top from where you were standing.
Ross: Well, it might have given him a new outlook on the world. Might have made him have some different values after that. I mean, you find out he quits and becomes a campground ranger or something. Or maybe he’s a professional fisherman now and he’s spending all his time out at sea.
Yahoo: He can be like Jordan Belfort and give speeches on ethics while being known for your lack of ethics. I don’t know with that guy, fool me once. Have you seen the bear on the news? There’s this giant bear and now they think there’s three of them.
Ross: No, I guess I haven’t. I’ve seen a video from years ago from California where this guy is walking, it’s like this arial video, and he turns the corner and there’s this bear like right there in this suburban neighborhood and he just turns and runs away.
Yahoo: Well, there’s this bear in California that has broken into like 100 houses (no source), and it keeps eating everyone’s food. So, obviously the patrols are like “we’re gonna have to kill this bear” and now there’s this controversy where people are like “No, don’t kill that bear” so now I’m thinking the guy who went to prison in 2008, he’s gonna go defend the bear. He’s making amends.
Ross: He might be able to use that as a realignment experience. Like, he realized he was on the wrong path to what he wanted to do.
Yahoo: Then he kills like 300 rangers to save the bear. That would be a good story. Guy goes to prison for massive fraud…
Ross: And he was the only one.
Yahoo: Twist ending, he goes back to prison for all the houses the bears broke into and at the end you just see a bear walking towards the White House wearing a suit. I’m gonna write a script about it, get Gal Gadot on board, she can play whoever she wants, she’s Gal Gadot.
NFT’s
(The “t” Stands for “taxes”)
Yahoo:You did a video about live services and I agreed with your take whole heartedly.
Ross: That’s an example of where I strayed off of it, and it’s just because it bugged me, it just kept buggin me.
Yahoo: I mean, it should bug a lot of people. I mean, NFT’s are whole other thing and I’ll never understand how this happened.
Ross:: I think I figured them out, I have a theory. My theory on NFT’s is that the market of them is an illusion and their main purpose is for either money laundry or tax dodging and a lot of the buyers are also the sellers or are connected to them. So, you’ll see these transactions but really what’s happening is by buying this NFT worth 10 thousand dollars or something, they found a way to juggle taxes so that they can write that off of their expenses, so that’s the real money making from it. And if someone actually buys one of these things in the meantime, well great, we’ll take their money. But there’s not really enough of a market to sustain it because there’s just no value for it at all. I mean the value is saying you own this digital thing that can be copied and infinite amount of times. However, if the only reason it’s being run is for some tax scheme, well then, they win even if there’s no real buyers. I think some companies would love for this to become a legitimate thing because if it does then it’s free money, but the publics not really buying that much. It just doesn’t make sense trying to break it down like “why would I buy this?”.
From musk
till dawn
Ross: I’m not even sure where to start with Elon. Like with Mars, I think we do have capability to go to Mars and it would look neat, but when it comes to practical value that’s quite an endeavor, but I’m not sure there’s any practical value that comes from that especially considering what’s happening on Earth. What’s the advantage of going to Mars versus colonizing the Gobi Desert or the Sahara, or like Bioshock, underwater?
Yahoo: About six years ago I was struggling with money, but I put some away because I wanted to go on a vacation. I spent like $1200 then came back and I couldn’t afford my rent. That’s the way I view the Mars situation. Like, you want to go on vacation, but you can’t even pay rent. I played Red Faction years ago and Outer Worlds.
Ross: It wouldn’t even be on that level; it would be like the Donner Party. It would be a very difficult situation to survive with very little room for error and you’d very likely be utterly dependent on shipments coming in from earth. Again, it’s not like we ended hunger and poverty.
Yahoo: We haven’t even tried to.
Ross: We didn’t get the ecosystem stabilized and now all we have left is to go to the stars, no we’re not really there.
Yahoo: One thing about Elon musk that bothered me is when the pandemic started, he changed his profile picture to the logo for Deus Ex, and anyone who played Deus Ex knows the story. I mean, if it were a meme, it might be kind of funny, but when you have 20 million followers who believe every word you say… super irresponsible bro.
Ross: For any Elon Musk fans watching this and getting upset, tell me, what’s his answer to ecological collapse, that’s the one I’d like to hear.
Yahoo: Dogecoin.
Ross: The oceans being polluted and dying, the rainforest being destroyed, I think I read that like %60 of wildlife is gone since the 70’s (source: Google it) just from human expansion. So yeah, what’s Elon Musks solution to that
