Hello again! This’ll probably be a bit of a weird entry, but I wanted to talk about it all the same.
The first video I posted to YouTube was back in 2016, when I was only five years old and had just gotten a tablet for Christmas. Somehow, I managed to continue making content on YouTube for ten years and counting, and it has been an experience. But at some point or another, I realized there was no easy way to really see that progression, so in January of last year, I created a playlist to house all of that content.
You may or may not be aware of the No Food Before Bed channel. It was the most success I’d ever gotten on YouTube and remains so to this day. All I’d really do on it however was make lyrical covers of videogame music, and eventually, that got old. Really old.
I’d been working on a video for that channel that I’d recently completely abandoned, along with the channel itself for the second time in its lifespan, yet the video was mostly finished, so I decided I’d upload unlisted alongside some other videos I’d wanted to reupload from an old deleted account.
But as I was looking through, I kept stumbling upon more and more things I’d never posted but still spent lots of time on and that’s when I decided that that playlist, THE MAKENZIE DETRAY EXPERIENCE as I titled it, wouldn’t just act as a collection of videos that I’d posted, but an archive of all the content I’d made, posted or not. The only issue with that is that our internet is terrible.
I started this all off by combing through the second account on my computer. See, I’d originally signed into the computer with an account under the name “No Food Before Bed”, since, at that time, I’d assumed I would be sticking with that channel for a long, long time, but after said account got too cluttered for thirteen-year-old me to want to deal with, I just created a new one.
On this second account was mostly stuff from femboyWITHAGUN, a channel I’d created while I was still trying to figure myself out, and soon to be loaded with content. There were tons of things I’d completely forgotten about. Song covers, multi-hour Discord calls, animations, original songs! And every time I’d find a new piece of media I wanted to save, I’d load it into a folder on my desktop.
When it came time to actually upload all that stuff, I knew I didn’t want to go in order of name or something like that since some of the files were hours long and others were only a few seconds, so I set the folder to sort from shortest to longest and began uploading.
I started by batch-posting all of the files under a minute in length but my internet was so bad that it still took like twenty minutes to upload them. After that, I moved on to files under ten minutes in length and uploaded two at a time instead of all of them at once to save time… somehow. In retrospect, I’m not really sure why I thought it would save time. Maybe I assumed that the more files uploading at the same time, the slower the upload speed of all those files would be. There’s probably some truth in that to be fair.
But there was one video that refused to upload at a regular pace. See, every other video that was around four minutes long uploaded in around ten to twenty minutes, but for some strange reason the unfinished lyrical cover from the No Food Before Bed channel took over an hour, no matter how many times I’d try to upload it from the start to see if it had just been a problem with the page or the internet. Nothing worked. So instead, I simply saved it for last, the last one I’d upload before I went to bed that would upload while I slept.
I woke up that morning to find that, thankfully, there hadn’t been any major complications with the uploading process and the video was finally up on my channel, unlisted of course. With that, I continued the gruelling process of uploading.
As the first ten minute video began uploading, I made the mistake of browsing through my files and found even more videos to upload, including a twenty-one-part Minecraft series I’d recorded not for YouTube, but to watch back myself at some later date. And apparently, that later date would be pretty soon.
As I neared the thirty-minute-long videos, I realized that I hadn’t used my mobile hotspot in a while and that it might still be high-speed, which would actually allow me to upload things faster than my normal internet could, and, trying it out, I was indeed correct, and from that point onwards, I used the hotspot whenever I’d upload anything for the next few days.
Now that I’d found that Minecraft series, I began to intermittently upload it for the playlist between the other videos I was archiving, which I’m sure didn’t help with speeding up the process.
With the videos now becoming hours long, I moved the uploading process to my phone, since that’s what I’d always used to upload multi-hour things before. Though most of the multi-hour things had just been recordings of theater productions in the past. Of course, I did all of this on my mobile data since it was faster than the regular internet.
And then it was finally time to upload the longest one. “Alex Call”, a four-hour-long recording of a call I had with someone called Alex who I met online a few years ago. Yet, when I went to press the button to upload it…
“Error. File too short.”
It was corrupted, and fixing it would mean uploading it to a different program, having it work on it, downloading it back, and trying to upload it again, which is especially not going to happen considering it’s four hours long. So, unfortunate as it is, I decided not to upload it.
Even though I thought that I’d finished the day before, I wasn’t really done yet. I’d found even more files, this time mostly things I’d only done over the past year and never posted. See, earlier that day, I realized that, in THE MAKENZIE DETRAY EXPERIENCE, 2025 as a year had forty videos encompassing it, whereas 2026 so far only had fourteen. A lot of it probably comes down to the fact that I’ve moved away from video creation quite a bit in the past year and over to things like music and writing.
If I wanted to really add what I’d been working on this year to the playlist, I needed to find a way to include this blog, something I was unsure how to do at first. I originally had the idea of voicing over it, but decided it was too much work for something nobody was going to see but myself, so in the end, I decided it’d probably be best to just have them scrolling from top to bottom with some music I’d made around the same time playing in the background.
And after a very long four days, I’d reached the last one to upload. A cover of “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire”. But something about this one made me decide to make a short video for it and actually post it this time.
And that was the end of the archiving. It was a very long process and, to be honest, I’m not sure I did it justice, but I think I did a decent job.
This entry was written on the 14th of August, 2026.