Ten years of roaming97

Four days ago

I was thinking about a good way to celebrate ten years since I started creating videos as a hobby and a source of income for a while. I wanted to create a video for it, but life has been so busy lately that I could barely squeeze some time for projects I’m working on, among those a web tool that I believe will be useful for the community and my next short film.

The point being, this blog post will do. Text is what works best in my current situation as it isn’t as time-consuming. Back in time we go!

Five years ago

I made a retrospective video in 2021 (kind of a one-off I forgot about shortly after despite its significance), back when roaming97 had just turned five years old. That video only had a Spanish voice-over and a compilation of remastered versions of my older videos. I have obscured access to this video not too long ago - as I believe I could’ve done a better job explaining when and how all of this began. It can still be found if you look for it, though.

Remasters

Just as well I no longer believe the remasters were a good way to republish my older content when I could’ve just posted the original versions of those videos. I’m still figuring it out to this day since none of those videos are longer than a couple of minutes, some not even breaking the 30-second mark. The entire compilation in this 2021 video which remastered fourteen of my older videos was only 12 minutes long, minus five seconds of transitions between each video that would subtract 70 seconds from it, ten seconds shy of eleven minutes of actual video content.

In the scheme of my work as a whole, these are mostly drafts and scraps, which - understandably - belong in a highly experimental phase where I didn’t commit to any video as a full project. Or rather, I didn’t have to commit to a video I didn’t feel like finishing, which worked both ways. This is just a callback to my still unfocused way of working on videos that I’ve had up to that point, which all started…

Ten years ago

I’ll just rip the bandage off: The starting point of roaming97 would be my first finished YouTube Poop. Not when I posted my first video to the internet back in 2012, not when I created the roaming97 YouTube account in early 2017.

On this day, exactly ten years ago I had posted my first entry in the YouTube Poop spot in the unserious video format spectrum, here’s a screenshot I thankful took for no reason when creating this first video. You may notice a lot of Spanish here since it was the Spanish-speaking niche of YouTube Poops I was aiming for, which was easier to make jokes for since that’s my mother tongue.

I didn’t even publish these videos under my current alias, I used another one which I shall abbreviate simply as “TCLP”.

TCLP?

“The Crazy Lenny Pooper”. Because I thought the Lenny face emoji was funny. A couple of weeks after that channel’s creation I shortened the name to just “Lenny Pooper”, and finally just “Lenny”. My avatar used to be a bread-slice-headed gray stickman wearing a Lenny face all the time because that’s how I’d constantly draw myself in comics when I made them in school.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) <- This is a Lenny face.

Why YouTube Poops? Well, this video remixing subgenre differs quite a bit from the much simpler “let’s play” format which just consisted of cuts and slight captioning that I could accomplish using something like Movie Maker, which already shipped with my machine and is what I used from 2012-2015. When taking the leap to this other style of videos, it gave me the perfect opportunity to try out the recently acquired by MAGIX Software - Vegas Pro.

When writing this part I found out that Vegas Pro was acquired AGAIN by Boris FX on the 30th of March, 2026. That’s quite the timing.

So, not too differently from today, my interest had been sparked once again. I started it on the 29th of March, 2016 and published it on the 3rd of May of the same year. I was very excited, this was something I wanted to share to show what I had learned and had fun with in just a few days. That’s why that day is the one I’d mark as ‘the beginning’. The butterfly effect it had on what I was capable of on a technical level and what I wanted to create is something that I still consider funny but also pretty cool.

Belonging

Around this date I was just starting out middle school, and it wasn’t uncommon for some kids to have had their social circle reset. I thought a good way of getting friends was to just show some strangers around my age my “hilarious” videos. “It worked in elementary school, little reason for it to not work now!” I very naively thought.

This is something that I guess a lot of people went through that in their teenage years, setting the goal for themselves to find a niche where you can talk about topics of mutual interest or just seeking validation. And boy, did I seek it, both online and in-person, it’s something I wouldn’t have been able to admit then.

My attitude back then just made everything blow up in my face, it was a fuse I wasn’t ready to light up. The experience was pretty bittersweet, I learned the hard way what happens when you’re an annoying kid online but at the same time it helped me develop some self-awareness around different circles. Another very cool thing is that I did manage to find a small circle of friends who I still talk with to this day (even if not as frequently)! If any of those friends is reading this, los quiero mucho.

Outcome

From this 151 day period I can point out the best thing to came out of it: I had irreversibly adopted some new video editing skills which set me on a path.

Years later going down that path and iterating between different phases in my creative style culminated in my latest project at the time of writing, Cruce. It’s a short film that I’m pretty proud of finishing, and as described there, it hopefully will be a catalyst for a new chapter in my creative work, which is something I had been looking to do since 2024. During that same year, while browsing through my project list I realize that some of them date back a long time. But in spirit, they might just be what I’d want to make nowadays.

Thirteen years ago

I’m steadily believing more and more something I’ve heard occasionally throughout my life: “Time goes by faster the older you get”. Even though it was only three years before the start point, it feels like an eternity ago, not as close as these last ten years which I can still recall.

In 2013 I’d I try for the first time in my life building a world with its own story, characters, arcs, settings, stakes, all that. I used to talk about it with a friend nonstop on the phone, we’d share how we were developing our own fictional worlds, to each other and it was really exciting. It was so exciting in fact that I started to actually write some things down in a more or less structured manner, fleshing out some character designs, building all of the arcs around each one. Well, all but one. One of the supporting characters which at the time was the first ever female character I had ever written. No matter, I could draw her design later, I was just too eager to continue building this universe where a story of epic proportions would take place and then…

I forgot about it. I forgot about this dear brainchild of mine for eleven years.

Eleven years later

I have been drawing quite a lot lately, which is something that I hadn’t done in a very long time. My relationship with drawing could be its own blog post, honestly. My drawings would usually be just fanart from other IPs and characters, but I also began doing pieces for characters I’ve previously written, and suddenly she popped up in my memories, her name and how she was supposed to look like.

After this wave of inspiration, nostalgia, whatever you want to call it washed over me, I knew what I had to do:

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Meet Violette!

And thus, I have brought back a character who is very dear to me in ways that I shall share in the future in more detail. I’m not gonna lie, it feels a little weird to just present something like this in contrast to all of my previous material, but I was encouraged enough to get people to know her.

During this month I’ll see if I can finish up a special page I have planned for her character profile (predictably located at /violette when it’s done). She will be appearing around the site as time goes on as well.

Today

Backwards-looking posts like this sometimes help me see how far I’ve come, but they also make it seem like it’s all I do, so I’ll try to steer away from this tone in future ones. A lot of changes have been going on in my life as of late, but I’m thankful for still being able to stay creating in spite of everything.

Thank you for reading if you’ve reached the end! Here’s to another ten years, maybe? In the meantime, I’ll get back to work.