Sam Callahan

“A Video By Sam Callahan”

Fits and Starts

It may seem strange at first glance to see someone like me, who’s only put out four videos, to be looking back at a YouTube career, but the truth is I’ve been at this on and off for a long time now. My personal channel, under my real name, goes back as far as 2015, which is around the same time I began work on a channel called “Interactive Friction” with Brandon Carey, which I was the editor for. Even before those, I had started and then killed at least two more channels, and even that was after a short lived stint with a few high school friends back in 2011-2012. Regardless of the quality one may argue for most of them, I have made literally hundreds of videos.

And after this latest attempt, I can feel myself falling away from it yet again, even though I want so badly for it to stick.

Things I Loved In 2020

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A Short Discussion About ‘V’ From DMC5

COMPLETE SPOILERS FOR DMC5 WITHIN.

So last week I appeared on Brandon Carey’s stream with Matthew Lovenzka to talk about Devil May Cry 5, and while I was pretty excited and discussing things during the latter half of the stream, I was rather quiet for the first half. Anxiety be like that sometimes.

So, in an effort to clear my thoughts on the missing pieces, here’s a few notes on someone major that I didn’t talk about enough.

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No Feet, Dead Man, and Cap’N Shammy: A Sea of Thieves Tale

Header Photo by Alan

A dimly lit tavern and it’s quiet shanty tunes offer a night of reprieve for weary sailors on this dark and stormy night.

Oh, and the mead. The mead helps a lot.

Resting in the corner with drink in hand sits a lone pirate. He mumbles to himself between drinks as a duo comes through the door. Soaked in rain, one of them is a burly woman of sorts, covered in tattoos, and the other a scrawny man missing a hand. They each take a seat next to the drunken pirate.

Betwixt their idle conversation, he lifts his head.

“Dark night,” he says.

“Aye,” the woman responds, “cold as well.”

“No colder than the night me and my crew met The Queen of Crests.”

The man sighs.

“Gods, not this again. Every bleedin’ tavern this happens,” he moans.

He gets up with, “can’t a man just have a drink in peace.”

The pirate man lies his head back down.

The duo get up to leave.

The pirate slams a few blue-ish coins on the table. They glow in the faint lamp-light. The woman and man look on with awe.

“What are these?” the woman asks, her eyes fixated on the their beauty.

“The story’s true, if ye care to hear it,” the pirate responds with a sly smirk.

Slowly they both sit back down.

The pirate takes a long chug of his mead.

“Our tale begins on a night much like this…”

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In Memory Of Mitch

I’ve never been particularly good at talking about myself, and the story of my relationship to Suicide Silence isn’t an easy one at that. For years, I told myself I would write this story during the month of November, and always let it slide by, because it always felt painful to think about these years in my past.

But these days, I’m doing well. I’m moving forward.

And I think it’s important to remember a moment when I wasn’t.

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The Future Of Interactive Friction

This is very off-the-cuff, so it’s definitely not going to be a very professional sounding post.

Today marks the first time anything has been uploaded to the Interactive Friction channel since the end of the Kingdom Hearts Primer on March 2nd, and I wanted to express some thoughts about the future of the channel as related to myself.

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Funny Games: As Real As The Reality Which We See

Released in 1997, Funny Games, written and directed by Michael Haneke, tells the story of a family on vacation being invaded, tortured, brutalized, and eventually murdered by two young men. Aside from the fact that the film is incredibly violent without any reason, what’s notable is that Paul, one of the two young murderers, consistently breaks the fourth wall and acknowledges that the audience is viewing the film, and and questions whether him knowing he’s in a film makes it as real as ‘reality’.

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What I Learned From The Kingdom Hearts Primer

Header Photo Credit

The Kingdom Hearts Primer was teased on September 27th, 2016 and ended on March 2nd, 2018. That’s 522 days to make this series happen, not counting the original botched recording that started exactly a year before the teaser went up. My co-host Brandon Carey and I totaled 103 episodes, averaging about half an hour a piece, or simply a clean 100 if we don’t count the custom-made trailers.
While I didn’t work every single one of those days, the primer was still something that hung around me that entire time, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot from it. Here’s a few of those things.

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The Journey’s End | Persona 3

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Note: For this article, it’s assumed that you’ve played Persona 3, or at least have a cursory knowledge of the game’s plot, characters, and combat system. If not, you may find yourself a bit lost.

Memento Mori. Remember that you will die. Remember your death.

Riding the train on the way to a new city and new life, we suddenly experience a moment in time where everything twists. The city is bathed in reds and greens, and everyone around us now resides in a literal coffin. To everyone else, this moment in time doesn’t exist. To us, and a select few others, it has a name: The Dark Hour.

This, and the enormous, seemingly endless, tower that dominates the landscape during this time, make up the bulk of Persona 3’s narrative, themes, and play hours. I can’t honestly say that Persona 3 is better than any of the other games in the franchise, but I feel that some aspects of it are worth taking a closer look at.

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I felt like I spent a lot of 2017 not doing much. While the Kingdom Hearts Primer rolled in and onward from the previous year, the sheer monotony of the editing process started to take its toll on me. At the same time, I also finally filmed one of my dream projects, LAST NIGHT, that I wrote back when I first started film school. Then I proceeded to barely work on the editing for it, even though I had to take off of school for a while do to financial reasons.

Whether for those reasons or not, not too many games seriously gripped me this past year, but even so, I deeply appreciate the level of storytelling, intimate or grandiose, through writing or gameplay, that video games are coming to consistently achieve.

Here’s a few of those.