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A place to turn obsession into writing, writing into videos, and a lifetime of overthinking into something I can actually point to.

I’ve spent too much of my life living inside my own head, turning interests into private internal worlds, and this site is me finally making those obsessions concrete through writing that eventually leads into videos.

Nicolas DeCubas

What This Site Is For

So this is mainly a place where I can turn my obsession into writing, and then definitely videos as the final overview of my work.

That’s the basic idea. The writing builds toward the videos, but it also gets to be its own thing. A deeper dive. The messy, more complete version. The videos, ideally, become the concise refined version of what I write about here, whether that’s movies, games, or whole series I want to disappear into for a while. If I go in deep on something like Metal Gear, I want to do a post for each game, sit with each one properly, and then eventually make one concise video covering the whole series. That structure makes sense to me. It gives the obsession somewhere to go.

I also want this to be a personal archive, and honestly a showcase of my dedication to each topic. A small part of this is just me trying to stop letting interests stay trapped in my head. I decided to make it now because I feel like the past 28 years of my life have mostly been lived in my own head. I want an outlet. I want something to show for my ideas and dedications and passions.

Why I Needed to Make It

I’m an obsessive curator, which is good and bad. I’m trying to learn how to refine that instead of just keeping a hundred broad interests floating around at once. I usually describe my hobbies and passions as a mile wide and an inch deep, which is probably a little hard on myself, but not unfair either. I can talk to someone who doesn’t care much about film or gaming and sound like I know everything. Then I talk to someone who really knows their shit and I can fall apart. This has been a recurring theme in my life. So part of this site is me trying to fix that a little. Or at least confront it. Put the reps in. Stop hovering around my interests and actually go deeper on them.

The Taste Behind It

The taste behind what I like is pretty consistent, even when the subjects are all over the place. I love when it feels like someone fully absorbed themselves in their craft. David Lynch feels like that to me. Daft Punk feels like that to me. I appreciate when someone puts their entire mind and body into what they do. It creates immersion, but it also creates respect. You can feel when something was made by someone who cared enough to build a whole world around the thing. Not in a fake “content” way. Not in a “here, I slapped together some shit for you to watch” way. More like, I curated this for myself, and if you happen to appreciate or enjoy it, that’s great. If not, whatever.

That’s a big part of what I’m chasing here.

Film

On the film side, my taste is personal in a way that can be hard to explain cleanly, but I know it when I feel it. I love Napoleon Dynamite for the nostalgia aspect, obviously, but even when I watched it back closer to when it came out, it felt like a world that was just around the corner, even though I’m from Florida and this is Idaho. It felt weirdly reachable. Familiar in a way that didn’t make literal sense. And beyond that, it still feels fully authored to me. Like Jared Hess really put his all into it and made something out of his own experience instead of sanding it down into something broader and more acceptable.

I love Mulholland Drive for almost the opposite reason, but really for the same reason. It feels like I’m being absorbed into a curated David Lynch dream, not just watching it from the outside. Same with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Same with Dreams. Same with World on a Wire. Same with Kwaidan. Same, honestly, with Revenge of the Sith, which is a very different movie from all of those, but still feels like a world with a real point of view behind it. That matters to me more than polish by itself ever will.

Interstella 5555 has always had a special place in my heart because it felt like worlds colliding in the best possible way. Daft Punk was always one of my favorite artists, and that movie combined my love for film and craft with my love for Daft Punk in a way that kind of blew my mind when I first saw it. I couldn’t get enough of it. Fellowship of the Ring is another one that feels deeply me, mostly because it is the start of a great adventure and can stand on its own in a way the others can’t quite do. The scale is incredible, but it’s also the invitation that makes it special. The promise of a whole world opening up.

Games

That same impulse carries over into games almost perfectly.

My taste in games is very broad, but the throughline is still immersion, curation, history, and worlds that feel worth entering. I love gaming history, which is why I’ve gone so hard into old consoles and emulators. I have what is basically a personal emulation museum on my computer, which is probably the most me sentence possible. I’ve got my Big Box setup all organized and clean, with games propagating across each console so I can get a taste of everything, preserve history a little, and build something that feels intentional instead of random. I love experiencing new genres. I love seeing how people pushed the envelope in the medium. I love series. I love that feeling of finding a lane and then realizing there are ten games before and after it and now suddenly you’re gone.

Presentation and Curation

And even that is not just about playing a game.

It’s the setup. The presentation. The right way in.

Not just watching a movie, but caring about the disc, the transfer, the audio, the presentation. Not just owning stuff, but curating it. Not just consuming, but building a world around the thing. I love boutique Blu-rays for that reason. I like physical media because it makes the experience feel more deliberate, more grounded, more yours. I don’t really collect games that way because most of my collection is digital, but I still care about preserving it. I keep backups. I’m getting a hard drive for that exact reason. I want a digital archive that won’t just disappear into the cloud one day like it never existed.

Why It Matters to Me

And part of this, if I’m being honest, is for my son.

One of the main reasons I’m doing all of this is to give Jakob a peek into my mind. Maybe it inspires him. Maybe he just gets curious one day. Maybe he never cares about movies or games at all. That’s fine. But I still want him to know they were a big part of my life. I want there to be something here that shows what I loved, what I kept coming back to, what I thought was worth preserving. Not just some vague idea that his dad liked this stuff, but an actual record of it. Something he can look through.

Travel

Travel will be part of this too, just probably less at first. I don’t want to force that lane when I haven’t been traveling as much lately. But when I do go deeper on it, it’ll probably be trips built around food and family-friendly things, because I’ll be bringing Jakob and because that’s just where life is right now. I like the idea of this site reflecting that honestly instead of pretending I’m some constant jet-setting travel writer when I’m not.

What Comes First

For now, the first posts are going to be on the Metal Gear series, which feels right. It’s exactly the kind of thing this site is for. A series big enough, weird enough, and rich enough to justify going one game at a time and then eventually stepping back to look at the whole thing. That’s the model. Go deep. Build outward. Turn fascination into something real.

I want this to be sincere, but polished enough that it doesn’t just read like a rambling post pulled straight out of my notes app at 1:00 a.m. I want it to feel like me, just more organized. More intentional. Less trapped in my head.

That’s probably the whole point of this place, actually.

Follow Along

Follow me on Letterboxd for per film reviews, and follow me on YouTube to see the latest videos.

Takeaway

This site is where I stop just having interests and start building something out of them. A personal archive, a deeper dive, a record for my son, and hopefully the kind of place where obsession gets refined instead of wasted.

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