The Power of Abandoned Places

Or the audiobook!
As well as booktopia and many more!

POSTAL ADDRESS (if you're kind enough to send me a letter or something!)

Tim Hickson
PO Box 69062
Lincoln, 7608
Canterbury, New Zealand

Script by meeeeeeeee

The artist who design my cover photo:

Chernobyl clips from WSJ, Getty, and Blockchain travel.

Stay nerdy!
Tim

[HelloFutureMe]

When did the desolation colonise you?

~ Tim

[pencilsplinters]

Cleaning up a relative's place after they died has a very similar effect. Everything from the left behind food in their fridge to how much toilet paper is left on the roll-- just mundane things gaining completely new value and meaning. Great video as always!

[raikaschieck]

In Germany we have the word "Ruinenlust", the enjoyment of visiting ruins and abondend places and I feel it hard. To see and realice that everything that we deem eternal will sooner or later turn into dust and rubble, is as awe inspiring as it is terrifying.
(Wow, thanks for the like ^^)

[onesith]

What I admire the most about abandoned/ruined places is that it allows readers to ask the question, "wow, I wonder what this looked like when it was up and running" Horizon zero dawn was great at this in my opinion.

[NoLinkfan]

This is an extraordinary piece of media, you should be very proud of what you’ve created.

[Dominic-Noble]

Roses mentioned she did a recording for this but I completely forgot and did a big double-take when she started talking.

[jonathanhancock]

This video brings back memories of when I sifted through the ashes of my childhood home after a wildfire left nothing but a blackened chimney, a misshapen shower, a charred exercise bike, and a large, house-shaped silhouette of cinders.

[AHealthyDoseofFran]

Empty/Abandoned places hold something almost special. For me, they can make me feel both safe and on edge. There's a mixture of feelings that comes from being in these places which just makes them all the more interesting. Great video!

[christianpetersen]

When I was moving to a new city to start a new life 10 years ago, I remember late one night, before closing the door to my old apartment, looking into the dark rooms one last time, and sensing a creature crawling on the walls in there, unresolved, unfullfilled, left behind, frozen in time. I missed my bus, started walking the streets at midnight, not a human or sound was there. A piece of grafitti said "like a hollow ghost, floating through the emptiness of the streets" No idea who wrote it, no hits on Google, but knew it was refering to me. I crossed a bridge, got into the taxi, and I was gone.

[anotherkenlon]

Your channel has a special kind of magic. I'll forget it exists for ages, and then one of your videos pops up and I spend an evening binging everything you made after the last time I watched.

[AutkastKain]

I love abandoned places in games, and I think Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild did this super well with it's Hyrule Castle town, as there are enemies haunting the land and guarding what is left. However, I also love turning an abandoned place into a populated place. This doesn't happen often, but side quests for Terry Town in BotW turned a small plateau into a nice little community, and it felt like you were restoring a small part of what was lost in the last 100 years of the game's story. It was really cathartic for me to see both sides in that game, which is why Terry Town is my favorite side quest ever.

[thermalvision]

"I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'"
-Percy Shelley.

[Calebgoblin]

In the woods behind my childhood house there was an old car by a mossy pond. Nothing ever seemed to move or change, not even the water.
A few miles away there was a whole abandoned town from the early 1900s. I never was able to go inside but I could watch as we drove by and my imagination would just churn.
I still think about those stories I imagined even after I learned the truth about them.

[deanima]

In talking about art, few YouTube essays become art themselves. This essay should be a model for any creators trying to make art in talking about art. Beautiful work.

[setablaze]

It's really strange when you encounter your own memories becoming an abandoned place. I'm from christchurch, and during the quakes, my parents as we lived in Australia cried out as my grandparents phone signal cut due to the tremors. An auntie saw the CCTV building go down, and my childhood optometrist died while trying to recover something from his local church. The home my maternal grandparents started their nz life in was abandoned because they were red-zoned. Over 40 years of living there after immigrating, raising their children, seeing their grandchildren visit, and it was beyond chance of recovery in such a quick moment. Vandals and looters quickly trashed the place along with other homes nearby. Nothing stolen but a sacred space to us was tarnished. When I was able to visit after the quakes, I couldn't recognize the land where my old school was. The century old church was gone. The roads had changed, and now it was just green grass with native trees. Much as I miss everything, I can't help but feel a little bit comforted that nature took over instead

[benjaminkirkham]

A beautiful dissertation on an idea that is so close to everyone's heart!

It feels very personal and relatable.
For you in New Zealand it's earthquakes.
For us in Australia bushfires are our event of desolation.
For the world, that desolation may be Covid.
These are reminders of the earth's ability to override our power; but also its ability to build us and make us feel more...
Alive.

[RumoHasIt]

The script for this was stunning. Also... you're the second person to mention House Of Leaves to me this week.

[benediktjostingmeier]

The powerlessness of experiencing a story that already happened that you have no control over and are not responsible for is what i love about so many of these games specifically nieR:automata finding out how much you were wrong is just incredible

[luscarora]

I think dark souls uses this really well, although it's a mix of an abandoned and a dying world.

[daedricdragon]

I personally think that when science-fiction marries horror, the child can be something great. And sci-fi is not just about robots and space; it's about ideas. It's about depth, profundity of thought, emotion and experience. A sense of wonder, the feeling of awe that we all long for, and desperately try to find, even if we don't think about it consciously.

Desolation, emptyness of space, vacancy where it is not expected faces us with a particular sense of humility which is a characteristic of sci-fi and horror; it makes us realize one true fact about our circumstance:
We are alone, and there's something magical about that.
And that feeling, though tapped into much more easily when one is surrounded by desolation and emptyness, can also be felt when one is surrounded by people. One has to only look deeper, and pay more attention to the quality of one's immediate experience in the face of everything.
These locations also have a certain religious, nay, spiritual aura to them, and that is precisely due to their unquestionable power in inducing an urge of self-reflection in us. They make us think and feel more deeply about everything, especially ourselves, and what this all means to us.
Emptyness, vacancy, desolation can indeed be terrorizing and horrific, or beautiful and calming, but they are always, regardless of all else, magical.

This video was absolutely brilliant and amazing. Certain parts were breath-taking; you have made something special. The writing, the narration, the editing, the music, everything was on point.
This is quality youtube. Thank you :)