The Annals
Every archive keeps, somewhere near the back, a shelf it did not plan for: the ledger in which the archive records itself. The Keeper has resisted opening this one for years, on the entirely reasonable grounds that a building which begins describing its own foundations rarely stops.
But the crate arrived, and the crate was labelled The Annals, and inside were fourteen exhibits spanning eight years — the channel’s own year-end reviews, collection tours, awards nights and channel updates, from a hot summer room in 2018 to a golden torch in 2026.
Read in sequence, they are not what they appear to be. Individually each is housekeeping: what came in, what went out, what was best. Together they are one of the more honest running documents this building holds. A man announces he has stopped caring about board games entirely and has spent his summer inside David Lynch. He returns. He sets a target of one video a week and delivers eighty. He decides that shelf space is a moral constraint and that a collection which cannot be loved entirely should be smaller. He calculates his hourly rate at ten cents and keeps going. He splits the channel in two to please an algorithm, and — five years and one exhibit later — admits that was a mistake and folds it back.
What accumulates is not a story of a hobby. It is a record of someone repeatedly discovering the same thing about himself and writing it down again in a slightly different hand: that the games, the books, the films and the music are one appetite wearing four coats, and that any attempt to file them separately fails within a year or two.
The Keeper, whose entire profession is filing things separately, finds this mildly insulting and entirely correct.
The catalogue runs earliest to latest. Four of these panels have hung here for some time; ten went up this morning. The Keeper declines, as ever, to say which are which — though a reader who works it out from the dates has rather proved the point of the shelf.
Exhibit Catalogue
- Channel Update — three months gone, one Lynch obsession, and the first admission that the channel follows his appetite.
- The Dungeon Dive Collection - 2019 — Dungeon Saga sold, and compared to a long-awaited DVD whose only special feature is “interactive menus.”
- The First Annual Dungeon Dive Game Awards (2019) — Hellboy takes the crown, but only the Kickstarter box; the retail version wouldn’t place.
- The State of the Channel and Collection - 2020 — he quits Kickstarter previews, on the grounds that the world has enough advertisements.
- The Dungeon Dive’s 2020 Retrospective — no awards this year, and the argument that sword and sorcery didn’t die, it moved into boxes.
- The State of the Collection - 2021 — done with gamebooks, done with art-object RPGs, and openly predicting he’ll regret saying so.
- The Dungeon Dive’s 2021 year-end review — ten cents an hour, a 50% pay cut, and the call that peak dungeon crawl has passed.
- Channel Update - Future of the Dungeon Dive and All Fiction is Fantasy — the books move out to a channel of their own, because YouTube dislikes a wide mind.
- 2022 - Year in Review — the year he went part-time, and played Shadows of Brimstone as a solo RPG instead.
- 2023 - Year in Review — a hard year told plainly, answered with fewer videos and deeper ones.
- The Best Games of 2024 — Dragons Down on top, for telling its story through what players do rather than what they read.
- I’ve made a huge mistake (channel update) — the books come home; the split is named as the tactical error it was.
- Video Games? Why? Channel Update — six honest reasons, including a 10×10 room at capacity and a storage unit.
- Games of the Year - 2025 - Introducing the Golden Torch Award — a first Golden Torch, handed to Vantage, to the archivist’s own visible surprise.
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– The Keeper
Notes that of every exhibit in this building, the ones most likely to be filed under “housekeeping” are the ones a future reader will actually want, and that nobody has ever written a year-end review believing it would one day be the primary source.