I may backdate this to December, but 2023 was both a widely successful and stressful year for me filming elevators. Things have gotten especially crazy with work, school, and other activities that I have had little time to film elevators past October. I rediscovered air travel after 15 years and booked a couple of flights. One of which I filmed elevators on, the other I did not. Because of reasons other than elevators, I got in four more trips than I intended to take! I filmed only two of them.
The first trip was to St Louis in March, where I got to revisit after passing through in 2021. I got some videos from Washington University and St. Louis University, but the takes were really bad, and I may redo that trip. The second was in April (the one I intended to take). I read on the news that Iowa Wesleyan was closing, and it was about as far away as the University of Iowa, which I have previously visited. I also missed filming at the former Dana college in Blair, NE since I hadn't started my YouTube channel at the time it closed. So I planned out a trip to go visit Iowa Wesleyan before it closed, and it was a rousing success! I got detailed takes of all the elevators on campus, and enough still pictures to create a tribute for every single elevator! I also booked the same hotel I did on the "Last Kahona Before the 'Rona (2020)" road trip, and got the exact same room (I recognized it by the decal Hampton Inns have on the room number signs). I lost the video of the hotel room tour on the 2020 road trip, so I got to review the room on this one! The third one was in July, where I ventured out to South Dakota again to film more in the middle of the state, and repeat my success with filming the elevators at another closing college. Unfortunately, I was not successful, since the college already closed before I could get there. But it gave me the idea to name the previous road trip the "Redemption" road trip. The fourth trip was to Mississippi State in early October, and it marked my first time on a plane in 15 years! The primary purpose of this trip wasn't elevators though, and I'm not going any further into it. I took a fifth trip by plane, and I only got the Denver Airport train. I also refilmed the entirety of UNL as I mentioned in my 2022 Year in Review. It's been 5 years since I made any videos of most of the elevators there, and some haven't even been filmed with the SX740! There were a number of mods, more buildings closed for construction than 2018, and some new elevators I had no idea even existed! I also found a new vintage freight elevator on campus, but considering the recent trends and the failure of pulling my videos to stop mods that were already inevitable, I may never upload it to YouTube to avoid drawing attention to it in the first place. I also had a short meetup with ElevatorMan2004, and we filmed elevators at MCC Fort Omaha. Hopefully once things settle down outside of filming elevators, we can do another meetup and film more elevators the second time around. For 2024, I have mixed feelings as to whether I should add air travel to possible video ideas. Flying is something that's enjoyable to me, and it may open up more possibilities. It also cuts down on the miles I've been adding to my car taking all the prior road trips. But it's expensive! I have to book rental car whenever I fly because I'm not comfortable with ridesharing services. For the price of flying, I could book the rental car in Lincoln and drive wherever. The cost of gas doesn't add up to $219, the best price I can get flying from Lincoln to Denver. If I do, it will be the only change coming for 2024. I have completed the checking up on places I filmed in the 2010s, except for a few elevators (like this one) that may be in danger of modernization. I am considering revisiting some places I got in 2021, like Oklahoma and Springfield, MO. I don't know where the next road trip will lead me though. Considering I have more options now than I did in 2023, I want to leave my options open. I plan on refilming elevators in downtown Lincoln, particularly the parking garages and hotels. I have started with some of the office buildings in 2023, and the parking garages are due for retakes, despite being way over filmed. On my list of potential destinations is Fayetville, AR; Denver, CO; and Madison, WI. As I previously mentioned in my August update, I have toned down on the enthusiasm for many different reasons. The most obvious being the price of everything going up. While the price of gas has come back down somewhat, I still have had to make some cost-cutting measures. The first measure was only doing one road trip. Also on revisits, I have had to forgo eating out at a fast food restaurant and settle for a bag of pretzels and Gatorade at a local grocery store. It's not the greatest option, but it cuts the price of a meal in half.
I have started uploading some of my 2022 content already, and most of it has been revisits and retakes. I have visited some new places and videos will be coming shortly. I mostly visited places I have been before and dug deeper into them. I found some cool elevators in Sioux City, IA and on the KU campus I didn't know existed! Also, I haven't visited KU since 2018, so there were a lot of mods there, and lots of videos to make. I have decided that the removal of my videos at UNL to stop the ridiculous modernizing was too little to late and I am considering it a failure. Some videos will remain private, but all of the elevators the move was intended to preserve have gotten modded or are scheduled to be modded. As of now, there will be no significant changes coming for 2023, but here are some items on the agenda for the upcoming year: 1. It has been five years since my 1,000th video in which I have filmed all the elevators at UNL. No other videos have been made since of the elevators featured in that video unless they were modernized. I am planning on re-visiting and re-filming everything at UNL over the summer. I am debating whether to do the same thing for UNO and Creighton, which I did the same thing on those two campuses 5 years ago as well. I may save them for 2024 and 2025 respectively, since there have been no changes to any of the elevators on either campus. 2. I will continue to revisit and dig deeper into places I visited in the 2010s like I did this year, but I may plan another road trip, despite saying that I may not do one until 2024. We'll just have to see how the chips fall again. Some possibilities for road trips include Fayetteville, AR, Fargo, ND, St. Louis, MO (revisit), Cheyenne and Laramie, WY, and Denver, CO. If I do a second trip, I will probably revisit Oklahoma. 3. Westbrook Music building is scheduled to be demolished and rebuilt starting this month. So for December of 2022, I am making getting a building tour top priority, but due to the volume of traffic in the building, I am going to have a hard time doing so. The south wing of the current building is being preserved in the new construction, but sadly the elevator is in the north wing, which is scheduled to be demolished. 4. I did not do any meet ups this year. I had one short meetup with Super Techno Cat in 2021, but we were only able to film at one place. I'm hoping to get a meet up with someone else in the area, but many of them are uploading less frequently. Mr. Patch Fan 1200 and State Cite Escalators have set their channels to "made for kids" which has made it harder to reach out. So it has been an awesome last ten years of filming elevators, and 2021 was a banner year where I filmed more than 500 videos and in three new states!
However, come 2022, gas has become outrageously expensive, and has hindered my ability to travel and get new videos. I have slowed down drastically in 2022 and have only filmed 131 videos to date. For the most part, I have stuck to revisiting places I visited before 2020 and digging a little deeper into some of the areas, as well as deeper into Omaha. I have really only made a retake video if something changed or there was an elevator I missed. Despite what I said in my 2021 Year in Review, I did do one road trip this year, and I complained about the gas prices the whole trip! Anyway, with that said, after the March 2021 road trip, I have already done a lot of updates in Lincoln, Omaha, and the surrounding areas. Super Techno Cat broke news to me that Valley West mall is scheduled to be redeveloped in the coming years, so I was able to get a meet up with him and get as many escalators and elevators as we could in a time crunch. We later found out that the mall went into foreclosure some time after the meet up, so we were glad we had the foresight to revisit when we did! I mentioned in the 10th anniversary road trip video that I would not do a road trip as long as it for a while. That statement aged like fine milk! In September of 2021, I ventured out on my longest road trip to date of five days, and stayed in four different hotels. More information will come out about that road trip later, as it is still being edited. I made a rather spontaneous road trip in December of 2021 as I got some unexpected free days off work. The trip has a lot of elevator videos and a hotel tour, but there will be no road trip video associated with this trip. I do not plan on doing a second trip this year, and it's possible I may not do one until 2025. So I am hoping the 10th Anniversary road trip, the September 2021 road trip, and the 2022 road trip will tide you over until then. I'm anticipating continuing the periodic updates for quite some time. More information about 2023 will come in my 2022 year in review. It feels like this year was a catch up year in many ways for some reason, despite the fact there were many opportunities to go places last year.
There were some notable things that happened 1. West Nebraska Hall at UNL got modded. This was something that was seen as inevitable and it has now happened. 2. A freight elevator was modded. The Scott Engineering Center freight elevator at UNL had its motor, inner gates, and button panel replaced and now the doors are fully automatic. 3. I got to travel to some new and unique places and added some new states to my list of places to have filmed, including Oklahoma, Indiana, and Ohio. I didn't stop and film in Illinois for some reason, but I might consider a trip to Chicago at some point. 4. I think I filmed more elevators this year than any other year. 5. Things, especially gas prices, have gotten noticeably more expensive. This has predictably made road tripping for elevators a challenge. While I was able to get in two good quality road trips this year, I foresee the need to cut back. There will be some significant changes coming for 2022: 1. I will be retiring and deleting my Dailymotion channel. I have found myself neglecting it and any of the videos that I have posted have gotten maybe 6 views, most of which were me watching it. There were a few videos that were made specifically for Dailymotion, and I'm not sure what I want to do with them yet. I will probably transfer them to Youtube, but that is still TBD. 2. I have decided to create a channel on Rumble. In the rare case that I should have issues with YouTube, I would like to have somewhere to go and get back up and running immediately. I am NOT leaving YouTube! I am only copying my channel to Rumble. Oh, and I have posted some of my earliest elevator videos on Rumble that have never been posted on YouTube! 3. Due to the rising cost of food and gas, especially gas, there will be no road trips this year. 2022 will most likely be a year here I search deeper into places I have already covered and find new elevators in the cities and states I have made videos in already. I might make one road trip depending on how the chips fall. It's gonna be near impossible to write a blog post without mentioning covid, but here goes:
There's no doubt that this year has been different than most. Opportunities to get out and film elevators have been far more limited than they have been in the past. But that isn't to say that there have been some silver linings: 1. Nobody wants to get on the elevator with me. and I have had little to no problem getting an elevator to myself when filming. 2. I have had more opportunities to explore car washes and make videos. 3. Since March, no elevators have been modernized or lost! This is particularly true at UNL, but I will still have to wait and see if it was me yanking my videos to know for certain. 4. I have finally got around to the University of Iowa after I attempted to do so back in 2018 and got stuck in a building due to a tornado warning. I have also got to explore the Kansas City metro area in more detail. 5. I have been able to get two road trips and a meet up this year. But there are negatives that are still being felt and could still happen 1. Traveling has been a challenge, especially in spring and early summer. 2. We could lose another round of department store elevators, knowing that JcPenney is about to go under. Although it will have a bigger impact on malls nationwide, the video I make for them will be smaller than the Younkers closing video, since there are fewer JcPenneys with elevators in my area than there were Younkers stores with elevators. There really isn't any point on dwelling on the negative, as we have already had enough negativity surrounding us and every negative is another opportunity for a video. In looking forward to 2021, there will be no new changes for now. So why did a bunch of my videos disappear? 2019 year in review with major changes coming for 2020.12/16/2019
The idea originally started out as an emotional reaction, but after chatting with some fans about the issue, I have decided to stop filming elevators at UNL as well as temporarily privatize all of my videos of elevators on campus. None of my videos have been deleted, only privatized.
Why am I doing this? In January of 2019, the elevator the the former College of Business Administration building, now Louise Pound Hall (renamed after the dorm with the same name that was demolished) received a slap on mod with Innovation fixtures, while all the exterior Impulse buttons remained. It was painfully obvious that this was a cosmetic mod, as the building still retains it 90s interior in a majority of places. In addition, many elevators on campus received mods starting around 2015 when my channel was taking off in popularity. Love Library North, Manter Hall, Student union south elevator, Brace Lab, Woods Art building, Morrill Hall south and entrance elevators, and now the former CBA, the East union, and the student union north elevator in 2019. As of the date of this article, West Nebraska Hall, the C.Y. Thompson Library and the Scott Engineering center elevators (both freight and passenger) are in serious danger of modernization for 2020 based on current projects already in progress. Back in early 2017, the state legislature decided to cut funding to the University as part of its budget. Naturally, the university took this VERY well (note my sarcasm!). The University has made some announcements publicly about how they will adjust to the news. However, they have also undertaken some little projects. ADA compliance has been their primary focus in such projects, some of which have been very beneficial. Given all of this information, I have reason to believe that the University is using my YouTube channel as a tool to extract funding from the state through the series of "little projects." As a taxpayer and someone interested in vintage elevators, it's high time I take action to impede the rampage of the mod monster. While most modernizations have been for the better (Manter hall's mod, though disappointing, was definitely necessary), many of the ones I am talking about are unnecessary. What are you doing? Effective immediately (Phase 1): All of my videos of elevators at UNL will be privatized. This is regardless of any situation in which removing them temporarily is unnecessary. At some point, I will still upload videos already in my backlog, and I will still visit elevators on campus as part of a meet up. I have also discovered some new elevators at UNL I have not filmed at all yet, and I will still make videos of those. Those videos will likely be delayed from their normal upload queue. I also encourage anyone who has videos of elevators on campus to privatize them as well. Though it won't necessarily have the same impact as me doing it, every bit helps. Starting January 31st, 2020 (anniversary date) (Phase 2). I will be reviewing each privatized video and determining whether it can be made public again. For example, a video that would be made public again would be one of an elevator that no longer exists. What if an elevator at UNL gets modded anyway, will you make a video of that since it is a major change? I am not sure what I want to do about this situation, but I think it is best for me not to draw attention to it by making a video. Will videos of elevators at UNO, Creighton, or UNK be privatized as well? Not at this time, as there doesn't appear to be any such correlation. Are you not aware of the viewership hit you will take? I have had a year to think through this, and have decided that this is the best course of action. And besides, it's only for one month at least for most videos. Then clearly you're someone who hates change! Most people don't keep their car when it becomes less expensive to buy than to repair. Clearly you have not seen my videos of the University Square garage mod or Reinert Library on Creighton's campus (two examples of many), nor read any of the above! I don't rule out the possibility that there may be some cause I don't know about. In that case, I plan to approve or disprove on a case by case basis. For the time being I am taking action within my control and within reason. What if I am dying to see one of the privatized videos again? Unfortunately, you'll just have to be patient. Nothing will be permanently deleted, so you won't have to worry about that. Please do NOT email me asking for access to a privatized video, as I do not have a decent screening process for that. Can you notify me when videos are made public again? No. I am already swamped with a life outside of elevators and I can barely find the time to upload new videos as it is. You can check these three playlists on a daily basis: City campus East campus Innovation campus I'm from UNL and have caught wind of this blog post and can provide some insight. What can I do? If this applies to you, then my goal in making a stink about this has been accomplished! From your @unl.edu email address, send me an email and I will get back to you as soon as I can. I would like to know the reasons behind some of the elevator mods (like, maybe there was a mechanical failure that I didn't know about) as well as if my YouTube channel was referenced in the planning of any renovations made after 2013. A long time ago, I posted the 10 commandments of elevator etiquette in which I outlined how to ride an elevator both safely and politely. I think it is long overdue for the escalator equivalent, however, I will focus more on safety as escalator accidents are more common than elevator accidents, and most escalator etiquette rules don't always bear safety in mind.
1. NEVER bring strollers, wheelchairs, dollies, canes, or awkward/heavy loads on the escalator. One misstep can result in disaster. 2. NEVER ride the escalator with socks, bare feet, or loose clothing. 3. Step on the escalator carefully and quickly, aim your foot at the center of the step. 4. When on the escalator, stand in the center of the escalator step, face forward, and hold the handrail. 5. Avoid the sides. Loose clothing or shoelaces (even tied) can get caught in the step, resulting in serious injury. 6. Once you reach the top or bottom, step off when the step is level with the floor. 7. Once you step off the escalator, move away quickly to avoid a pileup. 8. DO use the bathroom before using the escalator. It is always recommended to use the stairs when you need to find a bathroom on a different floor. 9. Hold hands with your child throughout the entire trip on the escalator. 10. In case of emergency, locate the emergency stop button and press it. Call security and/or 911 immediately. So clearly, as you can tell in the video above, I unboxed and tested my new camera for the first time. Now that the honeymoon moment is over, her is what I think about the purchase I made.
Pros: The image quality is tough to beat. Everything looks much more natural on camera and a lot less blurry. My old camera has a lot of dirt in its lens and that probably has something to do with it, but it's definitely a welcome change. I also have resolved not to carry my new camera in my pocket anymore for this very reason! Still picture quality is much better than my old camera ever was. The image stabilization is tough to beat. Not only does it stabilize shakes, but also stabilizes camera rotation, which is a feature I originally hated, but have come to accept as a welcome change. 4k video! What more need be said? It also has a timelapse capability, which is a feature I have yet to test. 1080p 60fps video that doesn't have a time limit (my old camera CAN shoot in 60fps, but cuts off at 1 minute). The camera charges the battery from within the camera, a VERY welcome change especially when on the go! Cons: My new camera is a lot bulkier and heavier than my old camera. I am still getting used to it and tend to catch the sound of the strap rubbing against the camera in some videos. I lose a lot of wide angle when filming in 4k. I'm not yet sure if it's a 4k thing or the camera. This makes it difficult to film in some elevators. The audio leaves a lot to be desired. The mic is on top of the camera, which makes filming epic motors difficult, and emphasizes my voice over the sounds the elevator makes. This is a negative for me. The pop up flash is a bit tacky and feels rather flimsy. Recently, there have been a series of meet up scams happening in the Lincoln area.
See here: www.1011now.com/content/news/Man-using-escort-service-claims-he-was-assaulted-held-against-his-will--489117691.html www.1011now.com/content/news/Overnight-assault-and-robbery-at-a-Lincoln-park-488973361.html As scary as it may sound, keep in mind that elevator enthusiasts are not immune to meet up scams such as these. If you are meeting with someone for the first time, make sure you abide by the following for your safety and for the safety of whom you are meeting up with: 1. ALWAYS meet up in a busy, public place. A busy mall is great because security is readily available and there are elevators to film! 2. ALWAYS film a few elevators together first before getting in the same car. 3. NEVER film with anyone under 18 who does not have a parent or guardian along with them. Conversely, if you are under 18, ALWAYS bring a parent or guardian along with you. 4. ALWAYS meet during daylight hours! Although it changes with each season, 8am - 8pm is a good time frame. Example: ElevatorNut13 and I met at Oak View mall by the glass elevator, and we filmed all the public elevators in the mall (5 total) before we went to Crossroads (a dead mall) and downtown. On a more positive note, elevator filming is not nearly as unsafe as one might think. When you have a camera rolling, that adds a layer of security for yourself and for the other person. Just keep in mind of your appearance for obvious reasons! 2017 will be most likely remembered as the year that everything gets modernized! (if 2016 and 2015 weren't that already). UNL tore down about five buildings this year (three of which didn't have elevators). Burr Hall, Fedde Hall, UNL housing office, and finally, Cather and Pound Halls (click here for a video of their demolition). I have not been nearly using this blog as much, mostly because...I don't know why! I may consider restarting it again soon. I have come to realize that I have become a bit too obsessed with elevator enthusiasm and filming back in 2016, and it nearly got me in serious trouble! I have backed off a lot in 2017 because of both a demanding job and a bit of a scare. However, I found time to film elevators and go to new places. I went To Iowa State university, and I haven't has a chance to start uploading those videos yet, but they will come! They have some pretty unique elevators. I did get to meet up with Dominic Arnone, but we only filmed two banks of elevators due to geographical restrictions. We ended up going to McDonalds and talking about current events. Most popular elevator video uploaded this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBHFt3-IX1Y
Most popular vending machine video uploaded this year: N/A Videos uploaded (Published date from 1/1/2017 to 12/1/2017): 180 Elevator videos: 178 Vending machine videos: 0 Miscellaneous videos: 2 Star City Elevator videos (counted in elevator videos): 1 New trailers: 0 Requests taken: 0 Requests rejected: 0 New cameras: 0 Meet ups: 1 Busts: 0 The Good: Little has changed since the end of last year. I have a lot more freedom to go places than I used to in terms of money. 2018 is currently a blank slate, and I have yet to make filming plans! The Bad: While I have the money to go places, finding the time to do so has been the real challenge. The Ugly: I have been lucky to find a Dover Impulse in a lot of the college campuses and areas I visit. It is also very likely that I might run out of content, considering I haven't had the time or energy to get out and film. |
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