Starting off with 2021, I wanted to do a small review of the spin-archive project in the almost 7 months that it has been in operation. I did a small blog post back in May 2020 but didn't end up continuing the monthly blog post.
This will be a round-up post about everything that has happened between May - December.
First of all, I want to thank a few folks who have helped a ton with the spin-archive project:
- Hobby: The first big contributor, published the launch to The Workshop server, and also helped test the first contributor-tool for bulk uploads. Super thankful for the early assistance in uploading + tagging.
- Might: Another big contributor, with over 900 files attributed. The spinner/kuzu tag now has 800+ uploads because of their contribution. :) thank you!
- Phrain22: thank you for doing the hard task of tagging uncategorized uploads. This is a time-consuming task, so I'm very thankful for your efforts.
- taichi1082: thank you for the huge CV dump + tagging old LPSA works. Happy to see someone archiving their own old works.
- RPD: thank you for your historical research work which has connected so many folks in the history research department. It's been great to see so many new things that haven't been uncovered yet, or has been scattered due to time.
- coffeelucky: thank you for the continual suggestions, the help in the history research department, as well as your regional perspective!
- Tache: thank you for your help in the history research department, your archive + wiki efforts, and your regional FPSB perspective!
Costs
Running an archival site does cost some money to run. So far, I'm happy to be in a position where I'm able to front the cost for the foreseeable future. I'd prefer to continue to not take money as it can tend to complicate things. But for long-term stability, I may end up implementing a sort of donation option. Nevertheless, files will always remain open and accessible to all.
2020 Expenses:
- Hosting: $270 (digitalocean VPS / load balancer / managed postgres, $45/month)
- Video Encoding: $73.96 (4930 minutes = 73.17 hours of video)
- Storage: $41.93 (1TB @ $5.99/mo)
- CDN: $8 (minimum $1/mo, nowhere hitting past that at the moment)
Total Cost: $393.89 for the year.
In the on-going 2021 year, I do plan to do small optimizations on price. Hosting and video encoding can most likely be brought down, though there's some dev work there that I don't mind paying for the premium in the interim. I'd be happy to explore p2p-based solutions as well where folks can donate space / CPU-time to encode and save videos.
Traffic
Using a privacy-minded analytics platform, here's the collected data for the year.
- May 2020: 666 views / 36 unique visits
- June 2020: 2100 views / 212 unique visits / 27.44 GB
- July 2020: 1500 views / 135 unique visits / 19.78 GB
- August 2020: 134 views / 28 unique visits / 3.03 GB
- September 2020: 455 views / 55 unique visits / 1.78 GB
- October 2020: 128 views / 35 unique visits / 0.84 GB
- November 2020: 121 views / 30 unique visits / 0.7 GB
- December 2020: 1300 views / 313 unique visits / 8.05 GB
Total:
- 6400 views
- 844 unique visits
- 61.62 GB of videos served
State of the Archive
From looking at the list of tags on spin-archive, there's a couple interesting things:
- 2378 uploads (of which 645 are uncategorized/untagged)
community/jebdominates the uploads with 1240 tagged uploads (and possibly more uncategorized).- I think this is mostly the nature of spin-archive archivists that have contributed data but also the archiving/uploading culture that JEB had. Skydrives were easily accessible, in comparison to the international community which did not have as much of the same mindset other than uploading to youtube.
Top 10 Spinners with the most tagged uploads:
name | upload_count
---------------------------------+--------------
spinner/kuzu | 829
spinner/makin | 135
spinner/juminuwo | 70
spinner/mesi | 53
spinner/wanna | 53
spinner/apollo | 36
spinner/kabu | 34
spinner/ayano | 32
spinner/bonito | 30
spinner/hideaki_kondoh | 26
Top Editors
name | upload_count
-------------------+--------------
editor/arezert | 20
editor/taichi1082 | 11
editor/xzelph | 10
editor/ayum | 7
editor/scissor's | 5
editor/jc | 5
editor/jamie_enns | 4
editor/losed | 3
editor/crow | 3
editor/okkar | 3
Top Organizers
name | upload_count
-----------------------+--------------
organizer/ayum | 8
organizer/taichi1082 | 6
organizer/xspin | 3
organizer/coffeelucky | 3
organizer/jamie_enns | 2
organizer/losed | 2
organizer/saizen | 2
organizer/coco_a | 2
organizer/mhig | 2
organizer/product | 1
Events
I'd like to focus a bit more on archiving world community events, so far WC 2012 has been archived completely but we are missing a lot of videos from the other events.
name | upload_count
----------------------+--------------
event/wc_2012 | 177
event/wc_2010 | 24
event/wt_2011 | 4
event/wt_2015 | 4
event/upsbt_2010 | 3
event/asian_cup_2008 | 1
event/psa_cup_2017 | 1
event/wc_2014 | 1
event/wc_2020 | 1
Uploaders:
username | upload_count
-------------+--------------
iColor | 1693
Hobby | 504
Might | 117
Akai | 27
fang | 20
coffeelucky | 10
taichi1082 | 5
suku | 1
After-thoughts
So far, I'm pleased with the progress of spin-archive and hope to continue into the new year. I'm thankful for the contributors who put in the hard work, and I also wish to make it easier for new users to contribute as well.
There are a number of things that I'd like to research at some point in the future:
Setting up a PS machine-learning initiative
- An open dataset of pen spinning for HCI researchers. A dataset for hand object manipulation would be valuable for the field and would be helpful outside of the PS community. This might require the use of new webcams with depth sensors, like the Intel RealSense cameras.
- Building a PS video prediction model. Some ideas for giving the model a portion of a recorded combo, and then having it generate the rest of the combo. This is easier to train with the data on spin-archive and requires no additional annotation work. Though, this is a very complex problem and the state-of-the-art models are still on their way to getting better. I'd be interested to see what new ideas can come out of it.
- Tracking hand + pen in 3D. This is a bit more practical, but also requires a lot of work in annotating and labelling the dataset. This would allow for building some really cool visual analysis tools for PS.
Improving spin-archive
- Make it easier to upload + tag uploads in bulk. There is an alpha tool for bulk uploading, which works, but is not the best. I hope to improve this tool.
- Add recommended videos. It's hard to know what is uploaded on the site without going on the main homepage. I want to highlight other related videos to make it easier to naturally browse the archive.
- Add youtube archiving. We should have a way to archive videos from youtube more easily (when the original raw file is no longer available.) This would be similar to how our current twitter archiving works.
- Multi-language support I think this is a necessary feature to help other folks in the community contribute and look up videos on the archive.
Is the PS Community dying?
There was some discussion about the future of the pen spinning community. The decline of pen spinning has been a reoccurring theme for many years as older folks leave the community, and less newer folks are able to take up the responsibilities of pushing the community forward.
It's already 2021, the PS community is still around, but it's smaller than it used to be. The international English-speaking community is living, but who knows how long that will last? It's not 100% assured that it will last in its current state, as a few other communities have crumbled badly due to the times. It's not too hard to see that no community lasts forever in these current situations.
We have been super fortunate that folks have stepped up to the occasion to give a home to the community when it was needed, but perhaps this is not sustainable.
Why have we been in a decline for all these years? I can come up with a few reasons:
- Older, experienced community leaders end up going away from the hobby, and there is nobody else to pick up the work left behind.
- The place and how we interact with each other has changed. We've gone from small websites to spreading across Twitter, Instagram, Discord, Reddit. Social circles are private, smaller and more tight-knit than the older forum-based days.
- Growing a community and creating content is time-intensive. Many of us join pen spinning as a nice hobby to do on the side, it's hard to focus and invest time into the community as you grow older, and some just treat it as a solo activity.
What can we do? I'm honestly not quite sure at the moment. It's easy to chalk it up to, "We need folks with free time to invest in pen spinning", but that's not quite practical advice.
Some ideas..
- Mentorship Program: I think there are a few oldies that don't have enough time to put into actual projects, but would be happy enough to spend time mentoring and giving advice to people that want to start their own. This would help close the generational gap between spinners, not necessarily for spinning experience, but community/project experience as well. CV projects can be assigned a mentor to help progress the CV to completion and give advice when needed. There is still work to be done culturally where folks are empowered to ask for advice.
- Progression: I think it'd be cool to have a sort of standardized progression or badging system. It's a bit random and useless, but spinners could get badges for participating in a CV/event, organizing a CV, etc. The main use is to have a pipeline for nurturing new talent, and a loose guideline on progressing as a pen spinner.
I do hope there would be more organized alternatives to competitive events. SpinFest is a good example of what I'd like to see, but it doesn't nearly have the same amount of publicity as competitive events, partly because WC/WT have been the mainstay of international community interaction. Who knows. I'd like to dive into helping out and supporting alternate events.
Ah, but of course, this all takes a lot of time and effort to organize and maintain. So, we are back to square one. The ones with the most time are the younger generation who are most likely inexperienced.
Is PS in a stable state where the amount of new folks coming in are equal to the number of folks leaving the hobby?
I'd be curious to hear what other folks may think about the "decline" of pen spinning. PS has survived this far, and there has been many times in history that claimed that PS is dying.
Certainly there has been a decline over the years, but "dying" might be an exaggeration.
Hopefully we can also adapt to these new times. Perhaps even grow a little bit.
Happy pen spinning, folks.