Cities Without People

For a full-length director's commentary on this video, including easter eggs and sections that didn't make it into the video, join my patreon at www.patreon.com/JacobGeller

Me: Say the line, Jacob! Jacob: I think about it a lot. Me: cheering

New constipated horse renders the car irrelevant.

"Realizing how much beauty has always existed so near to you, and yet you weren't able to see it." Immediately plucked my heartstrings and gave me chills. It reminds me of what its like to come out of a depressive episode. Sometimes life's so beautiful I want to cry, and sometimes it's so gray and hazy that I simply can't.

This is the first time I've actually stopped watching a video to go read something a youtuber recommended before finishing their video and boy do I not regret reading 17776

"All of New York is lovingly recreated" >Starts flying towards lower Manhattan Oh no

"The most dominant species on the planet" All of the sudden cars the movie starts to look more terrifying and existential

My city was almost subsumed in a massive wildfire at one point. We beat it, fought it to a standstill so precise it was like our city had walls, but it's always stuck with me. What was burned into my memory, more than any other image, was the ash cloud as it rolled in. It literally extended from the ground straight up into the sky. In a way I'd never imagined before, I saw exactly how high the clouds where, and they dwarfed my city so completely that a thing the height of that wall of ash would be as tall as my city was wide three or four times over. It curved as the day went on, and it looked like the entire surface of the planet was curling up to fall on me in some kind of cosmic catastrophe.

Oh my god, thank you so much for telling about "17776", I spent the whole day reading it without breaks and only finished a minute ago. Thank you so much, Jacob. It's a gem of a story.

My favorite part of the forgotten lawns bit of 17776 is the last bit; “You know who would have wandered out there? Just to do it?” “Children.” “children.”

this is why I hate making skyscrapers and cities in Minecraft. The taller I build skyscrapers, the longer/wider parks and streets became, the more distinct everything looked, the more it resembled real-life cities, the more it felt empty and unnatural. The savanna I used as space full of trees and animals now is just an entire group of deserted furnished skyscrapers and buildings, the vast open field now filled with inhabited streets and sidewalks, the forest now burned to the ground just for my little own replica of the world. All that effort into the architecture just makes me sad and empty in the end.

I almost started crying when you talked about how alienating all this is. I'm often consumed by this crushing sorrow, even rage, at how loneliness is literally carved into our world, separating us all from each other and from what makes us human.

"There is an uncomfortable kinship we share with volcanoes, both able to demolish ecosystems, change atmospheric composition, inspire great art. Both able to create cities without people." That part was so exquisitely written with a great narration and tone as well as being supported with beautiful background sceneries. I honestly couldn't but clap, well done sir!

The guy who invented the car: The environment is saved! People 200 years from then: sweating nervously

That line, "Humans matter more than concrete." That hit me hard.

Hearing Super Eyepatch Wolf's voice was an absolute treat

The story of the volcano sunset reminds me of the poem “Never Again the Same” by James Tate. I’ll paste it here - I think you’d enjoy it. Speaking of sunsets, last night’s was shocking. I mean, sunsets aren’t supposed to frighten you, are they? Well, this one was terrifying. Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful. It wasn’t natural. One climax followed another and then another until your knees went weak and you couldn’t breathe. The colors were definitely not of this world, peaches dripping opium, pandemonium of tangerines, inferno of irises, Plutonian emeralds, all swirling and churning, swabbing, like it was playing with us, like we were nothing, as if our whole lives were a preparation for this, this for which nothing could have prepared us and for which we could not have been less prepared. The mockery of it all stung us bitterly. And when it was finally over we whimpered and cried and howled. And then the streetlights came on as always and we looked into one another’s eyes– ancient caves with still pools and those little transparent fish who have never seen even one ray of light. And the calm that returned to us was not even our own.

Ultimate power play: the guy known for his emotionally charged, poetic video essays decides he can't do an Edvard Munch quote justice, and so calls in the one guy known for even more emotionally charged video essays to read that single line. I'm in awe of the power.

Using Outer Wilds music in your melancholy ending is basically cheating

"anti apocalyptic fantasy" Thank you for putting this into words. Man, I neede dthat. I feel like so many people these days succumb to a sort of "humans are bad and we deserve to die and soon we will destroy earth anyway" mentality. I can emphasize with that way of thought, but I also know it's not good for me and I cannot deal with this all the time. And to achieve positive change we need positivity, we need hope and we need reminders on how humans can be good and how we are part of this beautiful, incredible world we live in. That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fighting for.