I’ve always loved remote con­trolled cars. I think at one point in ele­ment­ary school I even lis­ted R/​C car driver as a future pro­fes­sion of mine. While I did have some actu­ally really nice cars as a kid, one dream of mine which never came to fruition was to put a video cam­era on the car. It would be like being trans­por­ted to a mini­ature world where everything is huge and cars go orders of mag­nitude faster than they should.

Right, so sadly that never happened as a kid, largely due to the fact that the smal­lest video cam­era in my day weighed as much as a small child and used a full-​​sized VHS (or BetaMax!) tape to record. But thanks to advance­ments in cam­era tech­no­logy, Jasna get­ting me an awe­some car for Christ­mas, and some help from a roll of duct tape, I finally man­aged to put this dream into action.

Across the street from us is an ele­ment­ary school. Cruelly five days a week there are kids there (the nerve!), which means I can’t play there, but on the week­ends it’s free. It’s an open sea of hard packed snow — almost ice, but not quite — which makes drift­ing a lot of fun, and it has a nice area of some fenced off trees that make a won­der­ful obstacle course. I took the cam­era there today to show up my mad skills.

Well so I’m post­ing this video mostly to show the absurd hil­ar­ity of it. Turns out if there were a tiny little driver in a remote con­trolled car, he would be sub­jec­ted to shak­ing and whip­lash so severe he’d prob­ably pass on within a minute. High­lights of the videos include hit­ting a tree, hit­ting a post so hard at the very end that the cam­era came off, and minutes upon minutes of the hori­zon jump­ing up and down. If I ever try this again, it’s either going to have to be on smooth pave­ment or I’m going to have to have to find a way to sta­bil­ize the cam­era bet­ter. I should point out that, even by R/​C car stand­ards, the shocks on this car are really soft.

P.S. Yes, there will be a video of chas­ing the cats around, at some point (duh). We have to clean up the apart­ment bet­ter before mak­ing any such videos pub­lic, though, you understand.

I've always loved remote controlled cars. I think at one point in elementary school I even listed R/C car driver as a future profession of mine. While I did have some actually really nice cars as a kid, one dream of mine which never came to fruition was to put a video camera on ...