The Archive Is Filling Up
When this site went up in September, it was mostly a promise. Four years of reels lived on Instagram, and the plan was to give each of them a second home: a page here, and a copy on YouTube Shorts, where people who never open Instagram might still find a cat asleep in a patch of sun. A few weeks in, it is starting to look like a place. Here is where things stand.
The reels first. The account has 188 of them, going back to January 2022. Every morning six more go up on YouTube, oldest first, so the channel fills in the same order the Instagram page did. As I write this, 47 are up, which leaves roughly three and a half weeks of mornings before the backlog is done. Each one also gets its own page here, with the original caption and a link back to where it first appeared. If you have only seen the recent reels, the early ones are worth a look. The cats were smaller, the camera work was shakier, and I think they are some of the most honest things on the account.
The order is not strictly by age any more. A reel that is doing well, or one that simply feels right for the week, can jump the queue. That is how “He cooks, I cheer” reached YouTube early: a small Sunday video of my favourite chef frying something while I cheer from the side. It passed 100,000 views on Instagram, and nothing else we have posted has come close. I have stopped trying to predict which ones people will love.
The cats now have pages of their own. There are six of them. Piggy, the first-born, rescued from the streets of Koramangala. Lutfi, the gentlest and the prettiest, and a mother to everyone. Tingmo, one of the gingers, who has been Rambo since birth and somehow also keeps the peace. Kudru, scared of the world and the unannounced leader at mealtimes. Tainy, the only boy, who meows in a whisper. And Poppins, colourful and strange and playful, and specially abled. Each page has their story and every reel and photo they appear in, so if you only care about one of them, you can follow just that one. People do have favourites. They are allowed.
Not everything was a reel. The account began with photographs in February 2020, long before I had the courage to film anything, and those are here now too. Photos holds 149 photo posts and carousels, grouped by year. The carousels swipe the way they do on Instagram, and each post links back to the original, because the likes and comments still live there.
One small change I like a lot: the big reel at the top of the homepage now changes every Monday. It is whichever reel went up on YouTube the week before and got the most views there. I do not choose it. The people watching do, and it is a nice way to find out what landed.
Since this section of the Journal is meant to be honest about the climb, here is the honest part. A new YouTube channel is quiet. The most-watched reel from last week had fewer than two thousand views, which is a long way from Instagram numbers. That is fine. As I wrote in why I keep a copy of every reel, the point of the archive is not to chase a second audience overnight. It is to make sure the work exists somewhere that does not depend on one app being kind to us. Every reel that goes up is one more that cannot quietly disappear.
There have been practical lessons too. A few old reels were filmed sideways, and YouTube will not count a sideways video as a Short, so those now go up in a tall frame, the way Instagram showed them. None of it is glamorous, and all of it is part of building something you own.
What comes next is mostly more of the same: six reels a morning until the backlog is done, then new reels following on as they are posted. If you would like the short version of all this once a week, the week's reels and what grew on the balcony, the letter is the best way to get it.
Thank you for reading, for watching, and for coming back to see what the cats have been up to. They have not changed. They are still asleep on the good chair.