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Shirley Curry is one of the internet’s greatest heroines. The grand dame of YouTube has been making Skyrim videos for nine years, since she was a more youthful 79-year-old, recording an extraordinary 2,300 videos in that time. Mixing long-running in-game series with short, charming vlogs, Grandma Shirley has become a beloved figure to an audience of 1.3 million subscribers. So it’s enormously sad news to learn that the internet’s granny has announced she will no longer make Skyrim videos. She’s just, understandably, fed up of it.
“I’m not going to be recording gameplays any more,” says Curry, after a deep breath, in a new vlog posted to her channel. “It seems that I spend most of my time, sitting in here at this computer, and lately—probably for the last month—I walk in here and look at my computer and think, ‘I’ve got to make a video today.’ And then I just shake my head at myself, and say, ‘I don’t want to. I have no desire to.’”
It’s a sad video, perhaps because of the lack of regret in Curry’s voice as she expresses her weariness with the process. She begins the video explaining that she is having eye surgery the next day, and is obviously quite concerned about it, before moving on to say of recording Skyrim, “I’m old, and I’m tired, and I don’t feel like doing much any more.”
“I’m just doing it for fun,” she explains, after laughing over how her son keeps pointing out she doesn’t “have” to record any videos. “And it’s not fun any more. I’m tired of it. I’m bored to death with it.”
It’s really quite the emphatic end. Grandma Shirley has previously taken breaks over the last decade, but normally only for a few days or a week. Back in 2020, she stepped away for a while due to—with wearying inevitability—constant unpleasantness in her comments. Curry has also taken issue with the way her videos somehow only score viewing numbers in the four figures, despite her enormous subscription, inevitably due to the grim YouTube algorithms that will crush thumbnails of an elderly lady or in-game footage, preferring some gurning buffoon with gaped mouth next to the words, “WORST FAIL EVER!” or what have you.
In the past, Shirley has received a fully-voiced mod that adds her to Skyrim as a companion character, and she’s supposed to be an NPC in the forthcoming Elder Scrolls VI. However, she was promised this in 2019, when rumors indicated it would be released in 2024, and even then she didn’t rate her chances of living to see it. But live she has. Let’s hope Shirley is still around and healthy to play it whenever it does release, free of the burden of having to make videos about it.
Thankfully, there’s an epic archive of all the lovely videos she has made, with their wonderfully contrary mix of top-notch gaming chair and defiantly 4:3 aspect ratio (despite Curry playing on an ultra-widescreen monitor). She also promises to continue to upload vlogs as and when she feels the need.
Grandma Shirley, we wish you all the best with the surgery, and implore you to feel no guilt for stepping down—you’ve created a wealth of wonderful videos that will live on forever, and we thank you for it.
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