Update + Next Up

Hey everyone!

I know this comes belated, but I want to wish you all the best for 2025! I spent New Year’s with my wife’s mother and grandparents who live in the south of France, which is actually a really nice place to be in the winter. It gets quite cold at night but during the day the sun shines bright and warm and you can almost smell the coming spring. We hiked around in nature and visited some old villages that we hadn’t seen before and that stood quiet and mostly empty so far removed from the tourist season. It was a great time and place to take a break, read a bunch of books, and come up with ideas for future videos, which brings me to:

Next up; I want to start this year with a short series of loosely connected video essays. The first one, releasing later this month, will examine the current state of the Jedi in the Star Wars universe. I feel they’ve been suffering from a bit of an identity crisis, as if Star Wars is unsure about what the Jedi are supposed to be in the modern era, and want to explore how exactly this came about, what it looks like, and how it can be resolved. Next month, I will build on some of these ideas with a video on Gladiator 2, a movie that, like the Jedi in Star Wars, I think also suffered from trying to be multiple things at once, albeit in a slightly different way with slightly different consequences. The third entry, then, will expand on another, more meta-level issue that I had with Gladiator 2 and some other recent movies; which is their in my opinion growing inability to accurate reflect the current zeitgeist and the true nature of society's current problems. I know this sounds a bit abstract and it’s still kind of foggy to me as well, so as I get closer to this one the exact emphasis of the analysis might shift around, might even ditch it altogether if it turns out to be nothing of substance, but for now, it's an idea that lives in my head and that I'd like to examine further.