ltas

NEW VIDEO: The Lost Art of Flashbacks

it is done! and in three-ish hours at time of writing, it'll premiere for all to see. this is definitely one of the weirdest videos i've done in a long time, and i had a blast pulling it together. hope to see you at the premiere!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLxN9jkJ_ZM

untitled flashbacks video, test version

hey folks! i wound up putting a lot more work into this video than i originally intended to. this is not the final version, just a render of the first finished cut to upload to see what the algorithm dings me on. in fact, this version got dinged for my use of the trailer for halo season 2, which i find hilarious. but looking at the section that got dinged, i honestly wanted to change it anyway.

i feel like i have to give some kind of warning about this one. it's weird! and it's me at my most maniacally opinionated. this is basically a collection of short mini-rants i've been holding onto in various forms for years --some are bits that i cut from other scripts, some are just personal bugbears. i've pulled them together here as a manic stream of consciousness that i HOPE at the very least keeps you amused. i guess it's also a prologue to the LOST video? make of it what you will, this one's for me.

i'm hoping to have the final version out on friday, but it may take til the weekend if my upload speeds don't pick up the pace. in the meantime, please don't share this link around.

enjoy!

https://youtu.be/z7Go22_y4g4?si=JsqfuLwOqjgboEeg

checking in 7/26

hello again folks! just wanted to take some time this morning to give a little progress update.

despite my relative silence over the last couple months, i've been working on a lot of stuff. when i talked about the DARK video being the first of an informal series on modern TV, i'd intended for there to be a couple more coming out in june/july that were shorter, filling in some gaps in the leadup to Everyone Is Wrong About LOST later this year. but after releasing the Doctor Who video (part 2 of this informal series) i struggled to find what the other entries wanted to be in the meantime. basically, i had a grab-bag of thoughts about various recent TV shows that were relevant to the LOST video, but none of them was strong enough to merit an entire vid on, like, Yellowjackets or whatever. then a few weeks ago i got to season 2 episode 5 of Interview with the Vampire, which flipped on the light bulb and got me working again. the result is an admittedly hectic, unfocused script-- literally a collection of arguments presented as a stream of consciousness ramble. it starts by talking about Interview, but quickly veers off to talk about the FNAF movie, the Halo show, Yellowjackets, FROM, Station Eleven, and of course LOST. i've recorded and edited the audio for it, i just have to get the video component finished. my hope had been to get it out before the end of the month, but i've been occupied helping my gf get the finishing touches on one of her projects. unforeseen crises notwithstanding, this one will be out within two weeks and hopefully sooner than that.

otherwise, i've been writing a lot! so far i've banked scripts about the death of theaters, the old-age discourse around joe biden, a lifelong nerd's defense of sports, escapism in I Saw The TV Glow, and the fear of dying young. obviously not all of these will make it to the finish line lmao but the point is that i'm getting back into the habit of writing more. i may end up formatting some of these as pure essays to be published here. at some point in the next few months i've got another barn-burner of a video cued up talking about the inimitable Sinkdog. i already interviewed the creator of Sinkdog for precisely this purpose. that'll probably be the last Big Video Project before LOST.

speaking of LOST: i've formally begun preproduction on my video! which is sort of a silly thing to say when this video has arguably been in preproduction since my channel started back in, like, 2014. there have been so so so so SO many versions of this video over the years, you really have no idea. what makes the difference in this case is that i finally know what i want to say and how i want to say it. a little over a year ago i did a pretty comprehensive outline that felt like a solid spine, but then a big expose was published about the rampant racism in the LOST writer's room, something i'd always kind of expected to be true but was still deeply disappointed to read about at length. this is the biggest reason why the LOST vid has taken so long to get off the ground since i first started seriously talking about it in 2022. i needed time to let it all sink in. but i think now i've finally fully processed those allegations and integrated them into my thesis on the show, and know how to talk about them without devolving into rank rubbernecking melodrama.

it's hard to say how long this video is gonna be. my aim is to keep it below 2 hours at all costs, but until the script is closer to done i really can't know for sure. i want to write each section as a self-contained essay, with overlapping elements that build up over the course of the video analogous to the way episodes work in a season of LOST. my goal is to film the sections in blocks throughout the remainder of this year, with a tentative release window in december. i know the 20th anniversary of the show is in september, but i don't want to rush this video by pegging it to an arbitrary release date. besides, everyone and their mother will be releasing a video essay about LOST come september, not to mention the huge "Getting LOST" documentary. this way, i'll have time to watch the crowd for new information and see if anybody else is wrong enough to get the pointing finger. i expect the answer to be yes at least once.

alright, what else? i've been thinking about getting back into streaming and podcasting, but i'm not about to make any promises there. i've gotten a lot better at playing guitar! otherwise i think that's it. thank you as always for your patience and support. i look forward to inundating you with even more special interest monologues in the near future. take care of yourselves!

ANATOMY OF A RESURRECTION: how they saved doctor who (again)

it's here!! my latest video essay about the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary specials and the blastwaste of corporate genre media is set to premiere in a few hours. i think this is one of the slickest-looking and most fun vids i've ever done! i put a lot of work into getting this thing over the finish line, Molly Noise made some incredible music for it... if ever you were looking for an indication that i'm "back" as it were, this is it. please enjoy and share with your friends, in your group chats, during regular unrelated conversation. if you happen to meet charon at the crossroads, tell them of my works. i need all the promo i can get!

DOCTOR WHO VIDEO FILMED!

hey folks! it's taken longer than i wanted, but i finally finished the script for the Doctor Who video and filmed it yesterday! here's a little video i took at the end of that six-hour (!) shoot touring my lighting setup. i shot in a real location this time, and i think the result speaks for itself:

this one's been a real pain in the ass. the initial germ for this script started when only one of the 60th specials was available. first i aimed to release it before the third special was set to release, but that didn't pan out. then i aimed to release it before the christmas special aired, but that didn't pan out either. as a result, the script went through a lot of conceptual revisions before any version of it was truly finished. the hardest part of putting this script together was taking all these philosophically separate segments and smashing them together, cutting pieces and moving them around to find the most enjoyable flow of ideas. by the time of assembling the final draft, i wasn't even sure this video had a purpose anymore since a lot of the things i was excitedly guessing at have since been basically confirmed. i got to feeling pretty apocalyptic at basically every stage of the process, particularly when i arrived at the true first draft last friday the 19th. my gf helped me a lot in working through the pain points, and by the end of the weekend i'd gone from a gangly 13,700 word ramble to an admirably succinct 10,300 words (and it'll probably be less in the final version once i'm done editing). the DARK script, for reference, was 8,800 words, which i held in my mind as the soft target. i think that's a pretty respectable length for a video essay and not something i'm eager to surpass by much until such a time as my subject matter really deserves it.

obviously the video isn't done yet (i haven't even started on the edit), but already this process has enlightened me. i stuck to this video despite my intermittent maladies as a test of myself. i said i was going to do this video, so i wanted to push through and make it anyway. too often i let my wandering creative attentions keep me from finishing any of my projects, too often i make promises that i don't keep. i wanted to push through my misgivings about the script, and my worries about filming in a Real Location, just to prove that i could. i wanted to give up on this script but i sat down and made myself work on it anyway. i wanted to rethink my shooting plans but i geared up and spent an entire day setting up/shooting/breaking it all down anyway. what i learned first of all was that i've been working for so many years now without proper tools that i'd sort of convinced myself that i was the problem. but now i DO have the proper tools, and it makes all the difference in the world.

i pushed myself hard to get to this point, and i feel good to have done it. whatever the quality of the final video, i'm proud of my ability to get up and do the work regardless of my feelings on the matter-- something i genuinely wasn't sure if i was still capable of. these last four years have drained me in a thousand ways, sapping my confidence and conviction and, worst of all, my work ethic. but these are skills, not inherent traits. the only way to get back on the ball is to climb it, tedious as that may be.

this year i've set some big challenges for myself, and now for the first time i have real confidence that i might be up to meeting them. it feels good. anyway i don't think this video will be ready quite in time for the end of april, but only by a pinch. may 3rd feels ambitious, but that's my soft target. thank you all so much for your support. take care of yourselves

NEW VIDEO: movies i own but haven't seen

it's time to talk about blind buys! this is a fun and chill little video i recorded RIGHT before i got sick for two weeks, which was very smart of me in retrospect. this one came together pretty fast and i think it's a good time!

the next video on this channel will be a scripted essay discussing the Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials. April is gonna be a big month!!!

KEEPING LOST TIME: a review of DARK

here it is, a new scripted video essay! for anyone who watched the rough cut, i did actually remove about 6 minutes from the final version (but the file is longer because i added an outro). i'm really proud of this one and i hope y'all enjoy it. the premiere happens in about an hour!!!

a DARK review: ROUGH CUT

hello and happy new year! sorry for the long absence, it's been an extraordinarily hectic few months (isn't it always?)

i bring good tidings on this february the second: a fully scripted video essay review of the netflix series DARK! this is just the first rough cut, mind you. ideally i'll be able to get this down to about 40 minutes (patron names/credits notwithstanding), and of course the final version will have a lot more on screen than just me.

my gf and i have been making our way through DARK over the last few months (we prefer to watch shows an episode or two a day while we eat dinner), and after many long conversations i wound up writing a whole script about it. this only started about two weeks ago, so it's been a quick turnaround on this one.

basically, after psyching myself into overthinking yet *another* video with my analysis of the Doctor Who 60th specials, i became deeply frustrated with myself and my process. so i took what i was thinking about re: DARK and turned it into a script. the last script i finished, for the TUNIC vid, took me six months. i love that video but it didn't make six-months-of-work money.

the thing with reviewing DARK is that it's the latest in a long line of shows that i feel like is in conversation with LOST. i've been thinking quite a lot lately about network television, writer's rooms, storytelling styles across genres, in part because i've been planning "Everyone Is Wrong About LOST" for such a long time now. Mrs. Davis, FROM, and Yellowjackets are just a few very recent examples. i didn't want to make videos about them at the time because, hahaha, "i should be working on the OTHER thing."

well, i've decided this IS the other thing. whether or not i believe it's relevant or important or even particularly of interest to anyone but me, television is what i'm thinking about right now. september 22nd of this year marks the 20 year anniversary (!!!!) of LOST's pilot episode, and if that's not The Right Time for this video then such a thing will never come. in preparation for that, i want to focus on a handful of videos that will lay some groundwork for that project, as well as cover certain topics that i can abbreviate in the final vid by saying "go watch this if you want to learn more."

so, at the risk of inflicting yet another curse upon myself: my aim is to get four videos out between now and the end of april. my review of DARK should be ready to go public in about a week. in the meantime i'm going to finish my Doctor Who 60th script, and hope to film that shortly after. then i'll be taking some time to work on godfeels. after that, i want to finish my review of Tears of the Kingdom and at least one other video that i haven't decided on yet. at that point, i'm going to shift gears into splitting full time between godfeels and "Everyone Is Wrong About LOST." other, likely related stuff will certainly come out in the meantime, but i don't want to overpromise or overbook. 

there are other, more emotional, more political video ideas that have been on my mind, but i can't do them right now. not yet. last year i suffered a huge crisis of confidence, and now that i'm (i think) mostly on the other side of that my takeaway is that i've gotten too scared and too lazy, and grown too convinced of my chosen medium's supposed importance. everything is just a piece of history. it isn't life or death, it's a day job, and i haven't been doing it very well. i have to remember how to do this job from the bare fundamentals, so here i am, trying to remind myself how this gig is done.

in any event, i hope you enjoy this review. i think it's turned out quite well! thank you, as always, for your support. take care of yourselves, and have a nice weekend!

JUST FOR YOU: "the problem is capitalism"

just popping in with this little thing i recorded a couple weeks ago about the phrase "the problem is capitalism" and why we shouldn't be afraid to say it.

in other news, i'm working on a scripted video about the recent Doctor Who 60th Anniversary specials that i'm hoping to have out before the end of the year.

take care of yourselves!!!

SEND IN THE CLOWN: a people's joker review

took longer than i wanted (thanks mental health) but here's my people's joker review!

update & people's joker review preview

hello folks! sorry it's been a while since my last update, i didn't want to post until i had something substantive to share. so, for your viewing pleasure: the first ten minutes of my review of The People's Joker, which i was lucky enough to catch a screening of at the Seattle Queer Film Fest last weekend.

anyway, i have a lot of great news for y'all today! but i want to get a few quick things out of the way first.

1. i got suspended from twitter! this happened a couple months ago, and honestly? what a blessing. i do the vast majority of my posting on mastodon these days, with longform stuff over on cohost (or tumblr for godfeels-related posts). i'm also on bluesky, but only because it's where all the other essayists wound up. i don't like that website and i don't recommend you use it.

2. speaking of longform posts, did you know i've been reviewing video essays on cohost? this is something i've wanted to try for a long time, and it's been an enjoyable exercise for sure.

3. i've been watching a LOT of movies this october, and reviewing many of them at length over on letterboxd. i'll be doing a few videos pulling from those reviews (more info below), but if you want my opinions Now, well, you know where to look.

4. if you're a godfeels person, i was on A Homestuck Podcast to discuss the history of godfeels, the so-called homestuck renaissance, and some other behind the scenes stuff. it is basically wall to wall me infodumping so if that's your thing, check it out!

okay, now onto the meat of this post. short version of the good news: i've acquired a bunch of new equipment and have a bunch of videos in the works.

long version of the good news: i've had a lot of false starts over the last few years vis-a-vis this whole "i'm back" business. 2023 has been a really obnoxious, annoying year. where '21 & '22 were a parade of various personal tragedies and interrupting the recovery process of a traumatic eviction and period of deeply uncertain homelessness, '23 has largely been a series of bureaucratic complexities and sickness. i was bedridden with stomach problems for most of march, good chunks of may and june, and then caught a stubborn cold (not covid, thank goodness) last month. these setbacks occurred simultaneously with a crisis of confidence in the quality and relevance of my work. despite my resolution at the start of the year to "just try some shit," making anything has been very difficult-- helped not at all by the increasing enshittification of every platform i rely on for income. i had a series of long, difficult conversations with my gf about what i'm actually doing here, what i want to get out of it, if i even enjoy this gig anymore.

somehow i came away from those conversations with the conviction that yes, in fact i do want to keep doing this. so i spent some time analyzing my production process, and realized something so obvious i feel kind of silly for not pinpointing it sooner: i've been using the same equipment for almost ten years!

all my lights and fixtures are pilfered from sets or acquired on the cheap, and none of it more complicated than a standard light socket. my tripod is a dented, clumsy piece of shit cobbled together from pieces of two separate broken tripods. my camera, the original 1080p blackmagic pocket, produces gorgeous images but has always been a thorn in my side as a video essayist because of its ridiculous 2.88 crop factor. short explanation of what that means-- a 50mm lens is called a "normal lens" because it's the closest you get to replicating the range of human vision on a full frame camera. because the bmpcc's sensor is so much smaller, however, the effective focal distance of any given lens is multiplied by 2.88, meaning that a 50mm lens is the equivalent of a 140mm lens, which means it's zoomed way the hell in. this makes getting wide shots in cramped apartment rooms hellishly difficult (go back and look at my old videos, i'm rarely framed with more than a quarter of my torso in frame). that's hardly the only pain point wrt that camera, but it's the one that's been the most consistent pain in my ass.

i worked in film for about five years in grip/electric. i have training in media production. i love playing with cinematography, shaping light in spaces to create dramatic images-- and yet i almost never indulge in that love. i've repeated to myself for years the notion that the best tools for the job are the ones you have access to, and just made do. but it finally clicked for me recently that none of the equipment i have remotely resembles the professional equipment i trained on. for almost ten years i've been using the kit of a college undergrad working out of her dorm, and then i wonder why it's such a hassle to shoot anything!

SO. all of this is to say that i finally bit the bullet and invested some credit card debt into upgrades. the above video about The People's Joker is the first i've shot on my new camera, the blackmagic pocket 4k. i've acquired a new tripod, and a beautiful directional LED light (which hadn't arrived yet when i shot this), and a whole lot of various gizmos and widgets to make the whole thing tick. there's more i need to get --a small handheld monitor, a couple basic LED light panels, a set of gels & diffusion, maybe a c-stand or two down the line-- but already, with just a week of playing with these new toys, i can tell you it's streamlined the process tremendously. for instance: unlike the original bmpcc the bmpc4k has a mini-xlr input with phantom power, meaning i can run my at2020 microphone directly into the camera instead of recording separately on a tascam. on balance this doesn't save a TON of time, but that's sort of the point. it's the little things that kill you, and i'm trying to smooth as many of them over as i can.

so, okay. let's talk about plans. as always, i've got a lot of big ideas swirling around in my head (yes i'm still reviewing tears of the kingdom, yes i'm still gonna make Everyone Is Wrong About LOST), but right now i want to focus on getting my confidence back with smaller projects. every year in october since 2020, my friends and i have gotten together in a server to watch at least one horror movie every day. last year i did a pair of videos going over the stuff we watched, which didn't exactly do numbers but that i greatly enjoyed making. i want to do the same thing again this year (though hopefully this time i'll manage to get at least one such video out in october lmao), maybe in smaller chunks for easier release. that'll give me at least two, probably three, maybe four videos. on top of that, there are a few subjects i want to rant about separately-- namely my accidental rewatch & surprising tier list of the Jurassic Park movies, and my complicated feelings on the recent horror film Talk To Me. i'm hoping to get these recorded & released relatively quickly, though i have a writing obligation to another project with a hard deadline this month that's the only hiccup. ah yes, balancing multiple creative projects at once, my greatest strength...

i don't like sharing my plans the way i used to because they're always changing. ideas that capture me one month bore me the next. but these are my plans this month and i've asked my girlfriend to hold me to the coals and make sure i follow through this time.

so that's where i am. i need to build up a whole new production pipeline here and i don't want to burn myself out on something huge right out of the gate. another aspect of this upgrade has been realizing how little i actually understand the tools of post-production. i know enough to get the job done, but i want to do better than that. i want to actually learn these tools. this will take time, trial, & error. but that is the other side of all this. ten years ago, assembling my kit was a process of ecstatic discovery. so much of the energy that drove me back then was just seeing what was possible, what i was capable of. i've spent a lot of the last few years feeling creatively stymied and held back by the memory & battery limitations of my old camera, by the crop factor, by my inability to craft light the way i really wanted to.

now i'm building the kit that'll last me the *next* ten years, and for the first time in a while i'm genuinely excited by the visual possibilities. i can do wide shots! i have a belt battery and 2tb hard drive on my camera so i can walk around getting shots for hours! lighting is easier, there are fewer cables, and!! AND!!!! i now have two cameras, which means i can FINALLY play with multicam!!!!!!!! this is something i've been fantasizing about for years, i have no idea how it'll work for video essays but i'm dying to find out.

i know money is getting tighter and tighter every day for all of us, and that giving your support to someone who barely updates is an increasingly difficult proposition to justify. to all of you who've stuck around this long, i can only say thank you, thank you, thank you, over and over again. despite how rough things have been, y'all have helped me pay the bills on time, and remind me every day that there are people in this world who like what i do and want to see more of it. the part of my brain that tells me i'm a failure is a liar, and it's easy to forget that when so many walls are crumbling down around us.

so, again. thank you for your ongoing support. take care of yourselves.

update 7/14 -- tears of the kingdom review progress

hello everyone!! just wanted to pop in with some quick updates

1. the tears of the kingdom video is coming along! work has stalled over the last week or two thanks to a close friend having a relationship-destroying meltdown, but hopefully the door is shut on that whole incident and i can get this thing finished. i have something i want to share from the script, actually, but first

2. in the midst of the aforementioned incident, my gf and i have been watching the tv show Yellowjackets. after finishing episode 5 i wrote a long video script about some of the show's structural problems, which i ultimately decided to post in full on cohost instead. it may yet wind up being part of an actual video, i just decided it would be better to catch up on the whole show first since there's not that much of it and i *do not* want to deal with comments from people saying "well if you'd just watched the next episode..."

3. anyway, the thing i want to share from the Tears script! so one of the big points i'm going to harp on in this video is the game's story, which i find tremendously lacking on a number of levels. part of how i'm going to do that is through, essentially, fanfiction-as-criticism. it's been tough trying to articulate in pure critical terms what i think is missing from this game, for a lot of reasons that will be explored somewhat in the vid itself. once i put in terms of character, though, suddenly things started to click.

anyway, here's an excerpt from a monologue by King Rauru. the concept here is that he's awoken briefly from the eternal slumber he fell into after sealing Ganondorf in place. he can't move, so all he can do is stare at Ganondorf and wonder what his fucking deal was. as far as spoilers go, the spoiler here is "Ganondorf doesn't have a motivation." he goes to war and fucks up a bunch of people's lives and his only stated reason is, like, a generalized lust for power. so this is Rauru puzzling over that void of motivation, in a deeply melancholic and bitter tone. so yeah, i will leave you with this and hope to be back soon with more updates!

"What was it you so needed to steal which we would not have given freely? Never in my darkest conspiracies did I imagine that your lust for power was an island. How could you have rallied the Gerudo behind your cause were that the case? Was it mere tradition which possessed them to alight the warpath, automatic loyalty to the first man born to the Gerudo in a hundred years? Or did you make them promises as false as the one you made to me, when you swore allegiance to Hyrule? I wonder how your subjects recieved the news that a woman of the desert, once a warrior in your own guard, helped imprison the King of Thieves. I hope she was welcomed as a hero, and not a traitor."

"I don't understand you, Ganondorf. Who were you, when not at war? Did you take any lovers? Did you have a favored meal? Was there nothing in this spited land that filled you with wonder, no sight so beautiful it was etched forever into your memory? What of your friends, your neighbors, your parents, your peers... there must be more to you than this. How else does it make sense? I did everything right and it wasn't enough. All the knowledge I have acquired, the love I have shared, the work I've put into building a home for all who wanted it... everything that makes me strong is still effortlessly eclipsed by your hatred. Such power as that can't be so simple, can it? It's as if you are my own shadow. Flat. Empty. Unavoidable. You know no hunger, except for the absence of light. Does that make me responsible for you, in some twisted way? In forging a kingdom of such generous bounty, did I invite your apocalyptic ire? Should we have been more warlike, then, so that you would see us as equals instead?"

"Alas, even that seems wishful thinking. If power was truly all you sought in life, then surely we were destined to end each other here, in this sullen cavern. The sun and its opposite, locked in parasitic embrace..."

"No. I do myself too much credit. If I were truly strong as the sun, my radiance would have banished you ages ago. I am weaker than ever I thought, and that delusion was my downfall. You knew the truth of the Zonai the moment you laid eyes on me, didn't you? We may play at godhood, but even immortality is conditional. And true divinity does not bleed."

update: oh hey, it's may

hey folks. been a while since i did a text-only update!

sorry it's been quiet on the channel since the pussen boots vid. i've been sick with stomach problems off and on since march, and the times when i haven't been sick i've had a lot of Real Life Things to take care of. i'm not here to make promises about how that's changing or whatever, i have to imagine if you're reading this that you know Right Now Specifically is hell. but i do have actual updates to share on my work!!!

first of all, i've got two big-ish videos cooking that i'm focused on in lieu of doing weirder shorter things. one is an exploration of Station Eleven, easily my favorite television show of the decade so far. this is gonna be the first "part" in an informal series of videos about the specific televisual storytelling methods coming from the school of Damon Lindelof. Station Eleven's showrunner is Patrick Somerville, who previously worked under Lindelof on The Leftovers. this is essentially a dry run for Everyone Is Wrong About LOST, a video that i've been doing a **lot** of research work for that won't pay off for a good while.

the other vid in active development, which i hope to have finished relatively soon, is a... review??? ...of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. i'm pretty excited for this one because i think i've got a really unique angle. the central thesis is "i love this game, so why don't i love this game?" and at its core is a video i shot in 2019 and never released, that i only just rediscovered a month ago, where i talk about my experience revisiting Breath of the Wild after a long absence with a few self-imposed limitations. i'll only be using clips from it in my totk vid, so i might release that whole thing here just for y'all. basically what i want to do with this one is cut through the kind of rote "is it good/is it bad" tendencies and dig into something much deeper about the nature of open world games, sequels, art under capitalism, etc etc etc.

the scripts for those are still in very early stages, but that's because i'm currently in the middle of writing for a video game!!! it's called Come Home Wolf and it's a sort of speculative sci-fi roleplaying werewolf game. you can play the unfinished early version here! it's very much a game jam game, but i think this is some of my best writing and everyone else on the team has done such a good job making it work. once my work on that is wrapped up in a couple days, i'm barrelling down hard the totk vid!

lastly, i am still working on godfeels. there'll be a new chapter of that up sometime in the next couple weeks with some TREMENDOUS art from my friend girlpillz. like it or not, you will be hearing more about my weird little homestuck fanfiction in the future. in a very real sense, the aforementioned "series" about television writing is the theory underlining the practice i'm putting in on godfeels. in between everything else i've mentioned, i've been working on an "author's introduction" to the series as an on-ramp for new readers (especially those who haven't read homestuck). but it's also going to be a lot of other things. there's a lot of meaningful history that's been aggressively memoryholed since the homestuck^2 project collapsed in 2020, and i'm pretty sick of it. but that's a can of worms best left unopened for now

so anyway!! thanks as always for your patience and continued support in these trying times of Definitely Not A Recession Bro Seriously Everything Is Fine Our Economy Is So Normal Now. next time you hear from me, it'll be to share a finished thing. take care of yourselves!

wga strike vid is public with a new ending!

i added about six minutes to this video yesterday and adjusted a few of the visuals. let me know what you think!!!

NEW VID: what happens after the 2023 WGA strike?

posting this one early for supporters! just some off the cuff speculation about how studios might respond to the results of the WGA strike. not sure when it'll go live publicly, depends on if i want to make any more changes when i wake up tomorrow. enjoy!

NEW VIDEO: life & death in pussen boots last wish

got a new youtube video for you! this one's about the new puss in boots movie, the wacky side character trope, and why i actually liked that fucked up little dog

NEW VIDEO: was the hays code good for movies?

i ended my last video saying i wanted to try some shit. here's me trying some shit. i wanted to have a few more of these shorter videos out by now, but i got sick twice in february and now my gf is visiting. pretty happy with this one though! with any luck this won't be my only Thing this month. hope you enjoy my hot takes!

NEW VIDEO - what's a video essay good for, anyway?

hello again! this is a bit of a weird one but i'm really rather proud of it. what started as your sort of bog standard "sorry i don't release stuff as much as i used to, let me talk about why" breadtube apology vlog slowly morphed into a more wide-ranging examination of how it feels to make video essays in 2023, and how some other essayists are handling their own similar feelings. it's also got a little art in it. i tried to execute this one artfully. anyway, hope you enjoy it and that the rest of your week is calm and pleasant!!

NEW VIDEO: Too Much Pineapple- A Glass Onion Review

here is my hourlong fractured review of rian johnson's glass onion. not sure how folks will react to this one since the vid reflects the fact that my opinion of this movie has flipflopped radically about a dozen times at this point. i hope you like it!

ROUGH CUT: glass onion review

hello again!! here's the rough cut of my review of Glass Onion, the sequel to Knives Out. the finished version is probably gonna be about ten to fifteen minutes longer once i record a few extra thoughts that i forgot to include plus the outro and $10 names. i'm gonna square that away this weekend and hopefully have the video up for everyone before the 31st! that'll make this the first time i've done two videos in a single month since, uh.... 2019! yowza

i don't want to bend your ear too long here, i've not been updating much because i'm sick of making promises i never keep. but i recorded a sort of experimental update video that i'm aiming to have out in early february that i HOPE will signal a shift in direction from me. i guess we'll see!

besides videos, i'm working on godfeels again!!! 3 part 2 has finally started after a yearlong hiatus (next upd8 is tomorrow!), and i'm so happy with everything about it. if you have no interest in/familiarity with homestuck fanfiction, i'd actually be REALLY curious to see how well you can follow along. despite the numerals i've designed this section to be what i HOPE is a good jumping-on point for new readers. in the year to come i'll be talking a lot more about godfeels in numerous places. but i think i've finally hit on a good way to balance fiction writing with video work.

ok that's all, enjoy my new youtube video, take care of yourselves!

NEW VIDEO: more nightmares after halloween

sorry it's slightly later than the first friday after christmas, i just thought it would be funny

more stuff coming soon!

JUST FOR YOU: hallowcember part 2

hey gang! here's the rough cut of part 2. i'll be adding footage from a couple things between here and the final version. i am also debating whether or not to include the section on Home With A View Of The Monster since doing so would sorta dox me. but it's here for you until i decide otherwise!

the final version will be out in a week or two.

thanks as always for your support, i hope yall have a really good holiday.

NEW VIDEO: horror movies in december??

i watched a bunch of movies in october and now it's christmas time so i want to talk about those. enjoy!!!

part 2 will be up exclusively for supporters sometime next week, and will go public after christmas :3

new video rough cut just for you...

hey folks! sorry for the silence, the month after putting out the tunic vid presented numerous unexpected challenges. we're over the hump now and back to work though!!!

here's the rough cut of my next video, HALLOWEEN IN DECEMBER (part 1), which is just me going through and commenting on all of the many horror-adjacent movies i watched in october. the final cut will go up publicly on the 9th, though i don't expect it'll be too different from this cut besides a few titles and things i need to put in(unless the copyright demon decides to strike me down over my egregious use of footage from FAUST 1994). also the outro & patron credits aren't in this cut, but they will be in the final version.

part 2 is already shot and will be up for you as soon as i've got a rough cut (hopefully before the end of the week) with the final cut going public... idk, after christmas maybe? we'll see how the winds are blowing when that day comes i guess.

hope you're all staying warm!!!! more news soon...

NEW VIDEO! The Legend of Tunic: Obscurity, Nostalgia, and Copyright

it's finally here! well... almost. please join me in just a few hours, at 2pm pacific, for TUNICVID's premiere! if you watched the rough cut, i cannot stress enough how much of a difference the extra polish makes. the latter half especially is now so much more precise than it was, thanks in large part to feedback from folks like you!!!

thank you so much for your patience and support. let me know what you think in the comments, and if you liked it then please share it around wherever appropriate.

TUNICVID ROUGH CUT!! plz read this first though

WAKE UP EVERYONE THE ROUGH CUT IS DONE

for those of you who don't know what this process looks like, a rough cut for me is the first complete pass at the video's main contents. every bit of footage i knew needed to be there is there. the music is there. it's all there (besides the titles anyway, but that's next)!

once i've got a rough cut, i upload it to youtube to check for copyright goblins (so far so good!) and then watch the whole thing start to finish with a notepad in my hand. watching it last night was the first time i'd experienced the complete multimedia argument from start to finish. this one's ambitious in a couple ways and i'd sorta convinced myself that the second half completely dropped the ball. but after seeing the whole thing, i think it works. i think this is my best video to date.

i'm going to release this video to the public on friday, october 14th. impatient as i am, i want to take one more week to really get this thing polished and presentable. with the rough cut down, i now have a list of things to change. the final video will have more footage of tunic, will have more varied use of the tracks that Molly made for me, and will be edited just so slightly tighter than it currently is. i'll be trimming a few lines here and there, adjusting some visual effects, that sort of thing.

i give you this rough cut now, however, for a few reasons. the biggest one for me is that i'm proud of this one and i want you to see it. i want to hear what you think! but i also share this unfinished draft because i like to leave a trail of production evolutions for anyone who might be interested in such things. this has always been the point of the $5 tier, after all: to see how the sausage gets made.

just know that the final video will be ever so slightly different, and those differences will make it an even better video than what is currently present. if you watch this rough cut, i hope that you will still join me for the final cut's premiere on the 14th.

thank you again for your patience. i feel like i've become a better writer through the process of finishing this video, and i'm genuinely so excited to show you what i've got cooking. but for now, please enjoy TUNICVID, at least until i come up with a better name for it

TUNICVID PREVIEW

hey folks!!! editing on tunicvid is slow but chugging along. we're looking at a final runtime somewhere in the ballpark of an hour and twenty minutes, give or take. bit longer than i originally planned! i wanted to get this one out by friday but i might have overestimated how many hours are, in fact, in a day. we'll see!

in the meantime, i wanted to share with you the rough edit of the first 8 minutes! titles are placeholder and everything is subject to change etc etc but what you see above is *basically* finished. don't worry about spoilers or anything, the intro and part 1 are both designed to be virtually spoiler-free.

let me know what you think!! and thank you, once again, for your patience. SOON YOU WILL MEET YOUR REWARD

everything's coming up zedig

hey folks!! just wanted to share my new teleprompter setup with you! if you've been around here a long time you may remember that futzing with my prompter has always been one of the most frustrating barriers between me and filming scripted stuff. this only got worse over the weekend when i set it up to shoot the Tunic video & discovered that my tablet doesn't work anymore! so i went into this weekend feeling pretty defeated tbh. without this thing, my ability to put my face to a scripted video is pretty limited! it's been a year of loss after loss, frankly, so this was just like. yeah. yup. that tracks.

then a friend gave me an old computer monitor they had lying around and now my prompter is literally the easiest thing in the world to set up??? i'm still reeling at how much of a difference this makes. i didn't even realize how much of a cognitive burden this thing was until it went away.

at my girlfriend's suggestion i think i'm gonna make a short little behind the scenes video comparing this to my old prompter that i built myself. i mean come on, look at this thing:

anyway, the Tunic vid is on track for an early October release at the latest. this is the best video script i've produced in a long time. as frustrating as the delay has been, i'm glad that i waited. and then, once this thing is out, i've got three other videos already filmed! so it's felt bad having so little to show for myself lately, but i've been working on this thing nonstop.

oh also: i'm planning on doing A Thing for the 5th anniversary of trans questioning.

thanks for your patient support, as always. the fields are budding and the harvest is imminent. take care of yourselves

END OF JULY UPDATE

hey folks!

it's the end of the month again, so i wanted to update y'all on The State Of Things here in the zedig household.

i've got three videos filmed and in the editing process. one of them is my stream discussing the rhetoric used in michael smerconish's interview with roger waters. that would have come out by now except i made a really dumb oversight in the edit that requires me to essentially start all over. i've switched from premiere pro to davinci resolve for video editing, which hasn't been nearly the hassle i expected but still has a bit of a learning curve.

the second video is a discussion of the use of spectacle in the marvel film shang-chi, and the third is a look at the queer themes of both the todd haynes film velvet goldmine and orson welles' citizen kane (with a lengthy side rant about the creative economy and the shocking regression of culture in the last 20 years that may or may not end up becoming a backer-exclusive thing).

the reason for the delay of these as well as any new trans questioning comes down, as ever, to economic circumstance and untreated ADHD. let's set aside the always stress-inducing crumbling american empire and its fascistic verve for eugenic covid policies, transphobic fearmongering, and infinite blank checks to the cops. part of the problem has been that, now that i am well and truly (KNOCK ON WOOD) out of crisis mode for the first time in two years, i'm able to see just how outdated so many aspects of my process are. i basically haven't changed anything since like... 2017? so i've been playing around and trying new things.

i want to address my Tunic video- i still still intend for that to be my next fully scripted video! but i needed to get my hands dirty with some messier projects first. the fact is i'm rusty! there's a lot i need to change and frankly i'm embarrassed at myself for being so thoroughly roadblocked for so long. i've got a chip on my shoulder about it, i do have some shit to prove, but it does feel like things are moving again. they're just, you know, not quite moving as fast as i'd like. anyway my goal is to get one of the vids i've already shot out there in the next week or so, and then time my Tunic vid to come out close to the game's PS4 release date of september 27.

but honestly the biggest reason for the delay is that at the end of june and throughout july, i had no ADHD meds, which just so happened to coincide with a personal crisis of confidence. BUT I HAVE THEM AGAIN NOW! they're a much smaller dose than i'd like but hey, it's a start. one day at a time, man.

thank you all so much for your patience and support. next time you hear from me, it'll be with Stuff. take care of yourselves

ROGER WATERS vs CNN: Commentary Stream

hey folks! here in about an hour (that's 5:00PM pacific standard time) i'm gonna do something traditional for the breadtube sphere that i've never really done myself: a commentary stream! specifically, i want to talk about this interview between pink floyd frontman roger waters and cnn pundit michael smerconish. this isn't about debate or mockery or anything like that, and this type of thing is certainly not something i want to make a habit of... but i haven't been able to stop thinking about this interview since i watched it yesterday, and i NEED to talk about why.

my hope is that this stream will either provide enough material for a standalone video, or at least enough to meaningfully supplement one should my intuition that there's some interesting stuff here prove correct. if nothing else, the full stream will be uploaded to youtube later on, so don't worry about missing it if you're busy today!!

thanks for the support, y'all. more news soon