January Update [VIDEO]

this video is just for all of you, not for the General Public. looking it over, I have caught a graphical mistake and a part where I misspoke, saying a film critic WRITES movies rather than WATCHES them. but, video done! not redoing it!

2024 is gonna be a real one, y'all. :)

transcript for folks who want such things:

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What’s up team, two weeks ago I turned 40. That’s a thing that happened. Nobody stopped me! And my first video essay turns 10 in June, so I have been doing Innuendo Studios for a quarter of my life. Another thing that’s a quarter is the amount my income has diminished over the past two years (segue!): my Patreon payout for December 2023 was about 25% less than October 2021.

Happy New Year, this is unsustainable!

I had a bit of a conniption last month when all the James Somerton news broke. (Some of you know this already because a sliver of that conniption was on Twitter and led to a few new patrons, so, uh, thank you! Welcome!) Finding out that a guy who stole 80% of everything he’d ever said and fabricated the rest was earning four times my best year despite 165,000 fewer subs, while I was entering middle-age, the freelance gig was fourteen months overdue, and my bank account had just gone in the negative for the third or fourth time that year, was a big, like, “what’s the fucking point?” I’m not saying this for sympathy - the indignities of capitalism aside, I did all of this to myself. I did not need to take that freelance gig and there where plenty of opportunities to quit; I’ve been losing money because have not produced a lot of videos; and no one made me become a YouTuber!

But something funky happened the day before my birthday: I finished the freelance gig. The albatross that’s been “a few weeks from done” since 2022. This is it, you’re watching it right now. It’s done. Like, done-done. Dun dun dun dun dun dun wh-kssh.

So: it’s 2024. The last video did really good - I don’t know why one mini-Alt-Right Playbook does better or worse than another, but this was one of the good ones! I got a good bump - first good bump in a year. (That sounds like I’m doing coke.) The gig is done, the check has arrived and been deposited; I no longer have professional obligations beyond the channel; as you know, I have a lot of videos in various stages of production - a nonzero number of finished scripts; and I’m signed to Nebula, the advantages of which I have barely used! I don’t know if we’re turning it around, but, if we were turning it around, this is how it would start.

The takeaway from my Somertonian Doom Spiral was this: the thing I can do that James Somerton can’t is write something no one else would write. I don’t know if that’s gonna support me as a middle-aged man living in an expensive city with just a shitload of debt, but I am, for the time being, still a YouTuber. And, for as long as that lasts… I wanna get fuckin’ weird with it.

So let me walk you through some stuff. I have been on meds for a year now; you’ve seen but a fraction of my power. There is no neurotypical explanation for what’s coming.

FINANCES

[Thanks George, me too!] Yes, I’ve set an income goal for 2024. If my income hits that number, it means I can afford to keep doing this. If not… things are gonna change. How, or by how much, depends on a lot of things. And I’m not going to tell you the number, but it’s ambitious; it’s more than I’ve ever earned, by a decent amount. And this is the Financial Planning document. I’m a spreadsheet guy now.

I’ve redacted all the numbers, but this is the lowball. This employs what I call Non-Fatalistic Pessimism: it is the bare minimum I would need to hit my target. It assumes the Patreon will only grow at the rate of the last few months, not build momentum; it assumes my ad revenue will not increase as I release more videos; it assumes my Nebula sponsor rate - pretty high after my last ad read - is a fluke and will regress back to my starting rate. It presumes I will mostly keep doing mini Alt-Right Playbooks throughout the year and a small handful of sponsored videos. I’ve got columns for tracking predictions, earnings, and the difference between, so I can see early whether I’m falling behind my target. (Since these calculations did not account for finishing the freelance gig, I’m actually starting the year several thousand dollars ahead of schedule.)

Now this is not The Plan. This is achievable - I have produced this many videos in a year before; it would be tying with my most productive year, but there is precedent. And those were longer videos, not mostly 5-minute TARPBs. The actual plan, I won’t show you, but it’s way more ambitious and sees me hitting my target by August, if not sooner. That plan employs a strategy called Non-Prescriptive Optimism: it is technically possible but very unlikely. It means not only finishing the main body of The Alt-Right Playbook but also the entire backlog of projects started in 2023. I wanna shoot for it even as I know pulling it off is infeasible. I know I won’t, but I also know I can, and I wanna lead with that.

MANA TRACKING

For anyone who missed it: last year I started “mana tracking,” where I measured my workload in terms of emotional and physical energy rather than mere work hours. I am, historically, disastrous at knowing how much time or effort a project will take, overcommitting myself, having things drag on interminably, and going through cycles of burnout. So I tracked my patterns for a couple of weeks. This taught me a lot; there is a surprising amount of method to my madness! Like, I can work while emotionally dysregulated, it turns out, I just can’t make decisions; sometimes procrastination is a way of conserving energy when I know I’ve got a big evening ahead of me; a few days of working too hard will always be followed by a few days of not working hard enough, so I should probably just not; and I underestimate both the time and energy that a project will take on a given week by almost exactly 30%.

Ever since, I’ve been using a variant of this system to plan my weeks around physical and emotional energy using a 5-mana-point scale and trying to treat 15 points per day as my hard limit. Week-by-week, this has been great! I don’t burn out as much, I’m way less confused about why I’m tired on a given day, it’s clearer when I need to take breaks. What I want to do in the coming year is to mana track a few videos from beginning to end - however long that takes - to get a better sense of how many hours of work are actually involved and how exhausted I can expect to feel. I want averages. I want to look at an Alt-Right Playbook script and be able to say “three pages, that’s probably this many work days.” I don’t need to be 100% correct on this, it’s just that my predictions so far have been based on “here’s when it needs to get done,” which, if last year is any indication, doesn’t work!

BINGO

Inspired by this Kimchi Cuddles comic, a group chat I’m in does New Year’s Bingo Cards in lieu of resolutions, and this year I’m joining in. Here’s mine.

I’ve redacted the titles because a lot of them are personal; I’m not telling you that stuff.

Every year, I make an Annual Goals document, where I list all the things I want to achieve in the coming year, and I also do a Year in Review document, part of which is listing all the things I wanted to achieve in the previous year but didn’t; it’s very disheartening! So what I like about Bingo is it incorporates failure. You’re not supposed to accomplish everything; you’re not going for blackout. You’re just trying to get a line. It changes the framing: you need things that are smaller, more achievable, not least because you need to come up with 25 of them, which is more than I usually put on list of resolutions. It’s things you would be proud to have done but not devastated to whiff. There’s no reason to even tally the whiffs.

“Incorporating failure” is a theme for 2024. It’s why the Non-Prescriptive Optimism: plan for the ambitious target you know you’re not going to hit. I have led with a fear of failure for much of my life, and I’m trying to look at it differently. It’s not a binary.

You’ll note I gave myself this bonus column for unexpected achievements; my Year in Review often has a lot of accomplishments I didn’t anticipate at the start of the year. So, if I pull off something surprising and noteworthy in 2024, I can put it here, and if I do that five times, Bonus Bingo.

LUDICROUS SYSTEMS OF MEDIA CONSUMPTION

Turns out the problem was never that I can’t do hard things; I can’t do boring things. Y’all who’ve seen the Overdetermined Adventure Game Tier List I’m planning, you know: I relish creating unnecessary work for myself, so long as it’s silly! Spreadsheets, math, number-crunching, it’s all fun so long as 1) the numbers are interesting and 2) the fact that someone would crunch them is funny. (It’s me, I’m someone, and I am very entertained by this.)

So: in 2022, I started logging all the movies I watched in a Twitter thread, writing 280-character reviews as an experiment in brevity. In 2023, I logged my movies on Letterboxd, writing reviews of whatever length I wanted if and only if I had something to say, as an experiment in unmasked ADHD. This year… hehehehehe I’M LOGGING EVERYTHING.

Movies: I am continuing to log all movies on Letterboxd, with no obligation to review. But: I have made a list. A few years ago I started keeping a movie list on my phone so I wouldn’t forget what I wanna watch but it got longer and longer and became overwhelming to even look at. So I selected about half of the films and put them on this Letterboxd list. Any time I want to watch something from here, I copy-paste the list into random.org’s List Randomizer, and whatever sorts to the top, that is what I watch. They are all movies I chose, but, when it comes time to actually watch one, I have eliminated choice paralysis. It’s still early in the year and I’ve already watched three of them, after a couple had been sitting on the unstructured list for a year or more. Oh, and I’m giving them star ratings (which I don’t do for movies not on the list) cuz I wanna see what my batting average is.

I’ve also made another one of these. If anyone wants to play Classic Noir Bingo with me this year, lemme know! We’ll make it a thing!

Music: the top song on my Spotify Wrapped 2023 was in my top ten for 2022. That is unacceptable. “Have The Top Song On Your Spotify Wrapped Be Something You Found This Year” is on my Bingo Card. Pursuant to that, I am bolstering my usual tools - Discover Weekly, playlists from friends, my own rabbit holes, and Twitter recs - with Music Map and Every Noise at Once. Both scrape data from Spotify: Music Map is a system for finding similar artists based on tags and Every Noise is a complete catalog of microgenres. These are for turning rabbit holes into a warrens. I will also be keeping a playlist of favorite finds so I don’t forget them, maybe I’ll share it at the end of the year.

Books: actually my existing system for books is working pretty well - I use Goodreads to log pages, explore new writers, I’m good with my current reading habits and genres. The one new goal on my Bingo Card is Read A Nonfiction Book That Isn’t Research. I’ve had a growing stack of these since 2019 and I would like to read one of them.

Games: hehehehe, ok. Like a lot of people, I have an enormous Steam library full of games I have never played. I have similar (but much smaller) libraries on Epic, GOG, and the Switch. And, for the last two years, I haven’t made a dent in these, cuz I’ve been sticking to my comfort genres: adventure games, throwback shooters, metroidvanias. This year I wanna branch out. But how?

Film critic Mike D’Angelo writes and (usually) reviews a movie every single day, so he’s got a pretty extensive To Watch list. But he did this thing a while ago, where he took a shitload of movies that hadn’t made the cut and watched the first ten minutes of all of them. Just a quick sampler of dozens and dozens of movies. And if any of those ten minutes were promising, he added this previously-dismissed movie to the Watchlist.

So I’m doing something similar. [Actually since the first draft of this script, YouTuber Tall Fox has released a video of him doing something similar: he played the first hour of 15 games in 2023… check that video out, but, hohohohoho buddy] I have made a bunch of what I’m calling Tasting Menus - collections of four thematically-related games from my backlog that I will play the first 15-30 minutes of. So, in 1-2 hours, I can give a fair shake to four games, and, if something jumps out at me, I can explore it further in my own time. And, if a few days later, I’m not feeling the urge to go back, I can uninstall it guilt-free.

I’m not going to spoil the games, but these are the themes - I’ve made seventeen of these tasting menus and threw in a wild card for obvious reasons. I haven’t decided how often I’m going to do these. I also haven’t decided how I’m going to pick themes - maybe the list randomizer? maybe twitter polls? maybe I let patrons vote on them! And I’m not sure what happens then - do I write them up? make short video reviews? give recommendations? I dunno! Still figuring this out!

WHAT IT ALL MEANS

The running theme is I’m going to involve you in a lot more things. There’s systemization and quantification here, and it seems a shame to waste it. Moreover: I have enjoyed writing my little movie reviews these past few years, and the haphazard recommendations I’ve occasionally made in my monthly updates. I have an audience! I have a platform! Let’s utilize that! It’s more fun to write for someone.

And any number of these could crash and burn! Is this me getting control of my tendency to overcommit, or an example of it? Is this my midlife crisis?! We’ll find out together!

There is a possibility this is my last year doing Innuendo Studios full-time. I don’t like saying that - any time I even gesture in that direction of bunch of you raise your pledges, please seriously don’t, this is not a call to action, sentiment appreciated! but the number is big, I’m not gonna get there by guilting you, I have a better strategy!!!

I don’t want to stop, and, at least in this moment, I’m feeling like I probably won’t have to! But, if I’m coming into this year knowing that’s a possibility, I want you to know it too. It’s not your responsibility to stop it. Don’t put your energy there. But, if there’s any chance this could be our last year together, let’s make it a good one.