May Update: A Break From Politics

Hey team!

Videos New & Old

I've just finished the slides on the next video, and should have a rough cut to you tomorrow. Came in at a downright ludicrous 285 slides this time, by a long way the most for any episode of The Alt-Right Playbook. It's also the longest script for the series and I'm guessing will be the longest video so far.

Am, in fact, very happy with how it's shaping up! This one is pretty dense with information, which is maybe why it required so many drawings. It's also possible that I'm just getting fussier with the illustrations and making more than I have to, but let's assume it's the first thing. I'm proud of the way the script covers a lot of ground without getting cumbersome or overly-digressive. Can't wait to show it to you!

I had hoped to have this online earlier in the month. For May, I was enjoying a leisurely pace with work, pecking away at the next video and making room to research future projects, write the intro for the video after this, make a bunch of notes for some videos I have planned for later. It's been really lovely! But when I recorded the script, I realized immediately that it needed a rewrite, so now we're bunched up at the end of the month again. I swear I'm getting better at this! It's just maybe not that noticeable...

This video will conclude the loosely-connected "Mainstreaming Trilogy," and, counting Endnote 1, will be my fourth Alt-Right Playbook entry in a row. I dunno about you, but I am ready to work on something different.

There was an old proviso that I realize is not on the current text of the Patreon, where I gave myself permission to, on occasion, take two months to make a video if it was going to be in the 30-minute range. It meant doing the same amount of work as two 15-minute videos, just not releasing until the whole thing was done.

This is to say, I have a strong suspicion the next video - my first non-political vid since the Monkey Island video in February - will be around half an hour, so there's a chance it won't come out until July. The prep work I've been doing for it has been really fun, so I just want to make it as long as it feels it needs to be.

I suppose there's a chance it could still come out in June it comes out shorter than I'm expecting, or if the edit goes faster since I don't have to draw many slides for this one (after four political videos, I forget what it's like to make videos without a billion slides). I'll let you know which way things are headed as the month continues, but, unless there is a huge outcry, I wouldn't hold my breath on a video til July. But I think it'll be a good one. :)

Annotation Situation

It has come to my attention that EverytimeHQ may not exist anymore. It appears to have been purchased by a site called MediaTag and none of my login info works anymore.

This is only relevant to the $5-and-up patrons, but EverytimeHQ is what I used to do the video annotations. The bummer about the site being gone and all the old links being dead is that none of that stuff is backed up. I don't think I got any notice that EverytimeHQ was going away, and, to the best of my knowledge, there wasn't any way to download your annotations anyway.

So this is a super frickin' bummer! Not only do I have to find a new way to annotate videos, I guess I'm just going to have to re-annotate all the ones I'd already done. That's... a huge amount of work. I'm hoping I remember all my amazing insights when I do them over.

One way or another, this is going to take a while to get sorted, so I'll be thinking of some stopgap measures for the $5 patrons to make sure y'all are getting your money's worth. I dunno, maybe we'll have to rejigger the tiers or something, because I don't know when I'm going to have time to re-annotate 3 hours of old videos. (Let's just pretend I wasn't embarrassingly behind schedule already.)

Action Movie Homework

Part of the research for the next video has been watching a lot of action movies - I am not complaining! - so let's leave off with this call to action:

What are some of your favorite action films? Let me know in the comments.

Cheers,

-I