January Update

Hey team,

It's January! A new year in a couple senses for me, since I just had a birthday. I wanna let everybody know where we're standing with the channel right now.

As many of you probably know, Extra Credits released a video  of recommendations for YouTube channels their audience should check out, and Innuendo Studios was one of them. EC has a pretty enormous following, and this led to the largest spike in traffic since I put out Why Are You So Angry? It's also the biggest bump in subscribers in the channel's history. (BTS backers, I'll go into the traffic stats in more detail in the near future.) As a result, Tomatoes  was released to a much larger subscriber base than my last video waaaaaay back in August, and we've got a number of new patrons reading this message. Hello new patrons! A big thanks to the folks at Extra Credits is in order.

Something I've been teasing for some time now is some more overtly political videos that discuss the current state of affairs in the US. While Tomatoes was my first video to only tangentially even mention games, these political videos will be talking about politics completely irrespective of games culture. I've been finding this a difficult thing to write about, and a number of scripts have been written and then scrapped as their subject moved out of the news cycle or because properly tackling a given subject was a gargantuan task. But I believe I've got an angle on what I want to talk about and how I want to go about it.

I've been considering, for some time, a sort of sequel series to Why Are You So Angry?, talking about various rhetorical strategies Angry Jack uses to control conversations online, and what kinds of worldviews they reinforce. Given the huge overlap between GamerGate and the Alt-Right, a lot of the rhetoric applies to both, so analyzing the Alt-Right as a whole fits pretty well into my wheelhouse. And a number of the subjects I've been considering for political videos would actually fit the format of an "Alt-Right Rhetorical Strategies" series.

One important facet of this series is that I want the individual videos to be short, so while I'm going to be releasing them to all of you as I finish them, I'm going to wait until I have a few of them done before releasing them publicly, as they will benefit from being viewed in sequence. There should be at least one off to you before the end of the month, and, since they're short, several more in the near future. I will also mix up these political videos with more of my usual cultural criticism stuff - I've got a few game-related essays in the works as well, so we're not leaving the wheelhouse behind.

Anyway! I'm hopping on a bus in a few hours to go protest the Inauguration in DC, so I'll wrap this up. Thanks, everyone, for your support! You'll hear from me again soon.

-I