November Update: Again We Ask "What Month Is It?"

Happy Belated Indigenous Peoples Day, team!

The Elephant in the Algorithm

I guess we can't really do a retrospective on November without discussing the video takedown, can we?

Well, as most of you know, Endnote 2: White Fascism was falsely reported as hatespeech and was taken down for 6 hours. The culprit is unknown and uninteresting - it's common for Nazis and "anti-SJWs" to report any video that discusses white racism as being pro-Nazi when they are clearly the opposite, and YouTube tends to get as far as "there are swastikas in this video" and just pull it. Sargon of Akkad also posted an out-of-context screencap of the video to his Twitter, and his audience is known to pull this shit, but the tweet didn't seem to get that much traction and the last time I got dogpiled by Sargon there was more vitriol thrown at me in comments and on Twitter/Tumblr, so I don't think he's (solely) to blame this time.

I was lucky to get the video back up fairly quickly - I know people who've had videos down for days without YouTube getting to their appeal. YouTube is a black box so I have no idea why they got to me quickly - someone from Google reached out and said he'd poke folks at YouTube, a lot of people tweeted at YouTube, and I filled out their appeal form. Which of these was most effective? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Having the video unwatchable during a big chunk of its first day has almost certainly hurt it in the long run. A lot of people probably missed it when it would have been at the top of their subscription box, and it likely dampened early word of mouth to not be shareable.

On the flipside, though, talking about what was happening on Twitter got me a huge outpouring of support, in terms of kind words, new followers, and new backers. It sucks that all this happened during a period of intense stress for me because I feel like I didn't get to appreciate it? Things have quieted down, so I'm trying to make room to appreciate it now:

Hey, new backers! I appreciate you! Thank you so much for backing! I can't wait to show you what I'm working on next!

Release Schedule

OK actually what I'm working on next is just another Alt-Right Playbook episode. I do these things in batches of interrelated subjects, and we're working through a cycle discussing the actual ideologies of the Left and the Right. There are two more to the current batch and then I'll take a break and do something less political.

I'm still one video behind schedule since I spent so long on Bringing Back What's Stolen. (No regrets.) The hope was to get that video made up by Christmas, which could have happened if I hadn't done a video on white fascism! The original plan was for Endnote 2 to be a 5-minute rundown of how I research the series, and it would be small enough that I could turn it around quickly and get two videos done in the same month. But then I was in a good writing mode and had a bunch of thoughts for this other video defining fascism, so I wrote that, and realized it needed to come before a later video where I define conservatism, and the research script could just as easily be a Tumblr post, but the fascism video was the longest in the series so far...

Look, I hope y'all don't back me expecting I'll be succinct or punctual.

So, yeah, with me traveling for part the holiday season, I don't see getting two videos done this month. I'm still in good shape! I got the last video online a few days before the end of November and managed to outline the next video by December 1st, so I'm already pretty near the end of a draft. That's pretty early in the month for me. It was kind of awesome to not be in a crunch at the end of the month for once, and not be burned out at the start of the next one. I'm hoping to get the bulk of the work on this next video done before I leave town so I can just put the finishing touches on when I get back.

I won't be able to edit while I'm traveling, but I should have time to work on January's script. So maybe we can get back on schedule then, or soon after.

End of Year Lists

This is a thing people do, right?

Here are a bunch of 2018 movies that were good:

Widows
Mission: Impossible - Fallout
Sorry to Bother You
Annihilation
Upgrade
Gemini
Halloween
Suspiria
You Were Never Really Here
Revenge
Searching

This is in no particular order, though, if I had to pick a favorite, I'd go with Revenge. It was the most amazing discovery of all the movies I watched while researching the Fury Road video. There's still some stuff coming out this month that I'm excited about, so maybe something will top it. We'll just have to see.

Keeping in mind that I don't get to play a lot of new releases, my Game of the Year is Iconoclasts. Special commendation goes to Celeste and Return of the Obra Dinn, but Iconoclasts was the thing that resonated the most strongly and kept me thinking about it the longest. People seem to be ambivalent about the quality of games as a whole this year, but any year that I get a few new favorites is a good year in my book. (Oh, also, I wrote up my thoughts on Obra Dinn.)

That's it for me, nerds. Talk to you soon!

-I