WHAT IS VIDREV?

vidrev is a blog dedicated to reviewing and sharing video essays. originally started on cohost, the idea is to examine the interesting qualities and blindspots of essayists from across youtube while also shining a spotlight on underrated videos.

i'm a video essayist myself, so i invite readers to check my work and see if i really know what the hell i'm talking about. my main tumblr blog is here.

if you have an essay you think i might be interested in, no matter the age, viewcount, or length (and yes, including your own work!), i accept submissions here. just know that i make no commitment to reviewing/highlighting any submissions and that there's nothing personal about it, i'm only human.

VIDEO ESSAY REVIEW: "The Invisible Illness We Don't Understand" by Ro Ramdin.

video essays are a strange medium, though their strangeness has been somewhat obscured by their digital ubiquity. what was once the niche documentary-esque indulgence of the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Orson Welles (though their genre was technically "the essay film") has exploded into a popular if not dominant mode of expression in the age of online video. this current transmutation of the form grew out of the vlogs of the 2000s and 2010s, when it was enough to just sit down in front of a camera and talk about your life. the vast majority of video essays lean pretty heavily on the "essay" part, owing to the fact that online video is the medium through which an essayist is most likely to have their work seen. but the very act of presenting oneself on camera delivering information is interesting, in a way that is quite distinct from the written essay. even a creator totally disinterested in the art of editing or public speaking is, by necessity, performing for a hypothetical audience. and once you decouple that form from the strict televisual structure (and network oversight) of something like At the Movies with Siskel & Ebert, you open up the door to a much more personal and subjective form of expression in the act of delivering an essay.

this is the dynamic that has drawn me to video essays from the very beginning. it's the reason i believe they're worth writing about. they provide a unique opportunity to blend art and criticism, two disciplines that have long been considered in academia as oil and water (when i went to film school in 2014 with the explicit desire to do film work while also studying the form academically, i was surprised to learn that this was unusual if not explicitly frowned upon).

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #7

hello, and welcome back to your regularly scheduled roundup of-- what was that? i haven't updated this blog since september 2024? no way, that's crazy.

anywho, let's talk about some video essays.

VIDREV: "Short Seasons Are Killing TV" by Captain Midnight.

[originally posted august 29th 2024]

Captain Midnight is one of those creators i don't really follow because the vast majority of their work (mostly Big Corporate IP analysis) doesn't interest me, but every once in a while they'll come out with something that's EXTREMELY relevant to my interests. this one caught my eye because i've been on that "the streaming model is really bad for television" grind since 2018, and i'm always curious to see how mainstream perspectives on this stuff are evolving.

i'll just say at the start that this is a pretty good video. most everything i've watched by Captain Midnight has felt at the very least on the right track, if not always entirely on point, and the lack of cutesy overly familiar Content Creator-isms are a godsend from this type of channel. it makes for a bit of an odd duck for a full VIDREV, because i'm not here to discuss the shortcomings of what was said, but rather to take a closer look at what wasn't said.

in short, this is a video about how the now-standard 8 to 10 episode TV season in a post-streaming world has strangled much of what makes the medium unique, and he points to how many of the top-rated streaming shows are older titles with a hundred or more episodes as evidence (though he leaves out that streaming rights to shows like The Office have been the subject of contentious bidding wars in the past, a fact that would only strengthen his argument). he hits a lot of my personal favorite talking points: streaming tv is worse at good individual episodes, the idea of "filler" doesn't really make sense when applied to american television, the serial episodic structure lets you get to know characters better over time. near the end he pulls out the Netflix Marvel shows Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, each of which had a 14 episode first season that felt somehow overlong, despite their characters being literally tailor-made to support serialized week-to-week stories. these, he says, were an important early example of how the prestige streaming model encourages movie-like storytelling instead of TV-like storytelling. these are a good points, many of which i've made myself across my recent informal series of video essays about modern television writing practices.

but on the other side of all that analysis, Midnight's conclusion leaves something to be desired. here's the closing paragraph that jumped out at me, with my own added emphasis: "I love serialization on TV and I always have, I just think it can often be used better within the scaffolding of episodic stories. and for a while there it felt like TV was getting better and better at melding the two together into something truly interesting and special. but somewhere along the way that progress got lost, and many in the industry ended up thinking that serialization and short seasons were the shortcut to quality." take a good, long look at those bolded statements, and consider how important they are to Midnight's argument. after 17 minutes of wide-ranging and generally pretty good analysis of specific shows and recent trends, these three generalizations quietly paper over a gargantuan blind spot in order to get the script over the finish line.

first, "for a while there." for a while there refers to the internecine years between the dawn of the Netflix streaming era in 2011 and the eventual Wall Street-ification of all the media companies by 2018-19, when there was a big shift away from purely serialized television towards the more expensive "prestige" model we're so accustomed to now. what were the causes of this shift? what was actually going on "for a while there"? well, the 2007 writer's strike increased the writer's royalty take from home video sales, and gave them more bargaining power with networks. for this and a million other reasons, a lot of post-2007 shows saw a diminished episode-per-season count from 23 to 16-18. this was a huge boon to writers who now had more time to work on fewer episodes, meaning the quality of each individual episode shot through the roof. it helped that everyone coming into showrunning capacity at this period had years of experience working in the sitcom/cop-drama mines, developing a hunger for a show that could tell a continuous narrative within an episodic framework. with this new higher-quality television spreading away from cable-only networks into broadcast, suddenly everyone was talking about "the golden age of tv" and hyping up the medium as a place for nuanced, artful storytelling. Netflix saw where the wind was blowing and invested heavily into this trend, selling the idea that on streaming, there's no need for a set episode-per-season count for every show, no need for every episode to come in at a set length, no need to avoid more controversial adult topics for advertisers. of course, they very quickly reneged on that promise and have since become everything they promised not to be, but whatever. as Netflix succeeded, other networks decided they wanted to eat the streamer's lunch and develop their own services, making big deals with established names that made for great marketing. this meant a wave of well-publicized high-profile investment that pulled triple duty with audiences hungry for more mature media, creators hungry to make more mature media, and investors with dollar signs in their eyes. perhaps you can guess whose interests are the ones that actually matter in this equation.

but then after all that investment and quality increase, Midnight says, "somewhere along the way" the trend shifted, and "many in the industry" adopted the streaming model as the artistic ideal. now, hold on, wait. who in the industry? do you mean writers? directors? producers? executives? these roles each have wildly different relationships to the medium and to the stores of capital which allow it to be produced, and putting them all in a single consensus-bucket together as if they're all the same thing is wildly misjudged. you know what happened "somewhere along the way"? studios and streamers (and their increasingly powerful Wall Street backers) realized that favoring streaming over home video meant they didn't have to pay those costly royalties that were so painstakingly won in the 07 strike. you may recall that apocalyptically low streaming royalties were a major point of contention in the 2023 writer's strike. (the irony of Netflix starting as a DVD rental service is lost on no one.) like every service that emerges out of big tech, streaming was tailor made to break unions and steal profits without looking like that's what they were doing. they sold a big loud exciting bill of goods, got everyone to invest before regulators could catch up, made themselves an essential part of the creative economy, stole absolutely everything that wasn't bolted down while no one was looking, and left all their traditional unionized competitors scrambling to make up the shortfall. if this sounds familiar, that's because it is THE business model of the post-08-recession world. you might call it platform decay, or if you're Cory Doctorow you might call it "enshittification," but i'm gonna cut out the middle man and call it what it is: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. it's the enclosure of the commons in microcosm, the natural process of enclosure and monopolization inherent to an open market. as is always the case with their loud proclamations of innovation, tech has invented nothing new here. it's pretty much just What Capitalism Does.

we do not need bloggers to reinvent Marxism from first principles to understand what's happening. Marx already did that for us.

another key factor for understanding what happened "along the way" comes with the development of Mini-Rooms. instead of creating a crew of staff writers experienced at multiple levels of production who work for months together to write the scripts for a single season of television, streamers like Netflix would assemble small rooms of relatively inexperienced writers paid slightly above intern rates under the guidance of maybe one experienced showrunner that were only given a few weeks to pump out scripts to please investors. this has led to shows that often feel samey, rushed, and terminally inconsistent. now, instead of writers having more time to work on fewer episodes for the same (or greater) pay, they have less time to work on fewer episodes for worse pay and virtually zero royalties. this coincides of course with cost-cutting measures across the board in streaming, with producers desperate to decrease time on set wherever possible and eating the cost of breaking union regulations because Economies Of Scale Are Fucking Absurd, meaning everyone on a production has less time to do their work, which inevitably means that their work is worse. and with TV seasons being so drastically shortened, and the gaps between seasons so drastically widened (not to mention the expectation that few if any shows will make it past season 2 (because union contracts get a pay bump at season 3)), there are fewer opportunities for young filmworkers to gain experience, build connections with fellow filmworkers, and hone their talent pool over a period of years. a show isn't just its writers, directors, and stars after all, it's an entire business operation employing hundreds if not thousands of people. for a filmworker in the 90s or before, getting a gig on a popular show could be life-changing because it was one of the rare Hollywood situations that was relatively dependable for a long stretch of time. those kinds of jobs are increasingly rare, and the alternatives are starting to look more and more like undignified freelance work than a real sustainable career.

all of these factors and so many more have had the downstream effect of making the entire industry less stable, burning out promising young talent instead of developing it, discouraging others from trying to break into the industry in the first place, and lowering the baseline quality of popular media so the viewing public sees it as less valuable. perhaps you can fill in the blanks on the ensuing race to the bottom.

this is not the result of a creative consensus. this is not something that "many in the industry" just sort of randomly changed their minds about "somewhere along the way." this is an economic trend driven by economic forces far beyond the purview of any single working person's decisions. maybe you can find interviews that suggest otherwise, maybe there were lots of writers excitedly extolling the virtues of streaming media over traditional forms-- but those people are no less vulnerable to marketing hype than you are, and why should they have been more educated about the economic realities of streaming than we were? we are, all of us, simply reacting to systems in motion, trying our best to make sense of them, searching for the silver lining that keeps us from going insane at the instability of it all. this is why it's so important to have a materialist framework for your analysis-- without that anchor you're just judging by vibes, trying to divine an explanation from consumer trends and missing the forest for the trees. look not to the words of any given writer or actor or producer, but instead to the money, to the actual flow of material power. look at the victories of organized labor, and the resultant retaliations by organized capital. Midnight's thumbnail loudly states that "WE BROKE TV," but "we" didn't do a damn thing. our consumption habits didn't do this, the creative preferences of writers or directors or showrunners didn't do this-- it was rich people with lots of money who saw an opportunity to make even more money and took it, damn the consequences.

here's my problem with consumer-side criticism. it tends to see a hard dividing line between those who make media and those who consume it, and thus generalizes all of the makers into a single heterogeneous mass that can only be understood in the vaguest possible abstract. without a materialist economic framework for understanding the flow of power in these systems, consumer-side criticism can only go so far before it crashes headlong into a big scary Marx-shaped wall. there's a door to the other side only a few feet away of course, but it's rare for a critic in this mode to walk through it because I guess they see the business side of things as irrelevant or overly complicated. like, we're here to talk about the contents of media in a very layman's death-of-the-author sort of way, to judge trends on their own merits and not rely on outside sources to skew our perspective. this is fine when the scope of your analysis is relatively small, but as soon as you start asking questions like "why isn't [thing] as good as it used to be" your consumer-end framework fails you utterly. i'm not saying Captain Midnight is a uniquely craven paragon of this particular misstep by the way, in fact on the whole i'd say he's better about this than many. this is an extremely widespread problem for a generation of critics brought up after The End Of History, when trickle-down free-market hokum was adopted as Natural Law, leaving them only the empty feelgood individualist babble of neoliberalism to interpret the world. but it's not an insurmountable problem! i've yet to meet a commie my age that didn't start in that bubble and have to work their way out of it. i certainly made my share of embarrassing neoliberal apologia before finding the immortal science! it is the process of a lifetime to unthink these blind spots, and i point them out in all kindness in the hopes that others might avoid such mistakes in future.

and frankly, everyone is asking these "why is [thing] bad now" questions because it's begun to affect every facet of our lives. it's not just movies and television shows, it's basic web services, it's the USPS, it's the healthcare system, it's jobs and housing and education, it's everything. what is it, precisely, that you want to fix? you want to see better movies and tv shows? how do you propose to make that a reality, beyond "i hope that creators/audiences adjust their habits accordingly"? to my mind, this notable tension is a perfect opportunity to point people in the direction of an actual systemic cause, and thus an actual systemic solution. do not stop your analysis at "shorter seasons are bad and i hope they stop doing that" when you could help your audience think about these things in terms of class, labor, and solidarity, by giving them an illustrative example they might apply to their own working life. there is no fix to this macroeconomic trend in reform, no union so strong it can put a lance through the heart of capital's lust for profit. maybe bringing all this up in a video would feel too political for a lot of creators in this space, but the politics are gonna do what they're gonna do regardless and it's gonna be your problem (and your audience's problem!) sooner than later. i'm not saying every video essay should be a dedicated Marxist polemic, that would get old real fast, just that the current liberal individualist framework lets the real perpetrators off the hook and limits our ability to imagine better futures. if you want to feel like your fluffy unimportant media analysis is "justified" at a time of war, genocide, and crushing economic disparity, you might start by using them to normalize a more collective, materially-grounded way of thinking about the world. it's the little things that add up most in the long run, and you'd be surprised how easy it is to make "too political" into "too important to ignore" with a little strategic frog-boiling.

that's my opinion, anyway. this is still a pretty good video essay and i think you should go watch it. i'd also recommend Midnight's review of the Borderlands movie and the interminable nostalgia of modern Marvel movies for a bit of good fun.

[final note: at the start of the video, Midnight mentions that Adam Conover also released a video about the harms of streaming television at the same time, but that it goes in a very different direction. i'm gonna give it a watch and see how it stacks up by comparison. i expect that it will have a more materialist framework (since Conover actually works in the industry) and correctly identify where the problems lay. i also expect that he'll fall flat when it comes time to talk about solutions, because like Cory Doctorow he's invested in the anti-monopoly line, which fundamentally believes that if you just break up the monopolies then capitalism will be fine actually. i guess now i'll put that theory to the test, and if i find anything interesting i may end up writing about it.]

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #6 [PART 2]

[originally posted august 1st 2024 NOTE: while migrating the archive from cohost i've discovered that tumblr has a 10 link-block limit, which means i have to split some of these roundups up in order to maintain the embeds. we love websites don't we folks]

"New Zelda isn't Zelda" by Eroymak.

it's novel to see one of these shot in the mountains! vibes like a younger, ganglier nakeyjakey. i like to imagine that there's an escalating war of spectacle happening between white outdoorsy middle-class nerds all trying to one-up each other by casually filming an otherwise anodyne video essay in increasingly precarious locales. how long until a 22 year old DJ from Wisconsin dies on the slopes of Everest trying to film an essay about Mario 1-1? who's going to be the first human being to levy a citation-heavy critique of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead while skydiving? how long until Shiey accidentally loses Jacob Geller down an abandoned mine shaft? anyway, Eroymak is extremely correct here about what makes modern Zelda games a drag, namely that their "go anywhere do anything" attitude ruins the sense of progression that once defined the franchise. i worry about this with the upcoming Echoes of Wisdom, which seems to be applying the Of The games' open toolset philosophy to the 2D Zelda template, but i digress. for being only 7 minutes and 20 seconds, this is a pretty succinct and broadly comprehensive summation of why the open world Zeldas lack a certain magic that was once so easily flaunted by their forebears.

"so that's why they cut all her scenes from the movie" by CinemaStix.

i've seen CinemaStix videos in my recommended feed multiple times and avoided them like the plague. i mean, come on. "CinemaStix"? at a glance this conjures a monstrous Third-Way chimera betwixt CinemaSins and CinemaWins, and i would sooner stave my own head in with a rock than give such a thing the time of day. EXCEPT… Constantine 2005 is one of my favorite comic book movies. i saw it in theaters and it changed me. in the years since, i've defended Constantine's honor from the haters to little avail (thankfully the tides have turned in recent years and people are realizing that they totally missed the second-best John Wick movie), and it's top of my list of fun movies to show guests when we're bored. this special interest overrode my kneejerk book-cover judgment survival mechanism, and i'm so mad that i don't regret it. this video is about the editing of Constantine 2005, and how many of the film's iconic moments were constructed in post. as the title suggests, a substantial amount of time is spent trying to understand why an entire character was ultimately cut, a question that's also plagued me ever since watching the deleted scenes on the DVD in 10th grade. whether you've seen Constantine 2005 or not, this is an excellent portrait of editing as a substantive authorial process. i've since gone and watched multiple CinemaStix videos, and god damn it, these are some quality essays. sometimes popular things are good, she said grumpily.

"Conservative Comedy Ruined My Life" by Big Joel.

oops, can you tell this vidrev roundup has been sitting in my drafts for a long time? this video came out on April 2nd of 2024 and has nearly 2.5 million views, so i won't belabor the point. this is a great deconstruction of conservative comedy that looks hard into why so much of it sucks beyond the empty platitudes endemic to smarmy liberals. it's some of Big Joel's best work in my opinion.

"On Online Entitlement" by CJ The X.

an excellent autopsy of the rhetorical implications of an overly familiar instagram comment-- a description that i know probably sounds obnoxious, but genuinely is not the case. Mx. The X goes to great lengths to assure us that this is not about the person who left the comment, but the various attitudes and assumptions that are implied in its construction. gen z essayists in particular seem to specialize in this sort of editorial post-game breakdown of the things people say when they think they're saying something else, and i think they're always worth paying attention to. consider this something of a downstream epilogue to Shannon Strucci's seminal Fake Friends series. even as i don't always agree with the totality of their conclusions, i do always come away from CJ The X videos feeling like i've learned something about how i and other internet-dwelling social animals think.

"How Uber Is Destroying Food Delivery" by More Perfect Union.

More Perfect Union is not typically in the business of video essays, focusing more on feature stories that heavily rely on interviews and on-the-ground reporting. this one's a unique development in that it is just straight up a video essay, using the business model of Uber as an avenue for understanding Corey Doctorow's theory of platform decay (except he calls it Enshittification because god forbid 21st century materialist philosophy grow out of its twee blogosphere adolescence). if you know the theory then there's probably not gonna be much here that surprises you, but i felt it a notable inclusion nevertheless.

do you have recommendations for video essays i might not have seen, new or old? well my askbox is open and i'm always looking for ways to penetrate my experiential-algorithmic youtube bubble. hope you found something enjoyable in this collection, see you in the next one!

<- ROUNDUP #5

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #6 [PART 1]

[originally posted august 1st 2024]

at last, it's time for another roundup! things were fairly dry for a minute there. i tend to go through peaks and valleys vis-a-vis video essay consumption, where i'll watch a bunch of them for a few months and then not be able to watch any for a few months after that. this has been especially true as i've been getting back into the habit of making my own scripted essays. did you know i did one about the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials a few months ago? i share this so you can judge for yourself if i know what i'm talking about enough to be worth taking recommendations from. i am a fallible beast, and our tastes are likely not the same! also i'm proud of that video and i'd like you to watch it.

but we're here to talk about other people's work, and let me tell you, the last month and a half has yielded a real bounty. let's jump in.

"Investigating a forgotten Edward Snowden Quote" by Allie Meowy.

this is one of the funniest, strangest essays i've encountered in years. what happens when the wikipedia page for games based on movies doesn't include Elf: The Movie: The Game for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, and also you happen to discover that Edward Snowden is on the record as liking "some" hentai games? i'm not even sure what this essay ultimately adds up to, but i had such a blast watching it that i honestly don't even care. a wild ride that's well worth your time.

"a pocket full of stones" by Glouder Glens.

i've been thinking about an interview with People's Joker director Vera Drew where she talked about how many young queer artists have relegated themselves to the anti-recognition of youtube. if her film was proof that there's room in the film fest circuit for artfully essayish digital cinema, then we have no choice but to campaign for the incredible works of Sylvia Schweikert, AKA Glouder Glens, to reach a similar level of recognition. if you've yet to encounter its work, Sylvia's half-essay half-werewolf-erotica about it/its pronouns is a classic, but everything on her channel is a gem (not to mention its excellent short films). lately, Sylvia's been experimenting with the form in a big way. her last essay, "Self Discovery Stories," is artfully vertical, a true phone video that digs deep and hits hard. "a pocket full of stones" takes a huge step sideways, rendered in 4:3 at a scalding 360p and edited with a post-adobe-flash Lynch-esque animation style that rockets you back in time to the earliest days of internet video in the best way. what i wouldn't give to see this one on the big screen, i'm telling you. this kind of work simply doesn't have a place on youtube as far as youtube's concerned, so it's up to us as champions of the medium to share widely what the algorithm will not. definitely heed the content warnings though.

"The Miraculous Horror of Stop Motion" by Henry Kathman.

here's a cozy, enthusiastic dive into the often unforeseen externalities of stop-motion animation, that doesn't outstay its welcome or get too sanctimonious. i appreciate Kathman's use of alternate backdrops to give each section its own mood. through three unique and interesting examples of stop motion, he explores how the medium itself is an artform that can't be streamlined through technology the way so many other forms of animation have been-- even just to recreate the feel of stop motion digitally, you still pretty much have to hand animate it with an equivalent amount of brute labor. it's a satisfying analysis, which is unsurprising from the ever-consistent and thoughtful Kathman. and the soundtrack by Molly Noise is, as always, fantastic.

"The Religious Gamification of Indika" by Pim's Crypt.

i watched an essay a couple weeks ago about Indika which heavily criticized it for being boring and overly talkative, that really just convinced me that i wanted to see someone look at the game on its own terms. Pim here does a great job doing exactly that, wasting zero seconds of the universe's limited window of coherence on lip service to the harsh critical consensus in favor of simply examining what Indika says on its own terms. they explore how the complexities of faith are successfully gameified in Indika, making a compelling case for its quality. i've highlighted Pim in a previous roundup, and i'm happy to see them back with another solid work.

"So What's Up With Those PS2 Castlevanias?" by Trans Witch Reviews.

this one's pretty much what it says on the tin. when it comes to analyzing game franchises long-running enough to have titles across multiple console generations, i'm always drawn to essays that dig into the red-headed step-children no one ever really talks about. like the PS2 Castlevania games. i didn't even know they existed until now! granted that's probably because i never owned a Sony console before the ps4, but whatever. like a lot of games with 2D roots, Castlevania seemed to struggle finding its feet in the third dimension, and the historical consensus seems to have largely landed on "the 2D ones were best." i think this Trans Witch makes a very compelling case that at the very least Castlevania: Curse of Darkness is an underrated classic-- enough so, anyway, to make me want to give it a shot. i appreciate how she highlights the music of the series by focusing on the work of specific composers, though i think she lingers on those samples for a bit too long. regardless, this is a well put together essay made with readily apparent enthusiasm, and sometimes that's all you need.

"Why The Ring Didn't Use Color Grading" by WatchingtheAerial.

an astonishingly thorough deep-dive into the very specific in-camera techniques used to give Gore Verbinski's American remake of The Ring its signature blue look. like a lot of people i always assumed this was accomplished with digital color grading, though unlike many detractors i adore The Ring's visual identity and think it's at least as worthwhile a film as its Japanese counterpoint. this is the kind of video essay i adore-- a technician with extensive domain knowledge utilizing resources laypeople wouldn't know about to answer a seemingly simple question at exhaustive and surprising depth. the real kicker here though is that the creator also wants to recreate this technique for themself, all the way up to tracking down the kind of film stock The Ring was shot on and using it in a 35mm stills camera. i immediately went from this video to watch everything else on his (?) channel, and i wasn't disappointed. here's someone who cares a lot about the labor of shaping and lensing light, and the emotional properties these processes bring to a film. "Collateral & the Death of Neon" is SUCH a satisfying watch if you care even a little bit about the visual identity of city streets across history. great stuff all around

VIDREV: "The Biggest Lie in Hollywood | Technicolor" by NationSquid.

[originally posted june 15th 2024]

i'm just going to be honest right here at the start so we're all on the same page: i do not think this is a particularly good video. it is by no means bereft of redeeming qualities, but those qualities are massively overshadowed by this essayist's reliance on assumptions, generalizations, and outright bad information. in this review i'm going to talk about both the good and the bad, but understand that i'm not interested in being mean for the sake of meanness, nor am i here to bully or make fun of anyone. at time of writing this video has 90,000+ views, and NationSquid's channel has 390,000+ subscribers. with an audience of that size, i think some measure of critical scrutiny is warranted.

"The Biggest Lie in Hollywood" is about the history of color film in general, and the development of the 3-strip Technicolor process specifically. the "lie" in question is the idea that Technicolor films are truly "in color," because technically they were shot in black and white. this is true by a dictionary's standards, and to NationSquid's credit he does a good job explaining the process that led him to this conclusion. with Technicolor, three strips of monochrome film are shot with red/blue/green filters in front of each; when developed, those monochrome film strips are then dyed cyan/magenta/yellow; when projected on top of each other, the result is the "appearance" of full-spectrum color, despite the fact that no color information was captured on set. basically: Technicolor films aren't "in color" because they weren't shot on color film.

it would be very easy to spend the bulk of this review hammering on that specific technicality. first of all, color information was captured on set. you have three different monochrome frames capturing the relative luminance of a scene as shot through three colored gels. yes, technically even after the dying process those three frames are still monochrome… but they're monochromes in three different hues. it's not a "trick" or an optical illusion that they reproduce color when combined, it's just how light and color work. NationSquid insists several times that this is proof that Technicolor films aren't "in color," that it's actually "your eyes tricking you," but that just is not true. the process is irrelevant; if the end result appears to your eyes to be "in color", then it is definitionally in color. his later furtherance of this supposed presentational deception through the lens of a CRT's phosphor dots at least has a symbolic case in that, if you look close enough, the image is actually a matrix of red green and blue rather than a "perfect" reproduction. but even then, is an old school superhero comic not "in color" if it uses the Ben Day process? are human beings not really "made of matter" because matter's actually just a collection of atoms?

you get my point. but if that were my only complaint, i wouldn't be writing this review. bold assertions aside, his explanation of how technicolor works is generally pretty good. he even reproduces the process through still photography, then later again in CRT video to believably insert himself into an episode of The Brady Bunch. this is cool! i like it when essayists do this! there is a level of technical knowledge here that's impressive and effective. but his faulty thesis carries water for dozens of tiny generalizations that range from odd to annoying to revisionist to outright falsehood. for example, early on he confidently says "you probably think The Wizard of Oz was hand-painted frame by frame to be in color," thus setting up this video as debunking a "popular misconception" that i've never heard anyone say in my entire life, and on this particular subject i've been paying attention for a long time. this moment has the air to me of a formative personal experience from one's youth (ie thinking Oz's color was hand-painted before learning about Technicolor) being misconstrued as an obvious universal experience. could be wrong, but that's my gloss. this is something everyone does sometimes, but your writing is stronger when you pause to reflect on these personal connections any time one makes it into a script to make sure it actually holds up to scrutiny. consider that a running theme of this review.

before we even hit the one minute mark, NationSquid bafflingly states that "no matter how immersive [B&W films] were, absolute suspension of disbelief was never possible. there was always one thing missing… color." it's an easy enough statement to let roll over you when you're still trying to get your bearings through the introduction. it feels like a dangerously impetuous way to start, but lord knows sometimes you gotta oversimplify to write through the opening minutes efficiently. hell, sometimes you even put such flags in as a deliberate trap-- you know, play towards an easy conventional conclusion only to critically re-evaluate it with a more nuanced one later on. i did as much in my recent video about the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials, where i spent significant time praising the show's practical effects before circling back around later to highlight the essential role that digital effects play even in practical effects-heavy productions, and how often we throw digital effects workers under the bus in our haste to praise practicals. now, i personally find the idea that color or lack thereof has any bearing on "suspension of disbelief" to be totally nonsensical, but whatever, sometimes you say wack shit to get where you want to go, and that's probably not even really what the video is about anyway… is certainly what i hoped. but after about thirteen minutes of generally pretty good technical process explanation, the video then jumps into a crash course on early film history which, uh, leaves some things to be desired.

he talks about B&W film as possessing a "degree of separation" which allows viewers to console themselves that everything on screen is make-believe. by lacking the color dimension, you see, B&W denaturalizes its subject and makes it feel less real. perhaps there's an argument to be made there, except NationSquid frames it as though the B&W film experience is inherently less affective due to the absence of color. he never says as much directly, but his conclusion sure seems to be that our experience of media today is qualitatively more nuanced and sophisticated than it was 50 years ago, that people today feel more deeply, experience more vividly the contours of a film's world when it is in color. consider the following paragraph:

citation needed. citation needed. citation needed. if B&W footage of the Vietnam War made it feel further away, how do you explain the massive student protest movements that helped get the draft rescinded and end the war? do people today seem any less prone to distancing themselves from contemporary wars now that their coverage is in color? what "consequences" are we avoiding by watching film and television-- as opposed to what, literally meeting Elvis Presley the man in real life? where's the relevant profundity in pointing out that these are different experiences? is media duplicitous for not bombing us in real life when we watch footage of a bombing? and how is B&W "even moreso" prone to this consequence-free affect when it comes from a time when virtually all film and television was B&W, including all the same kinds of essential journalism we have today? i just want to take a big red pen to that last sentence. what do you mean by "frame of thinking"? what do you mean by "form of art"? what mechanism, precisely, do you think allowed B&W to "prolong" its dominance?

elsewhere there is a discussion of how silent film evolved towards sound and color. nominally this is meant as a comparison point for how other major technological transitions were received, opening the door for what should be an interesting discussion of artistic epistemology. i know that it should be interesting because this era is a special interest of mine, which is why i can't let it slide that NationSquid namedrops Cecil B. Demill and DW Griffith as "innovating the landscapes" of silent cinema (????) and then moves on as if the matter is settled. here's a protip for all you aspiring video essayists out there: if your essay is all about correcting a "popular misconception," make sure you do at least a cursory investigation of all your other inherited conceptions first just in case you're missing an opportunity to add more nuance and context to your discussion. it's not even that Demill and Griffith are unimportant figures, but rather that saying their names alone in 2024 without mentioning, say, Mary Pickford, Dorothy Arzner, Alice Guy Blaché, or any one of the hundreds of women who dominated and defined silent cinema betrays a shallow wikipedia-level understanding of the history at best. you only bring those two up when they're the only two you know about, and at that point you should probably just gloss over the subject entirely for both our sakes.

when discussing the problems of phonograph records desyncing from silent films, NaionSquid hits you with a one-two punch that made me shout out loud in the privacy of my own office:

what's he saying here? is he saying that because records were a popular media format, no other formats should've emerged? is he saying that it's weird B&W film became popular since records already existed? or is he saying that film should've never been silent because we could have just used records to add sound? the chain of logic he lays out here is strained and confusing, and the succeeding lines provide little clarity. it's weak argumentative writing, a basic undergrad-level "many people say" type approach that permeates this whole middle portion of the essay. on its own, if you lack domain knowledge, you might be able to accept this chain of logic. but me, the special interest haver, the film school goer, i hear all this and i can't help but wonder why he's neglected to mention that silent films usually shipped with bespoke sheet music, and that movie houses employed dedicated musicians to perform them? anyone with more than a few hours of knowledge on silent film will tell you that "silent" is a misnomer, as it was rarely if ever experienced "silently" by the audience. one could, if they were in the mood, connect this to the monochromatic nature of Technicolor and explore how our experience of media is historically contingent to the material reality of extant transformative processes. instead, NationSquid leaves this context out, and the absence screams of well-intentioned ignorance. it indicates a narrow engagement with history that contradicts his philosophical confidence, which is nominally what English classes exist to beat out of you. these are the sorts of over-generalizations that are acceptable in a classroom where you're meant to be learning how to argue, but quickly become dangerous and misleading when they're confidently presented without review to a large audience for profit.

this is not a problem specific to NationSquid, and indeed, many in his comments share my criticisms. i picked this video because i think it's an excellent example of a broader problem that is by no means new, but certainly made worse by contemporary technology and economics. it is extraordinarily easy to presume yourself an expert, and there's only money to be made in pushing forward as fast and as often as possible. my videos take forever to make because i spend a lot of time fine-tuning the script, which is admittedly disastrous for my bottom line and certainly i could stand to speed things up in that regard, be a little less perfectionist, but the fact remains: in the current political economy of digital media, ignorance is profitable because it's easy and there's no one whose job is to say "now hold on, can you elaborate on this point please?"

there are just so many frustrating, unqualified assertions. he comes around to talking about nostalgia for B&W film and people's experiences of it, saying "The printing process, projectors, and screens that were used at the time just weren't as good as they are now." citation needed! "Black and white was just tolerated because of its cost effectiveness." citation needed!! "In other words Technicolor "looks older" because you were watching it on older technology back then" BUT I'M WATCHING IT ON MODERN TECHNOLOGY NOW AND IT STILL LOOKS VERY DIFFERENT! CITATION NEEDED!!!

he talks about people "tolerating" B&W film, as if everyone was just sitting around like "yeah Casablanca is cool and all, but it'd be better if it was in color." what is this technological determinist nonsense? who in their own time gets hung up on the absence of a technology that doesn't exist? what do you say of Civil War photography, WWI newsreels, the liberation of fucking Dachau, that it's experientially lesser for being B&W? imagine someone saying 2D film is less "immersive" than 3D and that people merely "tolerated" 2D because it was more cost effective. they'd be laughed out of the room! (unless they're James Cameron in 2007, but none of us are or ever will be again.) people use the technology available to them based on the economic and political conditions of the moment in which they're available. yes, B&W was dominant because it was exceedingly inexpensive compared to color film, but what filmmaker saw that as an abject hindrance? the canvas is your canvas, you work with what you have. yes, theorists argued B&W's superiority over color on aesthetic grounds, just as they argued that silent film was superior to the talkies. but such theorizing was secondary, it was a reaction to and commentary on extant conditions over which they had little to no control. people rationalize the times they find themselves in. we tell stories, and then we tell stories about how we told those stories, and then other people interpret what the stories about our stories tell us about the stories that we told. we are human beings and our experience of art runs soul-deep no matter the medium, no matter the spectrum of senses it encompasses-- if the art hits, it hits. we did not "tolerate" the absence of color, nor was B&W "less immersive" or less friendly to "suspension of disbelief." if it seems so today, that's only because color film has been naturalized and B&W made the novelty. by such ham-fisted terms, you shouldn't be able to suspend your disbelief reading a book because words imperfectly recreate the experience they're meant to evoke. no, see, The Wizard of Oz isn't actually in color, because at one point the film stock was B&W. what do you MEAN this map isn't the territory?! manager, i've been duped!!

and perhaps none of this is intentional. if i were to ask NationSquid if he believes in any of the conclusions i've extrapolated here, chances are he'd give an emphatic no. this is what i mean by "well-intentioned ignorance." it's the easiest thing in the world to skate by on an argument that feels sound to you because it maps to your own understanding of the subject. "it doesn't sound wrong to me, so it's probably not wrong, yeah?" you include single-sentence generalizations that are "basically true" because you read them or heard them somewhere at some point, and you know your source is good so if anyone calls you on it you can be like "well here's what i meant." but the more you rely on these half-remembered quasi-truths, the more your rhetorical scaffolding reveals itself to be unfit for the job of supporting your argument. at that point, all the plausible deniability in the world can't save you from yourself. it stops being about whether you're "right" or "wrong," and becomes something far more elemental and difficult to prove: did you do the work? did you sit with your script and scrutinize it, line by line and without ego, even for just a few minutes? a good essayist knows what they don't know, and educates themself when the opportunity arises (or otherwise omits the topic entirely to avoid looking like an ass to someone with actual domain knowledge). it's impossible to avoid making mistakes in this free-for-all media landscape where editors and peer review are a thing of the past. but this does not abdicate you of the responsibility you have to perform due diligence for the sake of not misinforming your audience, nor does it give you an excuse to presume that you in this moment already know everything you need to know. you don't need to be trying to deceive someone in order to be deceptive. it can just as easily happen as the result of laziness.

anyway, that's this review.

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #5

[originally posted march 30th 2024]

it's been a minute since i've done one of these, for a whole host of reasons. the biggest one is that i just haven't been watching very much youtube lately, on account of spending my time making youtube instead. in February i released a scripted essay about the German time travel murder mystery show DARK, while in March i posted an unscripted conversation piece about all the movies i own but haven't watched. i've got a lot more planned for this year, but we're here to talk about other people's essays, not mine. so let's do that!

"Yellow Paint" by Caleb Gamman.

i've talked about Caleb Gamman on this blog before, and no doubt i will continue to do so. he's a fantastic and criminally underrated essayist whose materialist approach to media analysis is a model for the kind of thing anyone making video essays ought to aspire to. nominally about the discourse over yellow paint signposting interactible objects in modern AAA video games, this essay is a disgusted and exhausted act of passive aggression (which turns into regular aggression by the end) against the ways social media and corporate greed have engendered an atmosphere of deliberate ignorance and illiteracy towards games, traditional media, news, politics, everything. it's an entertaining and vindicating watch, full of great points argued with genuine conviction.

"PS1 STORIES - 3D SHOOTING MAKER" by Blue Bidya Game.

this one i found through a friend posting about it. we're looking at a review of a very specific PS1 "RPG Maker" spinoff dedicated to 3D rail shooters a la Star Fox --which is an instant sell for me, a long-suffering Star Fox enjoyer. but it's just as much an in-depth history of the Maker franchise as a whole, which is a lot deeper and more interesting than i ever could've imagined. a lot of research went into this, a task i can only imagine was made incredibly difficult by the language barrier. it's a great little video that packs a lot of charm into its 31 minute runtime, but what i find even more remarkable is Blue Bidya Game's mission statement: "I do sentimental videos on every game in the PS1 library alphanumerically and region-free until I die. Let's get weird and look through low graphical detail windows together. What do you think is out there? What could be just past those blocky hills?" at time of writing, there are 36 videos on Blue Bidya Game's channel, the vast majority of which are below 2000 views. if the quality of this single essay is even remotely indicative of the rest of his catalogue, then this might qualify as one of the most exciting & slept-on works of historical games journalism out there. if you were a fan of Tim Rogers' "Let's Mosey: A Slow Translation Of Final Fantasy VII" series, i think you may have found your new favorite youtube channel. you're welcome

"VR's Greatest Hope, We Thought - Half Life: Alyx Four Years Later" by Brother Burn.

there was a time when i believed wholeheartedly that VR was my beat. i futzed around with the Oculus DK2 at the University of Oklahoma tech lab in, what, 2014? and had my mind blown by the experience of riding a virtual roller coaster. in 2016 my roommate and i went halfsies on an HTC Vive, which arrived on our doorstep the very day that Donald Trump won the presidential election. more on-the-nose symbolism you couldn't possibly ask for-- that is, assuming VR software development & investment kept up its then-rapid pace long enough to support total quadrennial escapism, which it absolutely did not. don't get me wrong, i found a number of titles to love; i made a video about perennial VR classic Beat Saber in 2018, but was plenty charmed by the likes of Arizona Sunshine, The Gallery, Vanishing Realms, Zombie Training Simulator, and especially the fast-paced climbing game To The Top, whose only weakness for me was the limited number of tracks in its (admittedly good) OST with no ability to easily import your own tracks instead. yet for as much as i liked these games, vanishingly little about them was so far beyond what was offered by the tech demos present in Valve's VR pack-in The Lab that you couldn't get an approximately similar experience by just playing that instead. alas, the horizon of possibility for VR games hit something of a ceiling once all the most obvious ludic experiences had been more or less perfected.

anyway, this video by Brother Burn is at least in part about that. i never played Half Life: Alyx, but it certainly seemed positioned to be "VR's Greatest Hope" at the time and so i was naturally drawn in by this essay's title. what it confirmed for me is that i'm glad Alyx exists, but don't feel an especial need to play it. he talks at length about the stealth level "Jeff", which sounds cool as hell and is something i could never under any circumstances subject myself to. i cannot handle horror in VR. there's a section of Arizona Sunshine set in an abandoned mine that i had to psych myself up to finish for three weeks. so it's good, in that respect, to get a breezey overview of Alyx from someone who isn't a Half Life superfan (like me), who gets motion sick in VR easily (also like me), and who clearly came up during a very specific era of youtube (ditto). Brother Burn's style is a time-capsule from 2017 in all the best ways. post-Game Grumps, pre-Breadtube, high effort editing with a lightly self-aggrandizing sense of humor, lives maybe two or three doors down from Errant Signal; i dunno what to say except i find his work charming. that he has less than 2000 subscribers at time of writing is as unfortunate as it is unsurprising.

"remember fingerboards?" by Jeffiot.

this may quietly turn out to be one of my favorite video essays of the year. a history of skateboarding with a history of finger-skateboarding along with a personal history of both into a genuine loveletter to what is objectively a very silly activity? oh yes, thank you very much, i'll take two. the section where he first tries fingerboarding is so surprising and charming, and everything that follows is like… i dunno, freeing? there's something about this video that feels like a substantially relieved exhale, as it's the first really niche thing Jeffiot's done since the astronomical success of his Skull Trumpet essay. the scariest part of being Suddenly Popular after such a long time being totally invisible is the looming specter of What Next. the temptation must've been there to just keep on doing videos investigating the origins of Weird Internet Ephemera forever, since that clearly resonated with a lot of people. instead, here he is doing something totally unrelated, in a realm that none of his new subscribers are likely to be interested in --a supposition at least momentarily supported by the fact that this video only has 14,000 views after a single day (compared to the 100k+ views his last few hit). that number will surely go up, but for the moment i think it's illustrative of the fact that every channel's subscriber count actually contains at least two, probably more, discrete pools of audience. 155,000 subscribers is impressive and substantial, but how many of those people are there for Jeffiot, and how many are there for More Skull Trumpet? all things being equal (which they very much are not), i see that 14k viewership number as a soft indication of Jeffiot's dependable long-term viewers, the people who'll follow him down whatever blind alley he wanders through.

i plugged Jeffiot in the previous roundup, with a lot of time spent analyzing the phenomenon of running a small channel that suddenly gets huge because of a single viral hit. when i wrote that post in january of this year, he'd just exceeded 50,000 subscribers after having only 5,000 a few weeks prior. now, two months later, he's got over 155,000 subscribers. this makes Jeffiot's channel a really useful case study in how one translates good luck into good fortune. the most notable development in my opinion is that quite a lot of Jeffiot's back catalogue has seen an immense increase in viewership as well, something that simply does not happen unless there's a palpable and immediate and consistent qualitative energy shared between the old stuff and The Thing That Went Viral. when i say that the job of a video essayist toiling in sub-5k-views obscurity is to lay the groundwork for getting lucky, this is exactly what i mean. Jeffiot's stuff is high-effort, surprising, and thoroughly entertaining across the board, unique in subject matter yet somehow broadly approachable (that he's clearly very influenced by the work of Tim Rogers over at Action Button is, i'm sure, just a coincidence). i really hope that Jeffiot doesn't take the relatively low viewership of this fingerboard essay as a Failure and vow to stay away from such seemingly off-brand subject matter in the future. it's not a failure (i mean, god, i'd kill for a video of mine to even break 5k in a single day at this point), but rather an indication of confidence and direction. the best artists and creators will walk their path whether you follow them or not. there's no being true to what compels you which also permits universal success, and any attempt to the contrary is a great way to strangle your soul to death. the successes float you on from the sinkers. views and subscribers don't have a linear relationship with monetary success on youtube (unless you rely exclusively on ad revenue, at which point you're already fucked and should probably check a calendar to see if it's still 2015), yet it's so easy to get spooked by them because youtube wants us to be obsessed with analytics. somehow, i think Jeffiot's smart enough to avoid such pitfalls.

"The Mass Extinction Debates: A Science Communication Odyssey" by Oliver Lugg.

this one was suggested to me through my askbox. what strikes me most about this video is how it spends 45 minutes building up the context leading up to the debates about what actually caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, so that you understand what they really represented beyond a simple who's right/who's wrong. i had no idea this was such a recent thing-- 1996, man. that's so in my lifetime. i've always thought the asteroid theory was just uncontroversially true, it never occurred to me that there would have been a combative dogma against it in the scientific community. this is just a good, fun, enjoyable and educational video essay.

"Everyone But Me Is Wrong About The Cornetto Trilogy" by Innuendo Studios.

this is an essay refuting the semi-popular assertion that the Cornetto Trilogy (Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End) are about stunted manchildren being forced by circumstance to finally grow up. instead, Ian Danskin argues, these films are about stunted manchildren who refuse to change until circumstances beyond their control forceably change the entire rest of the world in a way that allows them to never have to grow up. this is one of those essays that's clearly been on the backburner for a long time, delivered with a real sense of frustration and desire to correct the record on something that seems, to Danskin, transparently obvious.

i liked this essay a lot because (to get a bit inside baseball) i'm dedicated to finally producing my extremely-long-in-the-works essay titled Everyone Is Wrong About LOST, about how everyone is wrong about the tv show LOST, by the end of this year. a big question for me in writing that essay has been what tone to strike, how much indignance i should show, where the line between funny and annoying lies. this essay did a lot to clarify that question for me, which is only that much more edifying because Ian Danskin has been at this since 2014. his original essay, This Is Phil Fish, was a big inspiration for me when i first started thinking i might want to try my hand at this gig, and his work ever since has remained some of the most consistently good and clear argumentative writing on the platform. any time he posts a new essay is a moment of quiet celebration for me, especially on the rare occasion he does traditional media analysis like this instead of the equally excellent but generally dry rhetorical analysis he's been doing with the Alt-Right Playbook for the last 6 years. it feels somehow poetic to once again have the path forward in my work clarified by a creator who inspired me an entire gender ago, like somehow despite all that's changed i'm still being true to my WAIT HOLD ON WHAT

well i guess i'd better hurry up and make this fucking LOST video, huh?

<- ROUNDUP #4 | ROUNDUP #6 ->

VIDREV: "NO CGI is really just INVISIBLE CGI" by The Movie Rabbit Hole

[originally posted march 19th 2024]

like a lot of folks, i've grown weary of the preponderance of CGI in Hollywood flicks these days. it's all but a cultural tradition at this point to watch John Carpenter's The Thing, sigh wistfully at the goopy silicone animatronics, and say "man, you couldn't make anything like this today." the Marvel/Disney machine has done a lot of heavy lifting to engender this perspective, particularly in the cape department where every aspect of the film is under intense and non-negotiable executive revision until quite literally days before theatrical release (as was the case with Marvel's The Marvels). it doesn't help that this shift has a lot less to do with what's best for any given movie, and a hell of a lot more to do with the lack of unionization in the visual effects industries making them a readily exploitable source of labor. in such an environment, films that nevertheless lean on practical effects are enticing (and, quite often, demonstrably better) enough that we'll sing their praises to the point of hyperbole.

enter Jonas of The Movie Rabbit Hole, here with a genuinely essential series of video essays to slap some sense into that hyperbole and bring us all back down to earth.

one of the more important directors for the development of unobtrusive CGI is David Fincher. i have my fair share of issues with his films, but credit where it's due: they're constantly pushing technology in ways that you absolutely would not expect. there's a crane shot at the start of The Social Network that couldn't be shot with a crane for safety reasons, so instead it was stitched together in post from footage taken on multiple 4K cameras at once. a shocking majority of the blood you'll see in his movies is CGI. the praise i've portioned for his recent films, even as i find him sort of a fundamentally anti-human director, is that he understands that visual effects work best as a supplement to existing footage, rather than a pure replacement.

i share all this to underline my use of the word "essential" in describing this series. i worked in film for a few years, i went to film school, i try to understand the production process as pragmatically as possible. i am under no illusions that Christopher Nolan flicks or the John Wick movies are totally practical. i'm not an anti-CGI evangelist! and yet, even then, i had NO idea just how wrongheaded i still was on the subject until i watched these videos.

Jonas brings 18 years of visual effects experience to bear on a series that feels very much like him trying to settle an argument he's been having for about as long. he has countless examples of films praised for their lack of CGI that relied heavily on their CGI, using the demo reels of effects houses as the smoking gun. Jonas speaks with a plain matter-of-fact-ness that's bolstered just so by an edge of smug frustration, the kind you only get after bearing a cross for years. but it's not just an "i'm right, you're wrong" affair by any stretch. Jonas does a fantastic job communicating a lot of complicated subjects in ways that are friendly to even the most casual of viewers, rarely blaming the audience for their ignorance when studios and market trends are the real culprit. and because he's a veteran of the industry, he's able to interview prominent figures that would otherwise be inaccessible for the average essayist, like Academy Award winning VFX supervisor Paul Franklin.

(and here we come up against a question countenanced more than once on this blog-- where is the line between video essay and documentary? i think this readily qualifies as the former given the first-person direct address shot-in-his-living-room style, yet somehow i feel a bit uneasy with the classification. oh well, a topic for another day)

the most eye-opening section for me is also one of the first, where Jonas confronts the public image of Top Gun: Maverick. i haven't seen this film yet, but i have seen the endless and unqualified buzz about its practical effects. and to be sure, these deserve quite a lot of praise-- they put real actors in real fighter jets for crying out loud! yet in all that crowing, a very important fact totally fell by the wayside: nary a single shot in the film is without digital manipulation. and not just in the basic touch-up sense, removing safety anachronisms and the like. the jets, the cockpits, and the actors themselves were all extensively replaced with digital doubles! i felt like an utter fool when he pointed out that quite often films praised for their lack of CGI will have more VFX artists credited than any other department in production. like, holy shit, it's all right there on the screen? what job were those hundreds of people doing if it was "all practical effects"?

which is the crux of the series' title: "NO CGI is really just INVISIBLE CGI." we have --or perhaps it'd be more honest to say i have-- a tendency to address CGI in binaristic terms. either it's there, or it's not there, right? Fincher's team can put digital blood running down Daniel Craig's face in the shower after he gets shot in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but it's Craig's physical presence that sells it. a film like Top Gun: Maverick makes its bones marketing the spectacle, and because there's such fatigue with CGI-heavy blockbusters any mention of intermediary visual effects carries with it a stain on the authenticity. but really, it does nothing to diminish the practical nature of the photography to also acknowledge how much of what makes it to cinemas is, essentially, an extremely realistic cartoon.

and this is what Jonas's series really exposes for me. a lot of what we're looking at here is rotoscoping, the longstanding tradition of animating over top of live footage a la Disney's Snow White in 1937, though the technique was truly mastered by Max Fleischer in the 1910s. is there some gradeschool nag whispering in the back of our head that a rotoscope is just elaborate tracing? that it's a cheat, because "real" animation is done without reference? (for anyone who has actually worked in animation, this is your cue to laugh derisively)

but the truth is that you do not get one without the other. it takes a lot of planning to film a scene with an eye towards being reanimated, just as it takes tremendous skill to make that animation look good. if Top Gun: Maverick feels viscerally real, it is because the visual effects artists had a real reference to work from. one is not inherently better than the other, more pure or authentic. this isn't the 80s anymore, man. i mean, to get real fucking technical, the instant we stopped shooting on film was the death of "true practicality" in cinema, because a digital sensor must by its nature interpret visual information as raw data and then translate it to something we'd recognize as an image. celluloid film is purely optical, but a digital sensor requires someone (or a team of someones) to write an algorithm to do that interpreting-- which is, inherently, subjective. different cameras have different image processing algorithms, different bitrates and dynamic ranges, to say nothing of custom LUTs and the extensive post-processing required to make RAW footage not look like complete ass. and even now, celluloid cannot be said to be truly pure, because any film shot on celluloid is then digitally scanned, subjected to the exact same post production processing as any other digital film, the final product re-scanned to celluloid to give it a true filmic look, and then yet again digitized for wide distribution (because most cinemas today only have digital projectors).

this is not A Bad Thing! it is simply the material reality of film production in the 21st century. it has many upstream and downstream effects, of course, many of which have negatively impacted the quality of films and television in various ways-- but these are not qualities inherent to digital technology! rather, they are the result of a profit-seeking industry eager to cut corners wherever possible. the existence of CGI is not to blame for the bad CGI in Marvel movies, it's the greedy executives exploiting non unionized labor, forcing crunch at every level with no regard for the human cost, endlessly meddling in the production with their indecisive market-analysis driven brand alterations. ah, the age of the executive auteur, when at last the soulless corporate mindset once commonly decried by artists and audiences alike has been fully naturalized and even embraced by people who call themselves fans, who would sooner throw a director under the bus than say a bad word about Kevin fucking Feige.

it's a pathetic state of affairs, and it can only be called a brilliant act of marketing that CGI burnout in the public has been leveraged to only further erase the essential labor of visual effects artists. Jonas here even points out, much to my slack-jawed amazement, that promotional behind the scenes footage today frequently removes green screens and other indicators of a digital-forward production as a way of unduly acquiring practical effects credibility. as someone who watches a lot of these BTS features, i feel lied to and manipulated, and ashamed of myself for not realizing that making-ofs are just as much marketing as they are educational, often moreso by a lot. it's all just an illusion! and it cannot be repeated often enough that this is an erasure of a historically under-unionized industry, one whose exploitation has been thoroughly documented for years. that this erasure is occurring at a moment when finally, finally, finally corners of the visual effects world have begun to shed the libertarian values inherited from the tech industry and actually unionize is pretty fucking conspicuous to say the least.

i call these videos essential because they reveal a tremendous blind spot in our media literacy, even among those like myself who've studied media extensively. we are, generally, pretty good at identifying the weaknesses in a finished film, but our lack of experience and our credulity towards marketing that doesn't feel like marketing leads us to utterly fail when we attempt to diagnose their cause. when our analysis lacks an understanding of the material conditions of production, as informed by firsthand accounts of those who actually do the work, we cannot help but embarrass ourselves and in so doing blatantly misinform our audiences.

it didn't used to be like this. i remember the late 90s and early aughts, when joints like ILM were praised for their innovations. how often do you hear about VFX houses today? probably only when they go bankrupt. it's such a shame, because what Jonas does in these videos most of all is reveal just how astonishing the work of visual effects artists actually is. these are the perils of an industry whose job is to be invisible, which is why it's so important that their labor be made visible after the fact, celebrated rather than papered over, analyzed extensively rather than mentioned offhand. the truth is that quite a lot of us have been boldly, profoundly wrong about CGI in movies for a long time, and we're well past due for a correction of the record.

all of which is to say that these are some really great videos and you should absolutely go watch them right now

NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: episode 4 came out and it's also great.

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #4 (or: The Grind)

[originally posted january 3rd 2024]

it's 2024! i know nobody's happy about that, but here we are. bit of a weird roundup this time because i'm going to spend most of my time talking about one specific channel, as i think it's a useful example of what "success" looks like on youtube and the internet more broadly. so let's get right to it!

"no one knows who created skull trumpet (until now)" by Jeffiot.

i have a feeling that by the time this roundup goes live, Jeffiot's investigation of who, exactly, made the famous skull trumpet gif will have made the rounds in a big way. the algorithm recommended it to me and, as i often do, i opened it in a new tab to watch later. over the course of that same day, i saw three separate people on three separate websites independently say "hey, you should watch this." like any god-fearing youtuber i will gripe about the algorithm until the cows come home, but even i have to admit that a broken clock is right at least twice a day. this is just a solid, entertaining, unique, and earnestly impassioned video essay dedicated to the simple act of giving credit to someone for creating one of the most timeless and universally beloved images on the internet (a subject that has been very hot lately, thanks in no small part to Hbomb's recent video about plagiarism). all else aside, i have to applaud Jeffiot's visual style and production quality. now i'm gonna go watch some of his other videos :)

[20 minutes later] you need to watch It's: Doors™ right fucking now. finally, a video essayist who understands that horror and comedy are the same genre! the rare, fantastical species of creepypasta-knower who seems to understand that the backrooms aren't creepy just because there's a monster! and it's pretty good filmmaking to boot! this is exactly the kind of thing i'm always imagining when i talk about the artistic potential of video essays-- how the medium allows you to blend fiction and nonfiction, personal subjectivity with factual objectivity. i love finding a channel like this, it's like uncovering a goldmine in my backyard. how did nobody notice before??? i'm off to go watch more, will report back if i have further thoughts.

[11 days later] i must report now, having watched a multitude of videos on Jeffiot's channel, that this guy has the stuff. i didn't need to watch as many vids as i did to confirm that he has the stuff, but then again, when someone does have the stuff, it's not like you can stop at just one or two. as a general rule, when i watch a video from someone i've never seen before, i always click through to their channel and see what else they've got on offer. one of the unstated calculations i make in what i choose to cover in this blog is that i am more likely to recommend a channel that has multiple essays of similar quality. you'll understand why in a moment.

i can see why Jeffiot's channel didn't take off until now, as many of his videos are esoteric in subject and presentation. not in a bad way by any means, but in that way where if i saw one of his thumbnails in a lineup i would probably conclude it wasn't for me. this is the chief hazard of producing videos that are complex and intricate: they're fucking difficult to advertise. good art in any medium often requires a lot more prompting and persuasion before an audience can buy in, especially in an environment so drowned in easy, safe alternatives. this is why i try to watch through videos even if they make a bad first impression, why i try to watch multiple videos on a channel, so that i can get a sense of the voice behind the work. there are amateur creators out there with an identifiable spark that Will burst into something special eventually, if you just give em a little leeway and try to see what they're doing for what it is. luckily this is not a problem with Jeffiot at all. everything i've watched of his is fantastic and appallingly high effort. it's a channel that might be a hard sell at a distance, especially if you're not into horror-focused channels, but if you just give it time you'll see that he's got a lot more on his mind than appearances might suggest. this is someone putting in the work, clearly not satisfied with doing the same thing more than once, with videos ranging in subject from a frenetic examination of the logic of Death in the Final Destination movies, to an astonishingly journalistic investigation of the history of the Gävle Goat, to an odd and heartfelt exploration of the intoxicating and terrifying call of the void. it's rare to find someone who scores so high on style, substance, and verifiable source usage all at once.

and yup, i was right, he went from having just over 5k subs when i first started writing this draft on December 22nd, to exceeding 50k less than two weeks later, with the skull trumpet vid itself sitting pretty at over a quarter of a million views, the most of anything on his channel by several orders of magnitude. i mention all this because i think it typifies The Grind, on youtube but also as one working in any creative economy online (if you utter the phrase "content creator" at me i'm going to erase you from history). getting started as a video essayist, you will pour your heart and soul into videos that almost no one will watch. you will try to chase the algorithm, and it won't work. you will try to make something just for you, and it also won't work. some vids will break through more than others, but the progress will be achingly slow to the point of feeling nonexistent. you will do this for months and months, in some cases years, and you will ask yourself always… is it worth it? am i just dumping my art into an uncaring void for no reason?

i speak here from personal experience. i posted my first proper video essay in December 2013. i didn't have a real Hit until five years later, with a defense of a ContraPoints video in September 2018, which was successful in part because it was amplified by Natalie Wynn herself. but even then, it took until March 2019 before my video about The Politics of the McElroy Brothers took off (this time thanks in part to a lot of visibility gained from guesting on Hbomb's DK64 nightmare stream) and really pushed my subscriber and patreon numbers into "can actually pay some bills with this" territory. prior to both of those moments, i was convinced that i was at an insurmountable dead end. so you see, sometimes "luck" is getting a boost from popular strangers at the right time. while i did not expect the ContraPoints defense to gain any traction at all, the McElroy vid was weird in that everyone i talked to about it in the months before its release was immediately excited by the pitch. a rare case where i had reasonable suspicion that This One Might Be A Hit. but even then, i figured it would fail. when it didn't fail, in both cases, there was a terrible temptation to pivot my entire creative focus to just doing More Of What Worked. unfortunately for my wallet, i'm constitutionally incapable of making good business decisions, and so generally failed to fully take advantage of those opportunities in the ways a Mr. Beast might advise. but i also happen to think that it was the right call to not make those pivots. i would hate to be stuck just making response videos, or pigeonholed as the "politics of [podcaster]" gal. i stand by those videos (i think the McElroy vid still has some of my funniest jokes), but neither of them is particularly the kind of thing i would like to continue making in perpetuity. and anyway, you can't chase what works, because "what works" is always changing. unless you want to make half of your job studying the ebbs and flows of the Greater Video Essay Marketplace, only suffering and ruin lies down the path of trying to reproduce viral success.

the thing about making a living online is that what the job fundamentally is, is laying the groundwork for a future bit of good luck. if your very first video takes off, that's good for your views and sub counts, but it's an open question how much of that audience will come back for seconds. youtube is littered with channels whose first video went big and then nothing made a splash after that. unless you're a Big Established Channel, most of your traffic is going to come from a very small percentage of your videos. the people you want to court are not the mass audience, the hundreds of thousands who turn out when the algorithm and zeitgeist grants you time in the spotlight. the people you want to court are the folks who click through and watch your other stuff, who like what you do, and who will show up for you even if a project isn't something they expect or know they'll like. you want those people because instead of commenting "just play the hits" they'll tell you how surprised they were at how much they liked the wild swerve you took. so you put your heart and soul into releasing stuff even though it feels like screaming into the abyss, because it means that someday, when (if) you get lucky, you've got a broad foundation of existing works that new viewers can then jump to, giving them a sense of your proclivities as a critic and artist, how you've grown and developed over time, and what kind of commitment you rhave to the work you're trying to get paid for. this is important because anyone can make one good video essay. i repeat: anyone can make one good video essay. it really isn't that hard! it's the people who do it multiple times, on multiple subjects, in multiple different forms of expression, over a long stretch of time, that i think are most often worth paying attention to, and most reward material support.

the algorithm really isn't straightforward at all though. my experience for a long time was that when i released a new video, the new thing would drop like a lead balloon, but some random older vid of mine would get a huge bump in viewership. my essay about netflix's tendency to abandon its originals from all the way back in April 2018 still gets randomly promoted every once in a while! which is nice because i'm actually rather proud of that one. it's partially for this reason that i try to futureproof my videos, in the sense that i try to write for someone watching five or so years in the future (applying materialism to my analysis is a big part of this). youtube as a platform is incredibly wasteful in how it encourages disposable information, with no mechanism for mass rebroadcast or whatever, but if i still read media criticism written in the 1970s today, i have to imagine that people in the future will want to watch the media criticism of the 2020s for many of the same reasons. this isn't about legacy or an overblown sense of self-importance or anything, i just think it's good practice from a writerly point of view. you just never know what thing of yours is going to take off or when!

this is by no means a fair, just, or even particularly excusable system --it's defined exclusively by private enterprise with no input from the creators who generate the value that youtube's parent company thrives on-- but that's how it's been for a long time (and not just on youtube, even before the internet). i wanted to draw your attention to the graph at the top of this post precisely because it illustrates the long game of this gig. if you're not a creator, perhaps it can give you a sense of what it feels like waiting around to get lucky. an endless and desperate stream of little to no movement. no hope of change, no indication that anything ever could. nothing makes a dent, and no amount of work relieves you from the obligation to turn around and do it again, in the hopes that maybe this time something will be different. when you're really in the doldrums, it's never different. it can feel like being trapped in a wasteland surrounded by oases. all the youtubers you like are making money doing this, why can't you? you ask yourself if there's something wrong with you as a creator, or as a person, if there's something fundamentally unlikeable or whatever about you that makes succeeding at this gig impossible. you'll give up hope so often, only to get dragged back in for some reason or other.

and then, suddenly, for seemingly no reason, with the application of exactly the right video at exactly the right time (never a predictable combination), everything changes all at once. you watch in dumbfounded, horrified amazement as those numbers, long immovably static, multiply at an incomprehensible pace. the shock of it is so distinct it's like god tapped your shoulder and gave you protagonist privileges for a day. when this happens, you instantly and viscerally understand why so many people go absolutely out of their minds when this happens to them. such a sudden wave of attention is eldritch and, if you're queer or POC or cover any topics more controversial than watching paint dry, it's deeply threatening. but then you see comment after comment of people saying "wow this is so good, why doesn't this have more views?" and you're like, okay, so actually i've never done anything wrong in my life! it's awesome and vindicating and scary and such a relief and SO STRESSFUL all at once. you can just FEEL the 90 degree curve on that graph when it hits.

in many of his videos, Jeffiot talks about difficulties paying rent and making ends meet, begging as all essayists must for some portion of the audience to please give him a few bucks a month. since releasing the skull trumpet vid, his patron count has gone up from 92 in november to 160 at time of writing, and like, as someone who went from "i might have to get a full-time job" to "i can quit my shitty part-time job for at least a year" money over the course of a couple days, i feel such a vicarious thrill of relief on his behalf. what's better than getting a raise??

so we have two numerical changes to look at here with Jeffiot's success. 5,000 subscribers to 50,000, vs 92 patreon backers to 160. the disparity in magnitude there is huge, and crucial to understand if you're an essayist in your early days and you want to stay remotely sane. for all the thousands who subscribed to the channel from one video, only 68 decided to pay him for his labor. of those 68, how many do you think watched only this one video and then immediately went to give him money? or did they see the quality of the work on the rest of his channel from the launchpad that was the skull trumpet vid, and only then decide this is someone worth supporting? in my experience, it's the latter who form the longterm base of support that you come to rely on. they're the ones who stick with you through the slump eras when your pen dries up and you just can't pump em out like you used to. and trust me, you will experience slump eras, no matter how sigma your grindset.

the hits come and go. it's very likely that Jeffiot's next video will hit with a thud and stall out at, like, 20,000 views on the high end. but that's the grind, man. you aren't courting the thousands, you're courting the handful of weirdos who share your particular brand of derangement. infinite growth is impossible and unsustainable. i share all this with you because i think it's helpful to dig into an example of "success" within this system as it happens in the wild. so that maybe you can get a sense of what the business of this gig is for people with more ambition than content farming and response videos, and adjust your behavior towards such creators accordingly.

in any event, i wish Jeffiot all the luck in the world, and i'm very much looking forward to whatever he produces next.

hey, remember how this is supposed to be a roundup post? let's get back to that.

"The rise and fall of New Atheism" by Costanza Polastri.

i previously highlighted another Polastri video in VIDROUND #2 (is that what i'm calling these? that can't be what i'm calling these), and i'm gonna keep on recommending her stuff as long as it's this good. does a great job explaining the appeal of new atheism among millennials while also criticizing its worst elements. this topic so often gets discussed with a lot of exaggerated rhetoric and loud hyperbole, so to have Costanza talk about new atheism with such easygoing humanism and frankness hits different. i also share her feeling that new atheism did a poor job of replacing the social roles religion plays, and her desire to find something religious that isn't the institutional religions we're stuck with, or cults, or the church of the flying spaghetti monster.

"Alan Wake 1 & 2 | A Self-Indulgent Retrospective" by Pim's Crypt.

two entire Swedes in this roundup? and they're both channels focused primarily on horror genre analysis? i don't have a punchline to these questions. this is an enjoyable and digestible retrospective on the Alan Wake games from someone who really cares about them, which is the best kind of retrospective. these days i vastly prefer listening to someone talk about media they love than media they hate, and as someone who has a lot of gripes about Remedy's games it's always useful to get the perspective of someone who likes their stuff. full disclosure, i haven't finished watching this video yet because i haven't finished playing Alan Wake 2, but 58 minutes out of a 73 minute runtime feels like enough to give an honest recommendation.

"The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of X" by What's So Great About That?

Grace Lee is quietly one of the best video essayists out there. her stuff is always, without exception, insightful, well-researched, and polished to a mirror shine. this video is largely about the semiotics of the letter X (and, eventually, what it means to Elon Musk), and digs into a surprising amount of literature on the subject along the way.

THE "DOESN'T NEED THE HELP" ZONE

"It's time to talk about Plagiarism… again" by Jack Saint.

the post-Hbomb-plagiarism-on-youtube conversation continues. bless Jack Saint here for his insistence that lazily-researched bordering-on-plagiarized videos are popular because they're systemically incentivized. i also can't believe that the new Wonka apparently isn't complete garbage? anyway i think the evolving plagiarism discourse is fascinating to watch, and i like the insight that Jack brings to the table.

"The Obsession with Bad Games" by NeverKnowsBest.

echoes many of my thoughts on the toxicity of so much games discourse, particularly the vitriol directed at "bad" games. traces the influence of AVGN to now & and dares to ask "is the hate really worth it?" so often gamers treat bad games like an assault, and you know, movie reviewers do this too, but in this post-gamergate world such naysayers just so happen to be a significantly influential audience segment capable of amplifying their vitriol all the way up the chain to the likes of Elon Musk. it really doesn't help that tech types have well and truly devolved into spoiled children appealing to the butthurt gamerbros, that corporations like Disney hear their protestations louder than any other voice regardless of how numerable such voices actually are.

and that's it for this roundup! fewer recommendations than normal because of the lengthy Jeffiot analysis, but i think it was worth it. there will probably be another roundup this month as a result!

thank you to everyone who's sent me video recommendations to my askbox! to repeat from the previous roundup, please feel free to send me under-appreciated videos, new or old, made by you or anyone else! no promises that i'll cover anything you send of course, but i WILL see it.

take care of yourselves in this brave new year, folks. it's gonna be a weird one!

<- ROUNDUP #3 | ROUNDUP #5 ->

some thoughts on Action Button Reviews

[originally posted december 22nd 2023]

oh i still think Tim Rogers is hands down the best in the biz. i've watched the Action Button reviews multiple times, i've got a davinci resolve project with all his videos in, studied them under a microscope and taken lots of notes. i think his work absolutely does justify the length, because rather than trying to say Everything There Is To Say about a game, he instead focuses on digging into the game's relationship with his own hyperspecific subjectivity. i don't know how else to describe the Action Button reviews except as literary media criticism, using incredibly in-depth analysis as a jumping off point for discussing how these games shape us and the culture, the role they occupy at various stages of our life, and how who we are at any given moment is just as important to our opinion of a game as the game itself. sooner or later i want to do a full-on VIDREV on his stuff, probably in video essay form, but consider this a first draft overview of why i find his work so special.

there's little things. despite the length of his videos, he never fails to get to The Point (his term for the thesis statement) within five minutes of starting the essay proper. he is a talented and quick-witted tour guide, funny and clever and philosophically ponderous all at once. his work is clearly designed to reward multiple viewings, yet never fails to feel complete on a first watch. he writes with a precision of language that'll knock your socks off if you let it, especially if you're willing to go with him on his seemingly non sequitur tangents. but it goes a lot deeper than that.

i just don't think anyone else is putting nearly as much time, effort, and thought into the moment to moment particulate matter of his video essays than Tim Rogers. there are a ton of little mistakes that quite a few essayists make as a result of only doing one or two complete editing passes, or otherwise not sitting down and watching their video start to finish at multiple points in post-production. things like bad audio mixing, cut-off breaths and sounds that ought to be removed, stray frames from footage creating accidental jump cuts, flubbed line deliveries, misaligned overlay elements, sloppy compositing, the list goes on. it's no great sin to make these mistakes, mind-- no one's being commissioned, most essayists aren't professional editors, there's no quality control or review board or institutional best practices. it's the difference between giving the kitchen a quick once over with a rag and getting on your hands and knees to scrub every stain with a toothbrush. most people don't have the time it takes to do the latter, aren't getting paid enough, and the returns on putting the effort in are impossible to measure and therefore, practically speaking, nonexistent.

but as someone who tries to put that kind of work in (not always successfully), i can always tell when another essayist has done the same. longform video essays in aggregate tend to be messy, under-structured, rambling; they often arise out of an essayist's desire to say everything they could possibly say on a subject. not only is this an impossible task, it makes for a pretty dull viewing experience to boot. what i find so impressive about Tim Rogers' work is that despite their length, his videos are relentlessly structured. the attention to fine details in the moment-to-moment edit across the whole runtime is astonishing; that the script itself is so internally integrated never fails to make me furious (with professional envy). he always has a lot to say, not all of which is strictly speaking essential to the analysis, but nothing ever feels so indulgent that it drags the rest of the essay down in my estimation. he often repeats information, but he does so very strategically and in a way that's meant to help the viewer follow a thread from start to finish. i also think his presentation style goes a long way towards hiding how much effort he puts in, how relentlessly curated these things actually are in spite of their length. he's talked extensively about how much he cuts from these videos (most prominently is story 5 from the Cyberpunk 2077 review, which went from over an hour in length at first draft to, eventually, just over a minute), how he watches them back over and over and constantly makes fine adjustments. that work won't be apparent to everyone watching, but it's exceedingly apparent to me.

and then there's the cherry on top of it all, which is the fact that the Action Button reviews are constructed as being part of "seasons" that have a planned thematic throughline. taken as a whole, season 1 is a completely unique work of literary metacritical nonfiction, a series of six reviews (Final Fantasy VII Remake -> The Last of Us -> DOOM -> Pac-Man -> Tokimeki Memorial -> Cyberpunk 2077) that use specific games to talk about trends in game design, trends in gamer culture, the history of games development, all through an astonishingly earnest and open autobiographical document of Tim Rogers' own professional and personal life, which is given particular weight by his astonishing capacity for near perfect recall from early childhood. they are the clear result of a life spent thinking about and writing about and talking about games in between all the rest of his life, neither of which was ever truly separate. i know i'm throwing around a lot of superlatives here, but i really do adore these essays. i think a lot of folks doing longform games reviews try to achieve a sort of technical objectivity, limiting the scope of their analysis to strictly what's in the game (and often only that which involves numbers, leaving any narrative or thematic components to a brief aside at the very end). the Action Button method should fall into that category, and yet Rogers himself uses its technical objectivity as an anchor around which flows an endless and unquantifiable ocean of subjectivity, where game mechanics and thematic elements mix forever. each subsequent review drops a new anchor, and thus begins to compose a map whose purpose is as much a matter of self-reflection as it is pure education or analysis.

but i really do think it's with the first (and so far only) episode of season 2, his review of Boku no Natsuyasumi, that you can really see the cunning of what he's been up to all along. i often find myself thinking about his reflections on returning to Kansas ("it took me back to a place i had never never been"), on why people rewatch movies and replay games ("our memory only records the cold parts"), on the futility of trying to recapture the past ("places don't remember us"), on the screaming terror of our own looming mortality ("meanwhile our shattering animals"). i just know those quotes off the top of my head, man, that's how deep in it i am. the Boku no Natsuyasumi review is a masterpiece, and the ways it breaks from the style and approach of season 1's reviews only strengthens the choices he made in season 1, because suddenly we realize that they were choices. that's the artfulness of this series, in my opinion: it starts as, seemingly, a relatively bog-standard "i'm going to review some video games and make some jokes and tell some stories along the way" type joint, but slowly reveals to you essay by essay just how little of this project was automatic, unconsidered, arbitrary, and that its aims were never so miniscule as "tell you why a video game is good". there are themes running throughout the entire series, repeated phrases and ideas, theories of mind and play that build in the subtext, accruing like memories, subtly building mass until you look back and realize that what seemed like a random selection of topics was, in truth, premeditated with a conspiracist's attention to detail.

and yet despite all this high-minded gobbledygook, these videos are relentlessly watchable and entertaining. i don't always agree with his takes (i was particularly frustrated that his exploration of "every cyberpunk game" omitted the flood of relevant titles that came the indie sphere over the last decade, like Cloudpunk and Read Only Memories), but they're not the kinds of disagreements that would make me sour on his work overall, and anyway the experience is so much more valuable than something as rote and immaterial as an opinion. there's so much more i could say (and inevitably will say, someday), but there you go, that's a rough gloss on what i like about the Action Button reviews.

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #3

[originally posted december 21st 2023]

here we are again! i've had most of this roundup queued for a while and just haven't had time to finish it, so the entries here aren't necessarily super recent. but they're still quite worth your time! so let's just jump right in.

"The Gaming Industry, Gambling, and Addiction" by GC Vasquez.

in the previous roundup i highlighted Jimmy McGee's series on the video game industry's ties to gambling. GC Vasquez has made what i think is an excellent spiritual companion to those videos, in that it approaches the same material from a decidedly personal place. the fact that the primary expected model for turning a consistent profit in the games industry (at least as far as companies like Unity are concerned, with the c-suite insisting that you'd be "fucking idiots" for doing anything else) involves pushing microtransaction gacha mechanics into every nook and cranny really cannot be criticized enough. but i think, even more pressingly, GC Vasquez points out that games have always included fictional gambling in the form of slot machines, poker tables, roulette wheels, etc, and that this demonstrably conditions kids to develop gambling addictions. on a lighter note, his video about why replay value in games doesn't matter as much as we think it does is one of those "finally someone put it into words" type essays.

"The Lost Majora's Mask Notebook | New Zelda Info" by The Hyrule Journals.

there are plenty of folks out there doing Zelda lore and history videos, but no one's got the stuff quite like The Hyrule Journals. Their documentary Line By Line, tracing the history of Majora's Mask's English translation by talking extensively to the guy who did the translation, is an excellent work of games journalism that revealed a lot of information previously unknown to me. The Lost Majora's Mask Notebook is a followup to that doc, sharing insights gained from the translator's own notebook kept during the translation process. it's cool! i would not call this A Great Video Essay necessarily but it's a good excuse to recommend an underrated channel.

"SEND IN THE CLOWN: a people's joker review" by let's talk about stuff.

oh this is a pretty cheeky inclusion, huh? one of my own videos? that's right, you got me: the whole VIDREV operation was just a shell game to goose my viewership numbers all along. the video is exactly what it says on the tin: a review of Vera Drew's incredible trans coming of age story / Batman parody film The People's Joker. i talk a fair amount in the back half about the novel ways this film got me questioning the cultural purpose of copyright and IP law, which is itself a strand of thought that began in my TUNIC review. if it seems like i'm always plugging my TUNIC review it's because i'm really proud of my TUNIC review and i would like for more people to watch it ("it" being my TUNIC review). anyway, The People's Joker is relevant now with the recent news that the film will be seeing wider distribution in the states come April 2024! so look forward to that, and to me undoubtedly plugging my People's Joker review yet again.

THE "DOESN'T NEED THE HELP" ZONE is kind of silly this time around since most of what i have to recommend is from channels that are doing relatively alright. my criteria for the distinction between does/doesn't need the help mostly comes down to vibes and subscriber count. if a channel has more than 100k subs, that to my mind means they don't need the help. this is not to insinuate that 100k+ creators are rich! youtube is a fickle mistress and everyone's revenue model looks different. i try to give precedence to folks below the 30k range, because that's where my channel's at and, coincidentally, where i tend to find the most interesting underrated creators. is it totally corrupt to put my own work in the implicitly-needs-the-help zone? call me out in the comments if you think this is a gross abuse of power.

"Playing Minecraft and Losing My Apartment" by Leadhead.

Leadhead has some great stuff, but this one hit me where it hurts. it's a video about escaping into the artificial goals of a video game at a time when personal disruption and chaos wrenches all sense of control over your own life away. i went through a pretty traumatic eviction myself back in 2021, and found myself totally incapable of making art about it. really nice to see someone else picking up that slack!

"Transition Regret & the Fascism of Endings" by Lily Alexandre.

another in a long line of bangers from Lily Alexandre, about how complicated it is to have mixed feelings on your own transition at a time when anyone expressing such emotions has their story weaponized against the rights of trans people everywhere. a lot of trans women in my life started HRT around 2017-18, and i've noticed a trend of folks in that cohort (myself included) trying to reclaim aspects of their masculinity from a safe distance by playing more with pronouns and presentation. i expect we'll be seeing a lot more videos about this in the years to come, and i can't wait! also: Lily Alexandre has some of the prettiest compositions in the whole video essay game. seriously, her color coordination and framing choices (and use of nonstandard aspect ratios!!!) are subtly artful in a way you really don't see very often on youtube.

"Should We Get Rid of Sex Scenes? (Part I)" by Broey Deschanel.

uh-oh, this one's a Nebula exclusive!!! i haven't really talked about Nebula on here yet, but suffice it to say it's an extremely important development in the business of online video. especially in this case, a video about sex scenes in Hollywood that quite literally could not exist on youtube under its current content guidelines! Broey Deschanel is a lot of fun to watch and makes some really great observations here. if you've got Nebula, it's well worth your time!

"Stop using Fandom" by mossbag.

if you have spent any amount of time in fandom (lowercase-f) spaces, you'll no doubt be well acquainted with how terrible Fandom (uppercase-f) is as a company and a product. this video digs deep into how scummy they are about filling wikis with intrusive ads, making alterations at the behest of private companies without consulting the people who manage said wikis, and their refusal to remove the wikis of any property whose community decides to migrate to another platform. one gripe i have with Fandom that didn't get mentioned is their outright ban on outbound links, which functionally murders any genuine archival usefulness a wiki might otherwise have. everything has to be in-fiction, which is just such a backwards and pointless way of doing things. they are systematically opposed to preserving community history and have no interest in fandom except as a money hungry middle-man between fans and IP owners. i highly recommend installing Indie Wiki Buddy on your browser so that you can avoid Fandom wikis like the plague they are.

"Journey to EPCOT Center: A Symphonic History" by Defunctland.

hey, did Kevin Perjurer just reinvent video essays? well… no, not really. but what he and his collaborators have accomplished here is a fascinating, impressive, and deeply odd intervention on the format which mixes archival footage, live recreations, and a "read along at home" written component to create an essay totally unlike anything i've seen before. honestly i really hope more essayists include supplemental written material in the future, especially with longer works where maybe not everything needs to be on screen! anyway, Journey to EPCOT is such a wild ambitious swing, and while i'm not totally convinced that it completely works i still have to applaud the audacity of the attempt. definitely requires a level of active participation that is well above average for youtube, not something you put on in the background if you actually want to learn anything from it, but definitely worth the effort.

"I kissed nuclear waste to prove a point" by Kyle Hill.

Kyle Hill is an educator on nuclear energy, and while i find a lot of his sillier videos a bit grating, i have nothing but praise for his work on historic nuclear disasters and the present day state of nuclear energy. it really can't be overstated how directly our general distrust of nuclear energy was kickstarted by fossil fuel companies, or how unambiguously illiterate the wider public is when it comes to the management of nuclear power plants and the disposal of nuclear waste. Kyle Hill here does a great job explaining just how unbelievably safe the whole operation is when it's well-funded and well-regulated, and stresses the inarguable fact that there's no source of green energy safer, more plentiful, or more efficient than nuclear. windmills and solar panels have their uses, but they will never be sufficient in reducing our reliance on fossil fuels if they're the only energy infrastructure we invest in at scale. and electric vehicles? oh man. the EV push as it stands is set up to be a grand historic embarrassment of catastrophic proportions. let's be good capitalists and set aside the rampant human rights violations and immense environmental impacts of rare-earth mining. the emissions from having to put down fresh asphalt more frequently due to the increased average weight of electric vehicles wearing roads down faster alone will outweigh virtually every gain from an electrified vehicle fleet, if electrifying the fleet is the only transportation infrastructure we invest in at scale.

there is simply no path forward to liberating the world from its reliance on fossil fuels that does not involve massive investment into building nuclear power plants and reducing our reliance on individual vehicles by exponentially expanding the reach of mass public transit. anything less than that is a laughable half measure whose most prominent boosters are, without a doubt, paid by fossil fuel companies to always be boosting. this is why i find Kyle Hill's work so impressive and refreshing. he talks quite a lot about nuclear disasters, but goes to great lengths to highlight that the fault lies in lack of funding, lax security protocols, and greedy parties preventing proper management, and that even with these horror stories at hand, fewer people have died from accidental nuclear exposure in history than get exposed to carcinogenic discharges from fossil fuel products every day and OOPS SORRY I'M SOAPBOXING it's a good video you should watch it

"What Happened To Spoof Movies?" by Eddache.

bit of a mood shift from that last entry, thank goodness. this here is an exceedingly thorough history of the spoof movie genre that does a great job explaining why some parodies work and others really, really do not. i had no idea how much of the recent history of spoof movies comes down to failson nepotism! a good chill video to watch if you want something relatively harmless to wile away an afternoon with.

and that's it. good luck in these final weeks of 2023, be sure to mask up, get vaxxed, and make sure your friends and family get PCR tests before any big gatherings, what with covid levels being as high as they were in 2020 in many places! i'm serious, deaths have been above 1000 a week since the end of August! so take care of yourselves out there

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ALSO: VIDREV's askbox is open! please feel free to forward any video essays that you think might be worth talking about (even if you're the one who made it!). this includes new stuff, old stuff, professional stuff, amateur stuff, anything that can be reasonably described as a video essay. no promises that i will cover anything that gets sent to me, but i will try to give everything an honest chance when i've got the time. if you have specific questions you'd like answered, please send those over to my main account as i don't intend to answer any questions here. okay, thanks!!

<- ROUNDUP #2 | ROUNDUP #4 ->

VIDREV: "Plagiarism and You(Tube)" by Hbomberguy.

[originally posted december 7th 2023]

i didn't initially plan to do a full VIDREV for this one. it's a long video that speaks plenty for itself, revealing a veritable cottage industry of video essayists who've found great success in brazenly stealing the works of marginalized creators. it's an infuriating watch, especially as someone who has put a lot of work over a lot of years into getting better as an essayist. at a moment when the gormless profit-chasing business degree havers of the world are pretty unambiguously winning in every avenue imaginable, it's gratifying to see someone like Hbomberguy use his significant platform to at least make a dent in that trend. i had a few gripes, sure, but i didn't figure they were worth the trouble. of course now it's been out for a few days, the video already has over 6.8 million views, and people are still talking about it on every single social media website of note. watching that discourse evolve from afar has sharpened some of the round edges on my aforementioned gripes, and given me reason to think that maybe weighing in isn't a totally fruitless endeavor. and besides, what's the point of having a video essay review blog if you're not gonna review what is arguably the video essay of the moment? ahhh, there's a Faustian bargain if ever i heard one.

in this post, i'm going to be critical of Hbomberguy's "Plagiarism and You(Tube)" on a few fronts of debatable importance. but first, i want to make it clear that i am genuinely grateful to Hbomb for putting so much time and effort into this investigation. plagiarism is a serious accusation that requires commensurate evidence, and Harris's got that covered in spades. the case is made so much harder to deny by the frequent juxtaposition of a plagiarist's voice-over with the original plagiarized text on screen reacting to minor trail-covering alterations. these sections occupy the bulk of this video's near 4 hour runtime, and while i have some issues with that length, i understand that the deluge of evidence is precisely to make sure that none of the plagiarists in question can continue dodging accusations the way they have done previously. in this process, Hbomb lays out a consistent playbook utilized by all manner of plagiarists, and (hypothetically) gives viewers the tools and awareness they need to better spot plagiarism in the future. this matters because, as he rightly points out, youtube isn't a fun little hobby site for posting silly cat videos anymore, there's real money to be made on the platform and virtually no oversight to protect creators with ethics and integrity (i wanted to pull a direct quote here but alas, you can't ctrl+f a video). it's an open question as to how or whether we can fix this problem, but we don't get to that conversation until we acknowledge that plagiarism is a legitimate, widespread, materially harmful phenomenon online. none of what i have to say in this review is meant to minimize its broad success in calling attention to a very real problem!

that said…

in the days since its release, i've seen a lot of back and forth over what this video is about. on one side you have folks calling for the blood of James Somerton and others mentioned in the essay, saying "fuck these people specifically." yet on another side, many insist that you're missing the point if all you see is more drama for the drama mill. "this is a systemic problem" they say, "that's what the video is about." i'm inclined to agree more with the latter than the former, as Hbomb does consistently circle back to talking about the unpaid victims of plagiarism, ending the video by explicitly highlighting underrated queer creators and even saying outright that he doesn't want the end result to be limited in scope to just retribution against these specific plagiarists.

and yet, when i see a meme like this one:

i can't help but think… is that what the video is about? is someone who just sees the drama missing the point? yes, certainly, Hbomb says as much, but how much does he actually say it compared to everything else? what's the proportion of (to be overly reductive) "drama content" to "systemic criticism"? because it seems to me that anyone who only/mostly gets "wow fuck these people in particular" out of this video has done nothing less than take the video in aggregate. the bulk of its runtime is spent detailing very specific acts of plagiarism, and while yes, as i said above, this abundance serves a very real purpose, it shouldn't go unacknowledged that the tone of these sections is often one of ridicule and mockery. i don't mean that as a criticism in and of itself, to be clear. you can draw a line from here directly backwards through all his "Measured Response" videos, dude cut his teeth on knocking overconfident hacks down a peg, a bit of ridicule and mockery is to be expected. but that does ultimately mean that Hbomb spends most of the video saying "fuck these people in particular," in a tone of voice he honed through many other videos devoted to saying "fuck this guy in particular", only occasionally stopping to add that "plagiarism is popular and insidious and even creators you trust might be doing it" before moving onto the next scornworthy particular guy. so it kind of doesn't matter that one is "the point" and the other is "missing the point" because he's genuinely saying both things, and he's saying one of them significantly more often than the other. you can't tell me the dunks aren't at least part of the point, and if they're part of it then they can and will be misconstrued by some as the whole point. the entertainment and spectacle of knocking these plagiarists down a peg is an indulgence that, while certainly earned, does exist in concrete tension with the systemic arguments that are meant to take priority. now, some of this does come down to how internet culture has shifted in the last decade to facilitate a much more aggressive style of engagement overall, which Harris cannot control no matter how often he says "don't harass the plagiarists." there isn't really a perfectly right way to go about this, and under the circumstances i do think he did far better than others might have done in his stead.

but even still, i think this misapprehension is made worse by the essay's conclusion, which in my opinion largely fails to tie the whole thing together into the systemic argument that supposedly is "the point" some viewers are missing. Harris commendably points out how the so-called AI revolution is at its core an act of automated civilization-scale plagiarism, and that future instances of plagiarism may be harder to catch precisely because of this technology. frankly i wish that perspective had taken up a solid 10% of the runtime rather than a couple paragraphs at the very end, seeing as on balance it's the far bigger and more likely threat to the livelihoods of people watching than old-school direct plagiarism, but that's me. what really bugged me was the brevity with which he discussed possible solutions to the problem. he rightly points out that youtube implementing a plagiarism reporting system would just be another tool for bad faith actors to silence marginalized creators on the platform, and then… he kinda gives up? he shrugs his shoulders and says, well, for now, just talking about plagiarism and spreading awareness of it is enough. for as well-intentioned and, generally speaking, true as that is, it bugs me as an essayist because i believe that a big part of the job is or ought to be expanding the audience's ability to imagine what's possible even if you aren't 100% sure about the answers yourself.

these are all very much "how i would have written it differently" criticisms, so they aren't particularly worth much, but i do feel it's odd that he doesn't even broach the subject of federal regulation, platform control, unionization efforts, or even just good old-fashioned consumer activism. virtually every website that the creative economy hangs on is a venture-capital backed corporate venture, and their ad-driven models for profiteering at a moment when wages are stagnant and layoffs are happening everywhere is, like, the reason this is such a problem. to address plagiarism as a systemic issue, we need to understand the systemic enablers of it as a behavior. if creators weren't getting such a small slice of the revenue pie, if we had more control over the platform and what rises to the top, if the companies that owned these platforms were beholden to federal regulations, if the government increased arts funding and gave out grants to independent creators that involved third-party quality checks, if online video creators had any manner of collective labor power, if the cost of living was lower by way of public healthcare, free education, mass public transit, and affordable housing, then this would be a drastically different conversation. these are not non-sequitors! this is as much an economic problem as it is a cultural one, so any proposed solution that stops at changing the culture is necessarily incomplete and doomed to fail.

look, i don't expect Hbomb to have the answers. nobody has the answers. but i think it's a bit short-sighted to leave so many possibilities unsaid when the one concrete possibility discussed is immediately (correctly) written off as a bad idea. it leads to a conclusion that feels iffy, a bit defeated, lost at sea, and that's an infectious mood. if the first step to solving plagiarism as a systemic problem is to encourage talking about it openly, i think it's equally important to at the very least gesture in the direction of the many possible avenues for a systemic solution, no matter how impossible or ridiculous they might seem in the current political climate. in point of fact, i think it's of utmost importance to include these possibilities precisely because they seem impossible, otherwise we will forever be trapped in a world of insufficient half measures, meekly reifying the conservative austerity of the liberal order because it's easier and safer than taking a wild shot in the dark.

again, i want to stress that this is a deeply subjective criticism. i'm an ornery Marxist, of course i have these kinds of gripes. and it's easy to get lost in criticizing what isn't there, which as an exercise generally tells you more about the critic than the object being criticized. so, to close out, i'm gonna shake my fist a little at something that is there.

there's a moment at about one hour thirty-five minutes in where Harris turns on some colored lights to get that patented blue-purple Bisexual Lighting, and then he says this:

i understand where this jab is coming from-- the whole BreadTube scene was a melodramatic nightmare, on account of being an audience-invented genre which that audience (and later creators who emerged from that audience) often inaccurately treated as a coherent movement. i understand the frustration expressed by a lot of creators in that first generation of left-ish essayists (Hbomb, Lindsay Ellis, Dan Olson, Contrapoints etc) with the atmosphere of that moment, and certainly don't begrudge them a desire to distance themselves from it and ridicule its shortcomings.

but this brief little jokey aside left a bad taste in my mouth. the creator he's talking about being "ripped off" here is obviously Contrapoints, who brought a colorful theatricality to her early work that elevated it above being something she shot for cheap in her apartment. this went hand in hand with her Socratic style of essaying, giving her characters a strange and vibrant world to occupy. i don't want to say she "did it first" because, let's be real, Natalie Wynn did not invent the idea of using dramatic lighting on the internet. but she was certainly the first person i saw on youtube doing it in video essays, and yeah, a lot of people followed her example including me!

but that's not the same thing as plagiarism, is it? this whole video is an extensive exploration of what genuinely counts as plagiarism: taking someone else's words and pretending that they're yours. style is almost never part of that conversation across the whole 4 hours, except where it involves use of prepackaged assets like transitions and stock footage, which Hbomb deliberately notes is fine and normal except when people act like they're the ones who invented it (this particularly comes up in the Legal Eagle section). by the terms of this joke, Abby Thorne of PhilosophyTube falls under the category of "boring people" who were "ripping off" Contrapoints even moreso than those who just lit videos like her, because she even does the Socratic-style dialogues! but somehow i don't think Harris would call that plagiarism. if the concern re: bisexual lighting in BreadTube is attribution, all i can say is that Natalie Wynn is one of the single most discussed and cited creators in the whole field. virtually everyone i can think of who "ripped her off" back in the day openly acknowledged being inspired by her at every possible opportunity. of course that's just my own biased recollection of the history, so who knows, maybe there are people out there acting like they did it first. but unlike most of the other victims of plagiarism provided in this video, Natalie Wynn is not wallowing in obscurity. her work is IMMENSELY successful, to the point where she's arguably the closest thing to a household name you can get from this space.

now, i'm sensitive to a joke like this because i always felt like if anything Natalie got too much credit for "inventing" the so-called "BreadTube style". her use of colored lights was striking and unique, yes, but it was also rudimentary and not particularly complicated. i worked in film lighting for enough years to see this "style" as equivalent to late 1910's era silent films blindly grasping at the bare fundamentals of montage that have become the backbone of all cinema. it's good, but it ain't Citizen Kane. i really hoped people would take Natalie's baseline not as a concrete template, but as a challenge to get even more ambitious and filmic with their lighting setups! instead things have stagnated, and we've kinda circled back around to a very slightly more colorful version of the standard pre-Contrapoints look. this is by no means to play down the work that Natalie did, because i know from my own years making video essays that it is NOT easy or simple to set up even rudimentary lighting that looks good. but come on man, have some perspective. she's a philosopher, not an electrician!

what's worse is that later on in the video, Hbomb talks about how many creators were inspired by AVGN to do twists on his formula, and why this was a good thing. near the end, when he's very rightly shouting out many underrated queer essayists, he spends a good chunk of time celebrating the spirit of remix that is so unique to the internet, insisting that there's a real tangible difference between plagiarism and inspiration. this is good! i agree with him! which is why it's so bizarre that there's this one aside that equates using bisexual lighting to plagiarism! it's a disarmingly hypocritical moment in an otherwise relatively on-point video, and its presence kind of weakens the rest of the essay for me (especially if you're sensitive to how near this comes to being all-out drama youtube, as clearly even Hbomb is by his own admission in the video).

the last i'll say is that i find it frustrating when a creator in Hbomb's position tries to act like BreadTube wasn't A Thing. no, it wasn't A Thing the way quite a lot of people thought it was (including many who called themselves BreadTubers). but these creators were often collaborating with each other to make guest appearances, read quotes, etc. certainly they mentioned each other often enough, which couldn't help solidifying in the audience's mind that there was indeed A Thing happening that involved multiple people with similar creative & political goals, regardless of whether or not that was the creators' intent. it wasn't formal, and it certainly wasn't A Movement (the lack of an articulated ideological spine is a BIG part of why things went sour the way they did), but they were happy enough to play along before Drama blew the whole endeavor to smithereens. and notably, successive generations of creators (like Sophie From Mars, Jack Saint, Lily Alexandre, CJ the X, and yes, also me again) saw the BreadTube genre as a place where interesting things were happening, where the kinds of things they/we wanted to create were encouraged and supported vociferously. it's no coincidence that a LOT of up-and-coming trans creators doing very BreadTube-y things got a huge boost from guesting on Hbomb's DK64 Nightmare Stream in 2019 (including me again, haha, oops), because there was A Thing happening even if most people were wrong about what, exactly, it was. none of this is to say that Hbomb should call himself a BreadTuber-- god no, i hope no one does that ever again, i'm embarrassed that i did back in the day! but this history does exist. mostly i just think this joke would've been better left on the cutting room floor.

okay, i think that's enough criticism for one day. one thought i had coming out of this is that i wish more video essays would publish concurrently with a written version on a dedicated website. not just a transcript but an article-format version. i wonder sometimes about the difficulty of indexing video essays, of getting their contents into a historical record that can be printed out and put into a library. but anyway, all my gripes aside, it's a good video and you should go watch it! preferably in chunks over a day or two!

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #2 [PART 2]

[originally posted november 14 2023. NOTE: while migrating the archive from cohost i've discovered that tumblr has a 10 link-block limit, which means i have to split some of these roundups up in order to maintain the embeds. we love websites don't we folks]

THE "DOESN'T NEED THE HELP" ZONE

my preference with these posts is to highlight creators making stuff that might not get much exposure otherwise. but it must be said that sometimes algorithmically successful video creators are creatively successful too. who'dathunkit?

"Are Film Critics a Dying Breed?" by Broey Deschanel.

an excellent dissection of the miserable state of media criticism today, starting at the surprise resignation of A.O. Scott from the New York Times. touches on the important role critics can play in resurrecting films that failed on release, and how we've arrived at a moment when so much criticism is (ironically) uncritical stenography for creatively bankrupt corporations. i think we're going to be seeing a lot of videos on this subject in the years to come, especially as more and more traditional avenues of media crit shut down and our society continues its profit-driven plunge into seeing art as merely a container for passive good feelings to be experienced in the moment and then forgotten forever. does a good job explaining why the firebrand critics of the 70s, like Pauline Kael, were so important, without letting them off the hook for their often elitist attitudes.

"Parking Laws Are Strangling America" by Climate Town.

an essential and refreshing dive into the outsized impacts that zoning laws (specifically parking requirements on new construction) have had on the very shape and soul of American public spaces. we like to talk about car culture and "freedom of the road" propaganda when grousing about the miserable state of public transit, but this here does a delicious materialism and cuts right to the heart of the matter. i love how he consistently refers to parking as "publicly subsidized storage for an individual's private property." little rhetorical interventions like these can do a lot to naturalize a more radical perspective on urbanist reforms. related to this is his video on Chicago's disastrous choice to sell its parking meters to Morgan-Stanley in 2009. i don't love the jokey Daily Show-esque affect Rollie brings to his stuff all the time, but the clarity of information more than makes up for the occasional dud joke. also: really solid camera work? huge props to his gimbal operator.

"Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music" by Tantacrul.

an exhaustive look at the history of musical notation and the many, many attempts people have made at replacing western notation with something more intuitive. if you've ever had a professor just go off about a huge pet peeve of theirs, you'll probably enjoy this one.

"YouTube is spreading a filmmaking disease" by Standard Story Company.

some context: about a month ago i finally bought a new camera and lighting equipment for the first time in ten years. this was preceded by months of researching my options, watching lengthy technical review videos, trying to find a sweet spot between cost and utility. i've watched a million videos like these over the years, and yet i'd never really thought about them as a genre with specific socioeconomic impacts on a population… until now. this is a technical review video that has become self-aware, one which simultaneously reviews tech and the act of reviewing tech in equal measure. it's a fun, interesting experiment that got me thinking in new ways about something i'd very much taken for granted. there remains an uneasy alliance between art and advertising here that i'm not quite sure what to do with, but the work itself is admirable and well worth your time.

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and that's it for this roundup! good luck to those with get-togethers planned for thanksgiving-- make sure to get vaccinated, wear a mask in public spaces, and don't let anyone guilt you for staying home if you're worried for your or someone else's immunological safety.

<- ROUNDUP #1 | ROUNDUP #3 ->

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #2 [PART 1]

[originally posted november 14 2023. NOTE: while migrating the archive from cohost i've discovered that tumblr has a 10 link-block limit, which means i have to split some of these roundups up in order to maintain the embeds. we love websites don't we folks]

hello from the pits of november! between random youtube recommendations and time spent trawling through cohost's video essay tag, i've discovered a lot of bangers this month. so let's just jump in!

"Why Does Attack of the Clones Look Like a Video Game?" by Empire Wreckers.

this is a fresh take on one of the internet's oldest, most time-honored traditions: complaining about the stars wars prequels. fresh in the sense that creator Edan has worked in hollywood VFX, and so brings an eye for hyper-specific details that you'll be amazed you never noticed before. clean, no-nonsense presentation full of surprising insights. immediately after finishing this video i then watched "How Bad Movies Are Made feat. The Rise of Skywalker" whose thesis that "bad movies aren't made on purpose" yields to a refreshingly nuanced perspective on exactly why the third star wars sequel was such a mess without resorting to droll hyperbole about JJ Abrams being a hack or whatever. these are great examples of materialist media criticism, in that they are as much a criticism of the production pipeline as they are the finished product. after watching these videos, i actually think that any other perspective on these later Star Wars is… kind of missing the forest for the trees? impressive stuff all around.

"women who wish they were 𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐛𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐬: an analysis" by Costanza Polastri.

a quick and honest overview of how straight women often misunderstand the nature of lesbian relationships, thinking them somehow free of the conflict they experience in heterosexual ones. the insight that "you don't want a girlfriend, you just want men to be better" reminded me of when i admitted to having a crush on a cisfem friend shortly after coming out as trans, only for her to get mad at me and end our friendship because "i told you i'm not a lesbian and it's frustrating that everyone mistakes me for one!" this was before i'd even decided on Sarah as my preferred name. she was more invested in my newfound femininity than i was! anyway, Costanza Polastri has an enjoyable screen presence and brings a really interesting perspective to the table-- and in pretty short videos, to boot! not an easy feat by any stretch.

"A real history of video games | Pay to Win" by Jimmy McGee.

an essential deep dive into how the history of the modern video game industry is inextricable from the history of legal gambling. if you think you know how bad it is, trust me, it's so much weirder and more frustrating than you thought. Jimmy McGee is doing some really great stuff on his channel, providing an honest materialist perspective on media analysis that i've found sorely lacking. "The AI Revolution is Rotten to the Core" digs past the obvious criticisms of AI and LLM mania into the much more pressing question of what we, as a society, value in our art. for something shorter, i also recommend "The Dream of the Internet", about the war on the internet archive and why it's such an essential pillar of the open web.

"I Played EVERY Star Fox Game… Here's What I Learned" by wizawhat.

starfox 64 has been my favorite video game since i was a child, so naturally one of my favorite genres of youtube video is "Let's All Gawk At All The Ways Nintendo Has Catastrophically Mishandled The Franchise." wizawhat does a good job giving each game its due, mostly avoiding hyperbole while still acknowledging that picking favorites in a history this checkered is an inherently emotional, subjective process. the highest praise i can give to entries into this genre is that i was nodding along violently the whole time AND actually learned a lot of stuff i didn't know before, which i genuinely didn't think was possible! his other video "I Miss the Old Nintendo" is the closest i've seen anyone else come to really hammering home why i've soured so hard against nintendo over the last few years, despite having been a nintendo defender most of my life. my only complaint is that he uses some hack corporate language at times ("content" instead of "media," "consumers" instead of "audiences," etc), but i'm gonna dig deeper into that in a dedicated vidrev another time.

"Why We Can't Stop Mapping Elden Ring" by Ren or Raven.

a great little exploration of what maps in games do, and what they mean in an era of video games dominated by post-release patches and balance tuning. i'll be brief here because i've got a full length vidrev queued up for this one too, but it's worth stating that creator Renata Price is a games writer who has turned to video essays after being laid off by Vice earlier this year. as the first entry in a presumed corpus by an experienced critic from a very different critical tradition, i find this video exciting because it's an opportunity to study how the medium affects one's message. right now it feels like Renata Price doesn't quite know how to take full advantage of the video part of the video essay just yet, and that's a great place to start from. i just find it to be such a privilege when you get to watch someone grow their craft in real time!

"Death and Thriving - Discussing 920 London" by Wolf Witch.

just a solid textual analysis of the graphic novel 920 London, Remy Boydell's followup to their devastating prior book The Pervert. digs into serious questions about the death drive, and whether or not people can change or recover from trauma. not much else to say except that Wolf Witch is on Cohost doing speedruns of Snake Farm. Snake Farm rules! support your local Snarmers today!

"That one speedrun where you change your gender" by Minoan.

an astonishing little coming-out video in the form of a Dark Souls 2 speedrun tech overview. i don't have much to say about this one except that it put a huge smile on my face and gave me some serious vicarious gender joy. i love the sound of trans women's voices!!!

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #1

[originally posted october 11th 2023]

so, i watch a lot of video essays.

i started this blog with the intention of reviewing video essays at length, in the hopes of highlighting best & worst practices, discussing the history of the form, and using them as a jumping off point for personal/political introspection. but as time has gone on, i've found myself encountering more and more videos that i didn't have a whole lot to say about, but that felt worthy of a spotlight anyway.

WITH THAT IN MIND, welcome to video essay roundup, an occasional list of stuff i've watched recently that i think is worth your time. enough preamble, let's get started.

"Self-Discovery Stories | Video Essay" by Glouder Glens.

are you watching Sylvia Schweikert? i know you're not because its numbers are disastrously low. her video about it/its pronouns is a genuine work of art, a video essay about the dehumanization of trans people that seamlessly transforms into lesbian werewolf erotica. this newest video is just as beautiful and strange, not least because it's rendered in portrait mode like a tiktok. it's an honest, far-ranging and personal essay whose sub-300 views is genuinely criminal. seriously, seriously, Sylvia's an essayist you NEED to be paying attention to. it's making the kind of stuff that simply does not play well with the youtube algorithm, and that's the stuff that i live for. watch her videos and share them with your friends. give it money on patreon for gods sake! also definitely go watch her short film "Self Centered," it's a haunting and masterful work of art.

"More unremarkable and odd places in Mario 64" by Any Austin.

i stumbled across Any Austin a couple months ago and he's quickly become one of my favorite "it's time to relax" creators. his "unremarkable and odd places" series scratches an itch i never knew i had, as someone who loves exploring the least interesting corners of any digital world i find myself in. his other series involves calculating the unemployment rate of video game locations by talking to every NPC and deducing their employment status. the editing is calm, his tone is measured and matter of fact, and his sense of humor ties it all together. this is the kind of thing that used to be the bread and butter of video teams at outlets like Cracked or Polygon, before they were summarily laid off or pushed out. it's good to see someone else picking up that mantle in a way that seems relatively sustainable and isn't under the umbrella of a layoff-happy corporate enterprise (except for google of course, but we're all in that boat together aren't we?)

does this count as a video essay? i think that's a reasonable question. i'm inclined to say yes, with the understanding that there are many different types and genres of video essay. but that's a conversation for another day.

"On the Ethics of Boinking Animal People" by Patricia Taxxon.

i should do a full vidrev on this one honestly, but i can't do a post like this and not include it. if you play around in any sort of furry-adjacent fetish space, have opinions about the sexual proclivities of furries, or are otherwise prone to pearl-clutching as an outsider, this is an essential watch. Patricia here does a great job drawing attention to how even well-meaning defenders of, say, feral furry porn, often give up unnecessary ground to opponents with fallacious devices like the Harkness test. i've talked to a lot of fellow kinky furries who came out of this essay exalting in the joy that finally, someone said it! many of the arguments made here, especially in underlining that all furry porn is immaterial and imaginary, are thoughts i've had since i first made a furaffinity account in 2007 or 08 (though i swore up and down i wasn't a furry until 2019) but was always too afraid to express.

this is scary, sensitive territory, but that's what makes this such an essential intervention. this is the perspective of an autistic transfem furry who just wants to have an honest conversation without all the moral fearmongering and shortsighted kneejerk cliches that come up when a topic skirts dangerously close to taboos that we just, generally, refuse to talk about like adults. these are conversations that, in my experience, only ever happened among friendgroups with a long-established repartee and understanding of each other's boundaries, if at all. otherwise, even progressive supposedly kink-positive spaces can encourage a sort of cop-brained punitive attitude towards imaginary sex acts that very easily bleeds over into puritanical takes on, say, kink at pride. frankly, i'm sick of the language & rhetoric of Respectability, because saying "no, most of us aren't like the freaks" only ever results in a liberal block decrying the deplorables and subjecting them to further marginalization and abuse. it takes a lot of guts to make a video like this and i'm so, so glad that Patricia Taxxon stuck the landing.

"Who Is Killing Cinema? - A Murder Mystery" by Patrick (H) Willems.

i've already written two separate vidrevs on Willems, but what can i say? this most recent stretch of work focusing on the business and philosophy of cinema in the streaming era is good stuff. nothing in this particular essay is new per se if you've been paying attention to the business of hollywood for the last ten years, but it does a great job assembling the broad strokes of a lot of different-but-common arguments into one far ranging thesis. much like the prior two videos, i think this works as a solid introductory primer to a more materialist understanding of these trends for folks who aren't necessarily familiar with materialist theory. bonus points for wasting no time getting to the point, unlike his otherwise excellent video on the word "content."

alright, i think that'll do it for this video essay roundup! enjoy :)

ROUNDUP #2 ->

[NOTE: as i'm migrating the archive, links between roundups will direct back to cohost. i probably won't get around to changing that until i write a new one.]