February Update: Dotted Horizon

Hey team! Happy February.

Next Things

The current plan is as follows: progress on the next Alt-Right Playbook continues slowly. I'm making headway in my thick, depressing research book and I have several pages of a script I like. Partway through writing it, though, I had a momentary inspiration, and quickly wrote a script for one last CO-VID. A few times in the past year I had the idea to make a video that just listed some things that had brought me some happiness in the shitstorm, but could never get a discussion of 5 or 6 things to feel right. Felt I needed more room to do them justice. The sudden inspiration was: no, I need to do 25 things that have brought me happiness recently! And, instead of doing micro-essays on each one, I need to pick a single moment from each thing and see how well I can capture what made that moment special in just a few sentences. I challenged myself to be brief, and I'm pretty happy with what I came up with.

So! That's going to be February's video. It feels right to do one last CO-VID that acknowledges it's the last one, and doing it right on the anniversary of the pandemic beginning feels appropriate. And it means I have more time to work on the TARP video, which is important to me to get right.

Speaking of buying time: I will also be doing an online talk at UC Merced on March 16th about GamerGate and how it functioned as a proof-of-concept for what would become the modern Alt-Right. I'll be recording the audio from that and syncing my slides to it, and that will go online at some point.

Also also: I'm currently working on a proper collaboration with another YouTuber! We've been kicking the idea around for a while and recently decided that March would be a good month to release it. We're aware that "take a video from concept to completion in one month when we've never worked together before" is a tall order and might not work, but we figured the worst case scenario is we make a bunch of progress but still end up releasing later this year.

So, all told, there are four videos in the works. Not sure what order any of them are coming out. There's a chance the next ARPB will be the last of the four; I want to take the time to do this thing right, as the subject matter is delicate, so I'm going to be working on it steadily but not rushing. Regardless, you should have #content coming out on the regular.

CO-VIDs I Didn't Do

Since I'm bring the CO-VIDs to a close, I thought I'd share some of the ideas from my list of potential topics that came close to happening but didn't make the cut.

• Yojimbo Remakes. Early in the pandemic, I watched a lot of movies, among them Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Yojimbo is loose adaptation of the 1942 film noir The Glass Key, itself a remake of the 1935 crime film of the same name, which was an adaptation of the novel by Dashiell Hammett. Yojimbo also seems to borrow heavily from Hammett's Red Harvest, which I read last year. And Yojimbo has been "remade," officially or no, many times in many genres: twice as as a Spaghetti Western (A Fistful of Dollars and Django), as high fantasy (The Warrior and the Sorceress), as a Prohibition gangster movie (Last Man Standing), and as a low-budget cyborg movie (Omega Doom). And I set myself to watching all of them, and wanted to make a video showing how each adaptation tackles the scene where protagonist is captured, beaten, and then makes a clever escape; how genre expectations compel these scenes to play out differently; and also tracing the many other tendrils of influence these two Dashiell Hammet books from 90 years ago had on so many genres.
• The Cornetto Trilogy. I've seen a number of YouTubers discuss Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy and feel like an essential quality is always missed: that they are, ultimately, stories about people not growing up. They take the familiar comedy premise: a stunted manchild is thrust into a high-concept scenario that compels him to mature. There are half a dozen Adam Sandler movies with this premise. But, in the Cornetto Trilogy, the twist at the end is that they don't. They don't mature; instead of changing to fit into the adult world, the world changes to suit them. I find this hilarious in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and find it actually pretty mean-spirited in The World's End. This is interesting to compare with Wright's Baby Driver, which is his first story where a character actually does grow up and take responsibility. This idea has been kicking around a while, and may still happen as a standalone video.
• El Camino and the End of Breaking Bad. I wanted to share my perspective on how the ending of Breaking Bad reads to me, and why I find it troubling how many people read in differently. And then talk about how the first half of El Camino seems to reinforce my own reading, but the second half seems to undermine it, and why that complicates my feelings about the show and the extended franchise. I have pretty much the whole argument mapped out in my head, and I find it interesting, but never quite interesting enough to make the video. Maybe I'm waiting for a new insight to click it into place.
• Dirty Bits. This was an idea I had several years ago, when Red Sparrow had just come out. I was having a lot of thoughts about actresses who do their first nude scenes after having their nudes leaked online, and cases where the movie seems to frame that nudity in an almost confrontational way. Wanted to compare Red Sparrow with Under the Skin, talking about how both films deal with objectification, the weaponization of sexuality, women with secret or unknowable motives, and how, whether or not they took these roles to confront or shame the people who leaked their nudes, it's hard not to wonder if they did, and, if you're wondering it, it's affecting your interpretation either way. I considered finally revisiting the idea as a CO-VID, but shied away again. It's hard to talk about nudity and not have your audience read you as creepy, and I wasn't sure there was enough substance to warrant the risk.

February

For privacy reasons I'm not gonna into detail, but something sad has happened in my family this week and I'm going to be sitting with it for a little while. I don't think getting a video out by the end of February is in the cards; I wouldn't give a very convincing vocal performance for a discussion of things that have made me happy. I will be okay, and the video will come soon, but expect it some time in March.

-I