February State of the Channel

Hello Foldables!

It’s Crystal, back with this month’s update, trying out names for the viewers. Do you have something you call yourselves already?

If you’re wondering why you’re hearing from me, see the January post for a little more info on some channel updates.

There’s a big announcement at the end of this post. Unfortunately, it doesn’t involve Grover (™), but there is a new character.

Next Video

If you haven’t seen it, Dan posted a vlog about seeing the film Scarlet. For those of you who did, you might remember this beautiful cold open to the video:

You’re going to have to ignore this pile of Loonies. They have no purpose, but… they’re for something else!... You’ll just have to accept that you don’t know what it’s for yet.

That “something else” is the upcoming second video we promised in the first quarter* of the year. We still can’t tell you what it is (pesky NDAs), but I’ve been cleared to give you a few teaser bullet points. The new video involves but is not limited to:

• The Scarlet video Loonies pile

• Doing a three-way tango with an NDA and professional courtesy

• Renting a bouncy castle complete with inflatable slides

• Hiring our first intern

• Crystal needing to learn to create, not just obey, a call sheet (skill up, baby, we’re not just the talent anymore)

Taking Away Some of Hat Dan’s Hats

We’ve started making some changes on how video production works here at Folding Ideas virtual offices. Up until now – aside from a few experiments with extremely mixed results – F.I. has largely worked on one video at a time. Even with Nathan coming on board as a full-time Writer, there are some bottlenecks in video production that are unavoidable.

When you’re running a channel with a single person who is on-screen talent, producer, writer, editor, motion graphics designer, creative lead, director, point of contact, and probably seven other jobs I’m forgetting, you can see how one Dan can only wear so many hats at one time. Taking some of the writing load off creative-hat-Dan has helped immeasurably, and adding Nathan to the team has upped the quality (and, let’s be honest, length) of the videos in ways very noticeable on our side, and, we hope, to viewers as well.

My (again: Crystal) coming on to take over administrative things reduced Dan’s producer-hat time, allowing him to spend more energy on writing and shooting. I’m also lurking around back here managing relationships with our contacts, colleagues, contractors, and collaborators, and nudging Dan to take advantage of that awesome network when appropriate.

In 2026, we’re running experiments anew. This means we have to decide several topics in advance. This specifically has historically been difficult for a myriad of reasons, including the sudden appearance of a temporally salient topic that must be done right now (see: the penguin tweet video); or the loss of interest and dopamine chasing a project which withers while in the writing stage (see: the currently-dead video on high frame rate). So though we’ll have to deeply examine any emerging topics to decide if they’re worth dropping a planned video for, we have created a slate for 2026 through the end of the year.

That said, we are keeping the slate and the timeline close to the chest right now. This is still an experiment after all, and we don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver since that’s a recipe for anxiety and disappointment. We hope that knowing there is a plan is enough to sate the subscribers.

But I promised a big announcement this month, and a new character in this post, so there is one more hat we’re stealing from Dan…

Hard-Launching Jessica

We’ve added another member to Folding Ideas! Peep her name in the credits scroll on the next videos.

Jessica is coming on as Editor, which will allow us to reduce the All-Hats Dan bottleneck even further. With Jessica joining us we are hoping to speed up the transition from one video to another, letting us finally achieve the dream of overlapping writing/pre-production and editing/post-production on two separate projects at once. She’ll also be handling side projects between major videos, which means more Patreon and shorter-form videos between our full releases.

Get to know Jessica!

• A/S/L: Younger than Dan / she/her / Our second Brooklynite

• Face reveal: No, and don’t be weird about it

• Last Read: The Old Fire by Elisa Shua Dusapin

• Currently Reading: Bad Company by Megan Greenwell and Nefando by Mónica Ojeda

• Favorite Dan deepcut: The Art of Storytelling and The Book of Henry

• Favorite Non-Dan video: What happened to the post office? by Kendra Gaylord

• Likes: Reading, cats, cheese

• Bound by the same NDA as Dan, though she wasn’t working for us when she signed it

• Talented editor who’s been editing and writing content for YouTube for 7 years (plus a few more years and places before that)

• Thrown into the deep end to learn an entirely new editing software for us but is sticking the landing like a pro (which she is)

• Should be credited along with Dan in the next Davinci Resolve patch notes for how much troubleshooting they’ve done with Blackmagic Cloud Collaboration

All in all, we’re thrilled she’s on board.

Catch you next month!

*We’re operating on a loose end-of-quarter target, but do not take this as a promise of a video on Mar 31. Grant us some wiggle room here, y’all, videos are complicated!