quantifica july

SUP NERDS

PROGRESS REPORT
John Wick: With the Animals is officially live! Ad revenue is going in escrow while YouTube determined whether or not I have to split it with MASTER BOOT RECORD for using their song in the intro, but the more aggressive claim from Lionsgate was released pretty quickly once I escalated the appeal to "feel free to come back with a lawsuit" level. But that's a complete video!

Lemme be real with you: this video was a lot lot lot of fun. And, if you remember a guide to flaming out, I went five years without a "fun" video. This feels Big and Important. It also exemplifies what I mentioned in that video: not wanting my "fun" and "substantive" videos to be so separate. This video about action movies does not pull punches in its dissection of power structures or the ethics of "civility."

Comments have also been shockingly positive. It's not exactly "doing numbers" but it is finding its audience, and the numbers are respectable. We're in a good spot. I'm extremely pleased.

VIDEO CABINET: 4/9
JW in the can, that gets us nearly halfway with the Video Cabinet. I'm at an impasse of what the next proper video is. I know my immediate task is the public quantifica video, so I have some runway to decide. Multiple projects have called to me recently: the Andor video is written (well, drafted; I thought it was done but have since come up with a couple things to add), so it would be the fastest to get online. The Good Guys Lost has felt perhaps the most personally relevant to my life, and maybe the most cathartic to touch on, but also needs the most work to bring to completion; there are a lot of notes but nothing is actually scripted yet. In The Revolution, There Will Be Disco has a lot of text already down, and feels like the manifesto video, perhaps the most "important" thing to make, encapsulating a lot of my ethos about the channel, my life, existence in Trump's America, and the climate apocalypse. You know, fun stuff!

And, of course, in pondering all this, I randomly cracked how to tackle an upcoming section of Tendencies of Neo-noir and am immediately asking "hmm, if I started now, could I get that finished in time for Noirvember??"

With all this in mind: I spent a morning working a completely different project that isn't on the grid at all. This is not technically cheating! I am allowed to "take notes" on other projects, just not put them into production. Does a spreadsheet and scatterplot stretch the definition of "taking notes"? Mind your own business.

MUSIC CABINET: 0/9
This month's minimix reveals that I have been delving into the prog and, to a lesser extent, hip-hop squares of the grid, but I would not say either is "complete." I'm gonna have to write about prog, I have a lot of thoughts. Dunno if I'm gonna write a lot about each genre I explore, or just report "here's the best album I found," but prog... I got stuff to say about prog.

I have also collected a lot of chamber pop albums to explore, but haven't made a dent in them yet.

Here are the tracks:

Austin Wintory - He's Quite the Imposition
- evidence of playing the John Wick Hex soundtrack a lot while working on the new video; not even my fav song from it, track one just gets played the most when you start over several times.

Between the Buried and Me - Things We Tell Ourselves in the Dark
- the most Mike Patton-coded song to have zero involvement from Mike Patton, it's like they mashed up early Mr. Bungle with late Mr. Bungle, Mike's EP with The Dillinger Escape Plan, and Tomahawk.

Jean Grae & Quelle Chris - Peacock
- groovy hip-hop about how totally okay everything is

Beware the Dangers of a Ghost Scorpion! - Blood Drinkers Only
- I asked BlueSky whether this horror-themed surf rock falls under the umbrella of psychobilly; results too inconclusive to count it for the grid

Kelley Stoltz - Prank Calls
- infectious bop playing from a stereo on a train platform with one busted speaker

Coheed and Cambria - The Continuum IV: So It Goes
- I'm not sure how this pitch-perfect ELO pastiche is "prog" but good GOLLY do I like it

FILM CABINET: 2/9
In just the past couple days, the Film Cabinet has actually notched up to 4, but it happened after I made these graphics and I'ma call that the cutoff. I gave four stars to Poor Things! My review is pretty spare; feels like anything more substantive would require an overview of The Discourse and I am not really looking to wade into The Discourse on Poor Things. The uncomfortable things, I felt, were meant to be uncomfortable; whether that justifies them is a question I'm unprepared to answer. But it was certainly compelling.

BOOK CABINET: 0/9
I got nothin'. Still working through A Canticle for Leibowitz. Which is good! But my reading habit is... hiding. I might pick up one of the books on the grid just to see if something else takes, come back to Canticle later. But, also: maybe I'm just digging music and movies right now, and that's okay. Maybe I was busy having a lot of fun with a John Wick video. That is also okay!

GAME CABINET: 3/9
It is very weird to say "this WarioWare-ish game about eating disorders is actually really funny and uplifting, and also it affected me in deeply profound ways, doing more to help me process last year than any single piece of art or media I've encountered." Consume Me! is a masterpiece.

My reviews of Perfect Tides and Trepang2 are also here for your perusal, if you're into that.

Cheers, folks,

-I