April Update: New Places

Hey team!

Digs

I am writing you from my new office.

Without going into personal details, I have sort-of moved! Half-moved. It's complicated. But! The place I have half-moved to has a small office off the living room that is mine, all mine. And, with the internet getting set up yesterday, I am sitting down and working from said office for the first time. And, I gotta say, it feels pretty good!

The sheer lack of privacy from the pandemic has been very slowly killing me, like I was living in a house with lead paint and asbestos insulation. This room is tiny, and I'm working from my laptop on a folding table with an unpacked box of books sitting on it, but it's private, and, when I wear my noise-cancelling headphones, it's quiet. In time, there will be a proper desk and some bookshelves and probably a terrarium with a pet tortoise in it, but those are later steps. For now, it's a space to be alone while I work, where I can leave my phone in another room, put on my trip-hop mix, sit in my ergonomic chair, and focus on videos for a bit, like I used to two freaking years ago.

I don't know if this is a silver bullet solution. I'm not sure I believe in silver bullets anymore. But I think it's going to help a lot. I just sat down to work here for the first time, and it went a lot better than the last time I tried to work from my bedroom. Here's a sample of the slide I was just working on:

This represents a Milo Yiannopoulos type saying scandalously awful things for attention. I made the word balloon by putting a lengthy excerpt of Mein Kampf in a tag cloud generator.

It's not much. But it was more enjoyable than any work I've done since probably the FPS arsenal video. So. It's something.

Pillars of Creation

In other news: there is a very real chance I'm about to join Nebula. I had a meeting with the head guy there, Dave, on Monday, and they've offered me a contract. I need to have a lawyer look over it, which I haven't done yet, but from everything I've heard I believe their terms are astonishingly fair. Having a space to bring in a little more passive income on these videos that have generated billions of views and have only earned me a meager existence will hopefully go some way towards adequate compensation. And, also, it means finally having a place to host Lady Eboshi is Wrong other than Vimeo!

Now, the primary way that people on Nebula make money is with sponsorships. I have, for some time, considered ad reads a hard "no." Nebula leverages its large collection of creators to get better terms from sponsors than I've been offered as a solo creator. And those would mean a lot more than the $100-200 extra a month Nebula subscription money would make me.

I still don't know how I feel about doing them, and I don't have to. But I am also dead tired of boostrapping, of being nearly forty and still having to count every dollar, being on a strict budget that keeps my existence meager and all for the sake of going into debt slower, with the long-term goal of someday, years down the line, merely breaking even.

So I'll promise you this much: the versions of the videos you get (and the version on Nebula itself) will always be ad-free. Similarly, if I do any Nebula-exclusive content, you will always have access to that as well. YouTube bay just be the place where the free, more annoying versions of the videos live.

Other Stuff

I appear to be on a first-person shooter kick, and, similar to the thread of every movie I watch this year, I appear to have started a thread cataloguing all my shootgams. If you're looking for recs, check that out. (Standouts: Prodeus, Cultic, The Citadel, And All Would Cry Beware, Supplice, Boomerang X, Trepang 2, Turbo Overkill, and Anger Foot.)

Recent standouts from the movie thread: Fresh (2022), Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), D.O.A. (1950), The Northman (2022), Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022), Insomnia (1997), and Passing (2021).

Also, in keeping with my inability to juggle more than two hobbies, I've been watching fewer movies and suddenly I'm reading books again?! I just read James Naremore's More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts, then burned through White Butterfly by Walter Mosely (an Easy Rawlins mystery and second sequel to Devil in a Blue Dress), and now, having not touched it since January, I'm plowing through N.K. Jemison's short story collection, How Long 'til Black Future Month? This is very odd for me since I haven't been able to focus on any books, much less fiction, for months, and now I'm devouring it. Gonna ride the wave while it lasts!

So those are some recommendations (though content warning for some sexual assault in White Butterfly, which is treated with some seriousness but not enough for my comfort).

That's it for now. More updates from the office when I have them!

-I