Ramble #107: Me vs Horror Movie Monsters

And with that the halloween season begins...

Video player updates:

Patreon has now quietly rolled out a tv app for Android devices/Google tvs. It seems like they're waiting to see how it performs before rolling it out to other devices, so if anyone has the correct tv for it I highly recommend stress-testing it and giving patreon any feedback. I had a pretty productive call with my patreon rep and also requested the ability to download videos into the app for offline viewing (like the youtube premium feature) so we'll see what we hear back about that.

I use an android phone so a lot of the features people say are missing/broken work fine on my device, but I don't personally have the ability to troubleshoot on every device. For more device-specific tech issues, I'm assured that if people contact tech support directly, they will get a response about resolving the issue.

A note about the youtube mirrors:

I know people like the youtube mirrors and I really wanted to make them work, and continued them for about a year longer than I probably should have. But the sharing issue was just getting too public and too egregious and discontinuing them seemed to be the only solution left after the honors system was not working. I'm not talking about link sharing among personal friend groups, which I never really had a problem with, but sharing in public, on large platforms. (And sharing tips about how to circumvent the no-public-playlist safeguards, which was possible, and was one of the major issues with youtube. I'd been trying to ignore that too, rather than call attention to it, but it continued to be a problem.)

Beyond that, there were a lot of issues with the platform that I was constantly getting complaints about but had no power to try to change. Features being paywalled behind premium, which I have no power to grant to my patrons. Or ads running on videos after I tried to turn them off - which it turns out enabling monetization for the channel did not even actually resolve. Unlike on patreon, I have no youtube rep and no ability to get tech assistance for anything happening there.

Finally, I hesitate to give too specific of an example because once I admit something bothers me online, bad actors usually just do it more, but some of the ways in which the youtube mirrors were being shared were targeted to get my attention and were really unkind. I felt I was being antagonized over something that I was trying to offer as a courtesy.

Video-in-progress updates:

I'm still working on Once Upon A Time, but also, after the very sad loss of Hayden Panettiere I started doing a rewatch of Heroes - which I'd been meaning to do for quite a while. I had actually been talking about Heroes with a friend only the night before the news, so it was a real shock. It was appointment viewing for me when it was first airing, and I think maybe the first serialized show I ever watched, but I never actually finished it because... it gets bad very fast lol.

Anyway I wasn't outright setting out to do a video on it, but very quickly I couldn't help it and I now have like a 25 page script outline going for it. (For reference, the OUAT one is sitting at about 50.) I do think because Heroes takes itself pretty seriously, it's a more "fun" show to critique than Once Upon A Time, which often knows how ridiculous it's being.

The trouble is, I don't know if there's actually an audience for Heroes, since it's had very little cultural impact since going off the air, and a shorter run than a show like Vampire Diaries. Curious if any of you guys were Heroes-heads!