March Update: That Escalated Quickly (Patreon)

Hey team. Let's do the thing we do.

Announcements!

Before we get into the nitty-gritty:

I will be doing an AMA on Saturday at 2:00 EST on the largest Politics server on Discord. The conversation will be uploaded to their YouTube channel afterwards for anyone who can't stop by the livestream.

Tomorrow, Big Joel will be begin a charity livestream for the victims of the Christchurch shooting where he completes Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy 50 times. A buncha breadtubers will be on. I will be popping in as my availability allows.

I don't have links for either of these yet, so I'll send out another email when I get them! But mark your calendars if you wanna stop by.

I Don't Even?!

The day I released The Card Says Moops was the first time the channel had ever matched the traffic of the day This Is Phil Fish blew up. That was cumulative traffic - the new video plus traffic from all the other videos on my channel.

Always a Bigger Fish is the first video to ever get more views in a day than This Is Phil Fish. That is a threshold we have been approaching for a while and finally crossed. We did it, folks!

It's also the biggest bump in patronage I've ever gotten short of making videos where I directly asked for money. So, ah, new patrons: hi! Thanks for joining the party!

(It's also the first video with the new mic. Did you notice the difference?)

As long as we're talking accomplishments, this is one of the top comments on a Reddit thread that was apparently #3 on r/all. So that's... wild.

This is, per usual, all a bit overwhelming and I don't know what to do except say thank you a lot, so: thank you all! Your support has made all these videos possible.

Wrapping Up a Quintet

With the release of The Origins of Conservatism, we have wrapped up a string of five consecutive Alt-Right Playbook episodes. This run has been what you could call The Ideology Quintet: we dissected liberalism, fascism, nihilism, and conservatism. And we snuck a showtune into each one! I tend to release these videos in clusters of related subjects - we previously had The Mainstreaming Trilogy and The Founding Principles Diptych. But these videos have taken the widest view on rhetoric and the beliefs behind them, and has also had the longest videos in it.

I'm a bit exhausted.

I'm also a bit curious as to where to go next. We've broadened the scope of the series from talking about tactics out to talking about the fundamental beliefs behind the tactics. I needed to lay that groundwork before going forward, because it will make later videos easier, but it also feels like going back to talking about tactics is going to seem like a reduction in scope. There's maybe no way to avoid that, and it's not like I need every video to be an event. (And, hey, maybe a video or two could be back in the 12-minute range? That'd be neat.) But, still, I wonder if I'll get some disappointed comments.

Anyway, in the meantime, Ian is doing a video about something fun. Ian is going to talk about some frickin adventure games. I've been rereading a bunch of articles and replaying some relevant games and it has been such a wonderful respite after five straight months of talking about fascists. Hoping something a little less slide-heavy will inch us closer to that extra video I want to get done before July.

Big Project Updates & Extra Announcements

I have continued to add to the podcast questionnaire, and have thought of some more folks I would like to reach out to for interviews. And I've got some more sketches for the narrative project, and have started making mood boards for the aesthetics of the final illustrations. Hasn't been as much time for writing the script as I'd like, so I'm hoping to fit a little of that in while I'm also writing April's video. This bump in patronage means that my ability to pay illustrators out of pocket is a lot higher than it was a month ago, which is good because I realized I can't easily crowdfund for something that is essentially analytical fanfiction. Working with someone else's IP is against the rules at Kickstarter and GoFundMe!

I will also take this moment to let you know that I will be at Narrascope here in Boston June 14-16th, and at VidCon in Anaheim July 10th-13th. I am not at PAX East this weekend, but, if any of y'all are in town for the con, leave a comment and maybe we can all meet up for tea or something. :)

I think that's everything for now!

-I