October Update: So That Went Well (Patreon)

Hey team! Sorry for the slight delay with this update, I've been out of the country and just got back yesterday. (My assumptions that I would get some work done while traveling were, once again, over-optimistic.)

Normies

First off, I should say hi to all the new patrons. What's up?! The new video has been a big success and there are a bunch more of you now. Welcome!

How to Radicalize a Normie is currently on track to be the biggest Alt-Right Playbook so far. The current champion is Always a Bigger Fish, which had a bigger opening, but Radicalize got one of those after-release bumps and has had a longer tail so far. For comparison:

That's the opening two weeks for both videos. So! That is gratifying. I've also gotten some media inquiries; looks like I'll be in a Dutch TV documentary and possibly on Canadian radio in the near future (I'll update y'all as I get more info). Who knows, maybe I'll break through in my own country someday?

Thank you all so much, this channel couldn't possibly do what it's doing these days without your support. You have my deepest gratitude.

Solidarity Lowell

I've mentioned previously that I'll be giving a talk this month in Lowell. I now have actual details! To whit:

Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive RelationshipSunday, November 17th5:30 PMDracut Christ Church United10 Arlington St.Dracut, MA 01826

This talk will serve as the next entry to The Alt-Right Playbook, digging into all the research I did for How to Radicalize a Normie, expanding on it, and sharing some of my pet theories. I'm trying to get it filmed, but, barring that, I will record the audio and sync it to my slides in post, and that'll be November's video.

Paying What is Owed

This year has had a wonky release schedule:

January: The Card Says MoopsFebruary: missedMarch: Always a Bigger Fish, Origins of ConservatismApril: ~amnesty~May: missedJune: missedJuly: Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood 3, [deleted scenes]August: missedSeptember: missedOctober: How to Radicalize a Normie

That's six months missed. I ask for April off for personal reasons, and released two videos in both March and July, which leaves us with three missing videos. How to Radicalize a Normie is over 30 minutes, which we traditionally count for two months, so that brings us down to two missing videos. And I already owed you two missing videos from last year, so that brings us back up to four.

I have been allotted 35 minutes (plus Q&A time) for my Solidarity Lowell talk, so that may shave us down to three owed videos, but, then, I'll owe you a new video for December as well. So! This is where Protagony comes in!

(For the new folks: Protagony is a new series of short videos about narrative I've been planning since the summer; think of them like micro Story Beats episodes.)

So far I have two scripts written and have hired an artist to do the thumbnails. I'll be sneaking time to work on them here and there for the next couple weeks, but will go into production properly after the Lowell talk on the 17th. We're knee-deep in the holiday season and I've got more travel ahead of me, so rather than do my usual thing and predict optimistically that I will get four episodes of Protagony online by the end of the year and get ourselves squared up, we're gonna go with "let's see how many I can do before Christmas."

If we spill over into next year before we get things square, I can only hope the videos are good enough that you forgive me.

Revisiting Revisiting Perks

I've been brainstorming for a while on what to do about Patreon perks.

(Again, for the new folks: the site where I kept my video annotations went down a while back and being already way behind on annotations and having to redo all the ones I already did is a major drag, and I also haven't had much to say on the BTS blog for a while, so we've been trying to come up with some new $5 and $10 perks that are less labor-intensive for me, since maintaining the current ones would cut into the time I put into the videos.)

One problem here is that much of the stuff people have suggested doing as perks I'm already doing for everyone, or just for free on Twitter. Folks have suggested things like:

$1: Monthly Updates$5: Early Access to Videos$10: See My Research Notes

I've been doing Early Access at $1 since the beginning and my research notes are free on Twitter. I don't feel comfortable moving either behind paywalls after having them accessible for so long. Even these updates aren't gated at a dollar: you can see them if you're pledging anything, even a penny.

But I do have one idea, which is a book club. And I need your help on it.

What I'd like to do is take my research list and go through one book every month and invite people at $5-and-up to join me. We can all read the book the same month and then have a discussion about it. It'll help me keep up on my research and, hopefully, drum up some interesting discussion that will only improve the videos (and, of course, any observations that make it into videos will be credited to the people who made them).

The question is: on what platform?

My ideal would be a dedicated Discord or Slack channel for each book, so people can read at their own pace and we can all just scroll through and see what we missed since last we logged in.

HOWEVER: managing a Discord is probably too much work. If it's a $5 perk, I've got to manually boot everyone who cancels or lowers their pledge, which takes constant monitoring, and, obviously, I've got to moderate the channel itself to make sure it doesn't turn toxic or unproductive. And that's a degree of labor that I can't spare right now, not without cutting into time that should be spent on videos.

We could do the book club as an end-of-month post and discuss the books in comments, but that's less interesting and will probably not foster the same kind of conversation. Alternately, I could do Discord and hire someone to moderate it, which I think could be in the budget, but I might have to give them access to my Patreon to see when pledges get lowered/canceled, and that's a lot of access to be granting an employee.

So I'm a bit stuck on this. What do y'all think? Have you seen any better platforms for book club-y stuff? Maybe a dedicated subreddit? Maybe a means of handling a Discord I'm not thinking of?

Hit me up in the comments.

-I