In this episode Dan Olson pieces together what a meme is and draws a line from Regis Philbin to Jersey Shore.
This week on Folding Ideas the Foldable Human takes a look at Kanye West's All of the Lights.
In this week's episode the Foldable human takes a look at Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void.
In this week's episode the Foldable Human takes a look at Darren Aronofski's The Fountain, framed stories, parallel imagery, love, and death.
Aired June 15, 2011 Unfortunately due to a mouth infection the Foldable Human can't talk much right now, so he put together a clip trip for the episode that was supposed to be here, but couldn't.
The Foldable Human takes a look at the mess that is genre.
The Foldable Human takes a (real) look at Matthew Good's Lights of Endangered Species.
The Foldable Human takes a look at Sid the Sicko's subplot from Sam and Fuzzy Volume 4: Noosehead. Check out Sam and Fuzzy at www.samandfuzzy.com
The Foldable Human takes a look at The Kids in the Hall's first, and only, feature length film: Brain Candy. What works and what doesn't? Musings on satire, absurdist humour, and recreational drugs follows.
Aired July 19, 2011 Dan Olson sits in for the Foldable Human who's recovering from watching Transformers 1 and 2 back to back. Features a cover of K'naan's Until the Lion Learns to Speak performed by Sara Woloschuck. http://www.globalgiving.org/ http://www.hotsunfoundation.org/ http://knaanmusic.ning.com/
The Foldable Human takes a look at Transformers past and present, but really it's about anthropomorphization, character design, and self-constructed narrative.
The Foldable Human talks about the late 90's, music videos, technology, isolation, and artist's intent. Clips from: Backstreet Boys - I Want it That Way Ben Folds Five - Brick Blink 182 - Adam's Song Britney Spears - Crazy Daft Punk - Around the World Edwin - Trippin' Headstones - Cubically Contained Holly McNarland - Numb Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity Jewel - Foolish Game Lisa Loeb - Do You Sleep Lisa Loeb - Stay Marcy Playground - Sex and Candy N*Sync - Bye Bye Bye Our Lady Peace - 4am Our Lady Peace - Clumsy Our Lady Peace - Is Anybody There Our Lady Peace - Right Behind You (Mafia) Our Lady Peace - Superman's Dead Sarah McLachlan - Building a Mystery Sheryl Crow - If It Makes You Happy The Verve Pipe - Freshmen The Watchmen - Any Day Now The Watchmen - Stereo Matthew Good Band - Everything is Automatic The Little Mermaid Jurassic Park The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Foldable Human takes a short look at a specific metaphor in The Man Who Fell to Earth, inspired by the musical review on Brows Held High.
Aired August 17, 2011 Dan steps in for The Foldable Human after an accident leaves FH bit indisposed. Take a look at the history of inspiration that goes into making a short film about planting bombs.
In the first of two parts The Foldable Human takes a look at the history and context of The Cremaster Cycle, Matthew Barney's seven hour ode to his balls.
Aired August 30, 2011 Editing delayed due to a wrist injury. Instead enjoy an old music video with zaaaaaaany dancing!
The Foldable Human lays into the meat of The Cremaster Cycle from his hiding place on the run from the law.
Aired September 14, 2011 Dan's list of 7 Love Songs (that aren't love songs.) Oh, and has anyone seen Foldy around?
Foldy watched the most amazing movie this week about a man named Link who saves humanity from robots!
Aired September 28, 2011 Rounding out Season 1, Foldy takes a look at the season and addresses some nagging bits left over.
Aired October 26, 2011 * Sursum Ursa * Sherlock * Fan Fiction
Shenanigans abound in this stoner horror scare film that's either about how uptight Catholics are, or how drugs will make you a psycho killer. Maybe both.
Rantasmo joins Dan for a lively discussion about queer culture and the future!
Aired November 16, 2011 Jack and Skyrim
Skyrim! Fus Ro Dah!
Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress!
Aired December 14, 2011 Christmas Bieber featuring the 90's, laziness, steampunk, and creepy sex vibes!
Foldy takes a run through the high amperage world of Crank 2 and video games.
Foldy takes a bunch of stabs at why The Legend of Chun Li is such a bad adaptation.
Foldy take a peek inside Gamer and how games should fit into films.
Foldy takes a shot at Uwe Boll's adaptation of Postal
Foldy logs in and plays the Source Code
Foldy goes ramblematic on the dark implications behind Source Code.
Foldy takes a look at man pathos - MANTHOS!
Sam Witwicky might just be the hero we deserve.
Objectification and stuff and things
Foldy concludes MMMM with a look at Homer Simpson and how he's changed.
Foldy weighs in on video games and art.
Foldy lays down why he loves this movie. Is the angle of approach not good? You decide.
Aired July 5, 2012 A summary of Folding Ideas Season 2
Foldy's back for Season 3! To start things off take a look at book to movie adaptations, what makes them work, and what sinks them.
Dan tosses out a minisode on Genre Mixing and John Dies at the End.
Foldy delves into the controversial apocalypse film The End of Evangelion.
Consideration 4.
Aired April 1, 2013 This is my April Fool's joke. It is both a joke and not a joke. Schrödinger's joke. That is important. It will be on the quiz.
Foldy works the kinks out by bitching and whining about The Last Airbender
The Foldable Human takes a look at the collateral damage that has become pervasive in superhero movies.
Dan follows up on the feedback to The People vs. Clark Kent
Spoiler-heavy look at several recent titles and their use of violence as narrative element.
Foldy's back to take a look at revisionist narratives, satire, and a shockingly racist music video.
Foldy goes back and takes a deeper look at the structural problems with Man of Steel.
Aired August 6, 2014 Dan Gives a brief overview of Folding Ideas
Aired August 21, 2014 Dan discusses the importance of critical tools beyond the scope of pop culture.
Foldy examines Depression Quest and the Implicit Substance of Player Agency.
What's your story?
A look at Base Assumptions as a critical tool as applied to the GamerGate movement.
Let's break a couple rules...
Like, Share, Subscribe. Say it with me. Like, Share, Subscribe.
Recs: Econoline Crush - The Devil You Know k-os - Yes! The Tea Party - Transmission Ohbijou - Beacons The Tragically Hip - Day For Night Dramarama - Cinema Verite
Dan talks about that Star Wars thing. As always: WE ASSUME YOU HAVE SEEN THE MOVIE!
React World has been scuttled
CUFFCADE is a part of the Calgary Underground Film Festival lineup. For more info on the games that are a part of CUFFCADE: https://www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/cuffcade
"On Context" was commissioned by LUMA Quarterly for the Spring 2016 issue.
Folding Ideas Goes to PAX West 2016 and Comes Home With an Existential Hangover A rundown of my thoughts on my time at PAX West 2016
This is an exploration of the themes and meanings of the game No Man's Sky through a lens of both personal experience and the synthesis of mechanics with meaning. I do not use the word 'ludonarrative' even though it would be the correct word to use.
YouTube Heroes, announced September 20th, immediately drew massive pushback, but is it really as awful as people think it is?
Clickbait headline: You Won't Believe How Many People This Hero Killed! Batman kills a lot of people in Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. A lot of people. Piles. The bodies do, indeed, hit the floor. Here we've compiled all the non-dream-within-a-hallucination casualties Batman racks up during Batman vs. Superman.
Clickbait title: Ubisoft Makes a Movie and You Won't BELIEVE What Happens Next I walked up to the counter and said "two for Ass Creed" and the cashier lost it. Is Ass Creed ass?
Suicide Squad's construction is bad in a way that's legitimately unsettling for a movie of this scope and budget. There's serious concerns about what Warner Brothers is up to with how the DC films are being handled in general that makes you wonder if they aren't going to implode entirely.
Clickbait title: The Hot New Comment Responses Everyone Is Talking About Suicide Squad season has come and gone, but the crisp winter air reminds us of its icy grip on our collective cultural urethra. Part of me wants to move on, hunker down for winter and embrace spring, but another part knows it's going to be cold forever and maybe I should just spend the rest of forever dissecting caped hero and video game movies.
Clickbait title: This One Weird Trick Is The Reason Movies Even Work There's something cathartic about drilling all the way down to the fundamentals. Not just the basic techniques, but the actual fundamentals, the bedrock of how something even functions in the first place, the reason why a series of edits can be used to tell a story rather than simply turning into abstract mush. It's also surprisingly challenging, like explaining what hands are.
Clickbait title: Nazis hate him! Secrets of propaganda exposed! This took far longer to put together than I'd anticipated. It wasn't even the work itself, it's the emotional load. I eventually had to start chopping out huge planned segments, like looking at modern propaganda like that awful "Surfing in the DPRK" white guy rap video. I'm sorry about the downer ending, but there's no way to spruce it up. To a certain degree we lost. You should seriously read, and then re-read, Umberto Eco's'Ur-Fascism'. It's available online for free. It's not that long. Here, I'll even link it for you. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
Clickbait title: This video will restore your faith in the entombed god Dormin Shadow of the Colossus is a rare masterpiece of a game. The occasional janky controls and wonky physics aside, every element of this game holds up incredibly well. More than that, it's about the overall package just coming together in a cohesive and synergistic way, the mechanics of the game complimenting and reenforcing the themes and story. Probably the biggest reason we haven't seen a repeat is because it's less about a boss rush where you climb all over big monsters and more about the total package, and getting it right. Though it is also about the boss rush. The technological side of SotC is still daunting, and I'm sure plenty of game developers out there re-play it and go "wait, how did they do that?" Last word: the beginning of the fight with Avion, when Wander transfers from the ground to Avion's wing, is one of the purest moments in video game history.
Clickbait title: This editor describes basic vocabulary and you won't believe what happens next! Filmmakers are actually really awful when it comes to vocabulary, re-using words randomly, basically describing anything with whatever word feels right at the time. A gobo is a cucalorus, also called a cookie, that has a focusing mechanism, but a gobo is also a kind of motor, and that motor might be attached to a gobo, or it might be attached to the fixture itself, and by the transitive properties of metonyms you end up with a gobo gobo with a gobo on its gobo. I've seen 'parallel cut' used at least three different ways in various textbooks and glossaries. This isn't me claiming that I've got the definitive take on all of these terms, just that, you know, if you heard a term used a different way to describe a different thing chances are you're right, you have and you did, because it's a mess and we're all faking it.
Clickbait title: hack writers hate him! One weird trick to improving your screenplays! My friend Lindsay recently did a video on this subject looking at Mad Max: Fury Road talking about this same subject (though she uses the term 'planting and payoff'; both are equally valid, though I'll admit that 'planting and payoff' has a wonderful alliterative quality to it versus 'setup and payoff') and I'll admit that I was a bit chapped, like I'd been beaten to the punch on a great idea. But that's the thing: not only was it a great idea it was also an obvious one. Anyone with a trained eye came away from Fury Road blown away by the almost perfect efficiency of the story in managing the establishment and use of every single prop, from the guns planted around the war rig to the steering wheel to the bolt cutters to the boot and the blood and the bullets. It's a really good video and you should go watch it, here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLLGN7zv-3k
Clickbait title: Get Paid 60k Per Year With This One Online Trick! Blip.tv also positioned itself as "just pals" but that idea of "we'll let the users guide our growth" was a paper mask hiding a lack of core vision. They would make a lot of promises and did a lot of posturing vis a vis supporting creators and helping them develop content, but in the end Blip's business model was "get bought by someone bigger." That kind of worked out for them as they were bought by Maker Studios who were, themselves, in the business of getting themselves bought by someone bigger. So Maker buys Blip so Disney will buy Maker, opens Maker.tv as a hypothetical curated database clone-and-re-skin of Blip, but closes the whole thing within 18 months without ever actually re-launching the Blip creators they went out of their way to retain in the merger. As it turned out they had no real interest in developing content when they could just skim ad revenue off the 50,000 channels that fell below payment thresholds, and withhold payment en masse in order to milk the interest on the payroll account.
Clickbait Title: Warning Don't Use Dialectic Analysis Before You See This While meta-discussion of YouTube is hardly lacking, I think there's a lot of room for more serious analysis of YouTube as a broad subject and all the myriad subcultures in specific. Every time I've attended VidCon I've been as surprised by the subcultures that are represented as I have by the ones that are absent. I think it would be utterly fascinating to see an ASMR panel at VidCon 2018, to hear a bunch of ASMR creators talk shop about the specific nuances of their genre, the common needs and wants of their audience, what makes a successful channel, and how the genre is evolving. The other day I saw a five hour long, multi-part ASMR choose your own adventure. you always think you have a handle on what's out there, until you realize you really don't.
Clickbait Title: You've Never Seen Barthes and Saussure Like THIS Before I thought to myself "hey, this one's going to be a snap, you can just shoot it once and be done, you'll crank this out so fast!" and then I went and cooked up a whole bunch of intricate gags and cuts and segments that required multiple setups and/or doing things in a style that I've never done before, one of which involved driving to a riverside park half way across the city b/c I really dig the bridge. Miraculously I only suffered a couple bug bites while I was wandering around down there, and all of them have, at this point, stopped itching. The absolutely manic delivery of that bit at the end isn't entirely intentional, it's just what felt right.
Clickbait Title: this happened to me ~~~~pseudo-intellectual nonsense~~~~ STORYTIME #SocialExperiment When I teased this video the initial reaction was a near-unanimous slow-motion "oh no," like a comedy action hero leaping on a grenade that's revealed to be a dud or a prop or it was actually just a bagel. I'm not saying this looks like a grenade, but is really just a bagel, but I am saying that I find the tepid anti-intellectualism that has become calcified in video game circles to be exhausting. It's reached a point where so many intelligent, engaged people are on the brink of giving up entirely because any attempt to improve the language we use to talk about games as they exist and operate is met with suspicion and mockery, painted as little more than bloviating wankery, and trotted around like Quasimodo as a target for rotten turnips. Ludonarrative dissonance has earned a reputation not through any irreparable flaws in the concept, but because pundits catering to an anti-intellectual base coined stupid names like "ludonarrative disco biscuits" because pretending big words are hard is a sure way to get a laugh from the worst kinds of people.
Clickbait title: Watch These Hot Games Intentionally Misbehave The cough hasn't gotten any better. If anything it's worse now. I had to stop and hack a good, rumbling cough for a solid few seconds every other line. I wouldn't be surprised if
Clickbait Title: Video Criticism YouTube Exploitation Meta Commentary Pregnant Algorithm Educational Spam Fidget Spinner Buried Alive For Kids Very late in the process of making this I decided to change the name, largely because the moment I made the original title "YouTube and the Business of Exploiting Children" public in a promotional Tweet I realized that there was an entire constellation of related issues that I wanted to talk about. From channels that exist to get kids hooked on gambling to parents subjecting their children to abusive conditions as "pranks", there's a lot of shady stuff going on. In that context, weird spam and unsettling videos about poop didn't rank high enough to warrant burning a title that good.
Clickbait title: 7 Reasons The Book of Henry FAILS The Book of Henry is pretty close to an ideal awful movie. There's dimensions to watching the film that I can't convey fully in a condensed video, like how stop-start the plots are, how Henry gets sick and the movie basically stops what it was doing for twenty minutes waiting for him to die, and how watching the film is to go through a rolling process of trying to figure out what the film is trying to actually tell you. People who are familiar with Jurassic World should catch the similar ways that Book of Henry demonizes a woman for not behaving exactly and precisely as the mother figure that the filmmakers think she should be. Susan gets off light, though, since she isn't executed by dinosaur for the crime of texting.
Clickbait Title: A Lukewarm Defence of Fifty Shades of Grey It's been a long time coming. This was originally supposed to be ready for the release of Fifty Shades Freed back in February, but that clearly didn't happen. I know I like to try and write little mini-essays down here in the description, but I'm hard pressed to think of something to put here that isn't already in this video. It's over an hour long.
Book Club isn't very good, but you probably already guessed that, so instead let's talk about why and how it exists in the first place. Erin Simms' bio makes it sound like she actually was on the Power Rangers, but she apparently left the show before filming anything.
Clickbait Title: Does This Video Have a Direct Line to Your Inner Goddess? Of Course It Does. I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure that I can identify the exact scene where Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson started drinking to get through the nudity and sex, and it’s the shower scene where they’re on the boat. The reason I pinpoint this one is because we have so many examples of Johnson doing an admirable job at acting while crying, but in that scene she’s suddenly delivering her lines like she just got home from the dentist.
Clickbait title: THE WORST VIDEO GAME EVER!? [gone wild] [prank][TWIST ENDING] Frozen Elsa Spider-Man This video would not have been possible without the generosity and help of Nathan, who was able to send me both a PAL PlayStation 2 and not one but two copies of An American Tail, and then didn't freak out when I decided to open the PS2 and swap the power supply with a North American PS2 so I wouldn't need to use a voltage converter. It worked just fine because all PS2 motherboards use +12 v DC power to minimize the cost difference between regions.
Clickbait Title: The Ending of Annihilation Actually Explained For Real There was a lot of anxiety in the final stretch of this one, I got really worried that the front half was too mean. I wondered what Mikey would think of me. I always admire his commitment to optimism, but I also envy it, because I am an envious person. So you'll have to forgive me for my weakness.
Clickbait Title: A Eurocopter EC135?! Well, here we are. I want to say I'm done with Fifty Shades forever, but given the legacy it's leaving behind, the upcoming slate of fanfiction-turned-novel-turned-movies, I'm sure we'll be back sometime. There's always more that I can say. I just can't stop talking about it. Also Charlie Tango, Eurocopter EC135, is played in the film by a Eurocopter EC130 because Seattle noise laws prohibit civilian use of a helicopter as large as the EC135 within city limits. I do not know how this impacts Charlie Tango's safety rating.
Clickbait title: This Christmas Video Gonna Get You Hornt Oh my, what a year it has been! The upside to awful is that it pulls personal successes into stark contrast. I'm trying really hard to focus on those and not on everything else. I do think that, despite everything, I wrote some of my best work this year, and I got to perform at SGDQ which was a total blast, and I helped make one of the best Youtube documentaries on the site with Lindsay Ellis' Hobbit videos. 2018 has been two years long, but it hasn't all been awful.
This is my first attempt at doing a second edition of an old video. I like the original (link below) but there's a bunch of jokes in there that didn't really land, the audio was awful, and a couple assertions that just didn't hold up. I'm leaving the original up and marking it as "first edition" but it's pretty much just staying there for posterity. This is the better version in every way. It's the second edition.
Clickbait title: 10 WILDEST Geek Girls OMG!!! I found myself stonewalled on a number of other projects, to the point that I needed to make something just to get something done. More specifically I needed to finish something. Starting projects is easy, finishing them is hard. This isn't a thorough historiography of Vsauce, it's a story. It's not about the business of running the channel, the ways that it has fractured into sub-channels with multiple hosts and how the stand alone DONG channel functions as its own version of what Vsauce was, it's about the narrative created by the channel itself. Part of why I didn't go into all that is because the self-contained story is applicable to so many channels. It's a very prototypical story unique to the structure of YouTube itself.
Clickbait title: 5 Broken Things About Wonder Park If anything my experience with Wonder Park was a double stack of disappointment. It's not good, but it's also not the spectacular train wreck I was hoping it would be.
Clickbait Title: Dab your hearts out and jump on the battle bus, I'm dropping in to Retail Row and I've got an orange pump pointed right at your default. If you want to know one thing about making a machinima in Fortnite it's that it's super, super rad when you spend several hours late at night setting up footage in your virtual digital studio with the intent that you'll record the properly-composed shots in replay mode in the morning, only to wake up to a minor patch that breaks all your replays. It's extra rad when this happens three days in a row.
Clickbait Title: Everyone Who Dies In Avengers Endgame And, yes, I realize that even by suggesting that someone does, in fact, die in Endgame could be construed as a spoiler because addressing the idea of a subject, even devoid of details, is already an indicator that the subject is relevant to the film. I feel like with Endgame we have truly reached the apotheosis of spoiler-aversion. It has been so thoroughly hijacked by marketing forces that even reasonable discussion is viewed as hostility, that wanting to talk about movies is characterized as a betrayal of the movie itself.
Clickbait Title: A Short Review and Discussion of Detective Pikachu and The Broader Subject of Video Game Movies
Clickbait title: OOPS! Did I Do A Colonialism In Minecraft?! This video has been "done" for a while now, but I had a lot of trouble finishing it owing to a lingering sickness in my lungs that has made it difficult to record vocals that don't sound froggy and gross. Aside from that bit of TMI I do want to stress that I really love Minecraft, I love creative games, I love construction games, I love logistics games. All of the game footage in this video is mine. I have it because I own all these games and have played them all for somewhere between dozens and hundreds of hours each.
Clickbait Title: WoW Classic – Everything Sucks, Therefore You Are Free I'm really excited to see where Classic goes down the road. The predictable outcome is that Classic rolls into Burning Crusade and Wrath with essentially the chaos of legacy servers that we see in EverQuest and many of the other surviving MMOs, but there's the tantalizing, though slim, possibility of an alternate development path, where Classic becomes a second attempt at history, basically WoW 2, but starting from where things were 13 years ago. I wouldn't even entirely mind if some of the hazier, less balanced sensibilities of Classic cropped back up in the future, if the pace of the game slowed a bit without necessarily just making things bad and inconvenient to get there.
Clickbait Title: Two Will Smiths? You Won't Believe What Happens Next! I had to go home and take a nap in between viewings because the 3D HF DBOX UltraAVX Experience™ was just that draining.
While voluntary content flagging is useful and a good measure, and some measure of automated detection is likely necessary, YouTube’s response has been deliberately broad, utilizing their status as a monopoly in online video to force creators to bear the burdens of compliance without providing them with the tools and data to do so in a meaningful, educated manner.
Clickbait Title: Check Out This Hot Bird On Bird Action I have spent an unusual amount of time agonizing over the title and thumbnail for this video. I'm not sure I can vocalize exactly why they've been so difficult, but they have. I know I usually write a lot more here, but I'm very hungry and want to catch Pokemon and get a pizza.
Clickbait Title: Odds Are You'll Probably Never See The Snyder Cut of Justice League I do talk about the recent rumours with HBO Max, but it's not until the end of the video, so it's basically a guarantee that the comments are going to be full of commenters telling me I didn't talk about things that I definitely did talk about. I know mocking knee-jerk comments in the description is pretty hack, but knee-jerk comments are also pretty hack, so a hack for a hack I guess.
Clickbait Title: 10 Reasons To Go See CATS Before It Vanishes Forever CATS is poised to be one of the biggest box office bombs in terms of both % gross and absolute dollars lost. I'm not sure if it'll take the throne, but it's definitely up there, having made a scant $6.2m against its $95m budget. It averaged less than 200 tickets per cinema over its entire weekend. At this point anyone and everyone who wants to see it purely to gawk could do so five times each and it would still be an utter financial disaster.
Clickbait Title: Only 1% Can Last All Forty Minutes! The Snowman has been a bugbear on my back for years now. I first tried to make this video January 2018, but skidded out when I got distracted by Fifty Shades Freed, which inspired me to expand my already-in-the-works Fifty Shades video into a full three-part series that took most of the rest of the year to make. Then I tried again in January 2019, but things were moving along poorly, the script just wouldn't crack, and eventually I ran out of winter when I decided to Pivot to Fortnite, a video which took a huge number of hours to make. So it feels good to finally have this off my plate, even if it doesn't feel like a video that should have taken two years to come out. To add to all that, because The Snowman is cursed, it took ten hours of revisions, fifteen different versions, to get this video past Universal, who would flag it instantly with a total global block.
Clickbait Title: Spreading Misinformation During A Crisis Makes You A Bad Person The one thing that I'm expecting someone in the comments is going to latch onto is the exact timeline of the abolition of serfdom in Europe because it was very much not a uniform thing and the process took a couple hundred years to encompass the entire continent. It's a super big and complex subject because it encompasses both the fallout of the Black Death and various technological developments. But some of those developments were, themselves, responses to the plague, built to solve problems it created. Ultimately I chose a super simplified, ultra-compressed version of history because the story of history is ultimately the story of the present. We can come out of this crisis better than we went in.
Clickbait Title: World's Largest Activated Charcoal Superfood Epic Burger Made With Acai Cake In this video I mention Gourmet Makes a bunch and I actually felt really insecure about that just because for a long time during the edit it was feeling like I only had one example. But the reason it was on my mind so much is that the recent video with the gourmet Tater Tots was just so perfect with the intro where a parade of chefs, cooks, and foodies, the kind of folks who regularly cook hundred-dollar cuts of meat with obscure Italian names, stop by to talk about just how much they love frozen potato nuggets.
Clickbait Title: The Twist at 37 Minutes Will Make You Believe We Live In Hell This has taken a long time to make, and it was a very winding road, but I'm glad I did it. Hiking out to the north shore of Minnewanka, a 19km round trip, is one of the worst decisions I've ever made but I'm glad I did it. I'm not sure what else to say. I'm so tired. So very, very, very tired.
A companion video for "In Search of a Flat Earth" containing the details of the Minnewanka curve experiment in greater detail. Appropriate for a classroom environment.
Clickbait Title: Is There Proof We Really Are The Center of the Universe?! Shortly before the election my cat escaped the house and got her belly covered in sticky mud which then picked up all sorts of junk. During the extremely needed bath, which she hates, I lost control of her head and she managed to latch onto my arm and break the skin with two teeth. It looked kinda rough, so I figured I should get a tetanus shot in the morning. By the time the clinic opened I was in some of the worst pain of my life, the swollen bite looked like a tennis ball was embedded inside my arm, and the selling was pressing constantly against my ulnar nerve. The pressure was so intense that I could feel gravity pulling on my skin and fingers. Anyway, that's a big part of why this is late.
Clickbait Title: Die Hard Isn't A Christmas Movie The Trial of Christmas Movies: • A Grading System for Measuring Christ... Go watch Mikey's companion video for the other half of the Dan and Mikey Christmas Special. His is way better and he put so much work into it. We had a proper blizzard a couple days ago, so I just had to dig my car out from under over six inches of snow. And that's not like "oh, we got six inches" but it's kinda spread all around, this was six inches at the shallowest. It actually snapped my car's radio antenna. Anyway my arms feel like noodles from all the digging so I'm just going to wish you all happy New Year.
Clickbait Title: I remember it so you don't have to. As a full disclosure, I was briefly a contributor to Channel Awesome for about six months in 2014/15. Channel Awesome CEO Mike Michaud severed the relationship after he received angry emails about an exposé of 8chan I had published on Medium and I refused to take it down or commit to not doing "anything else like that." Several of the songs are a roundabout veiled reference to #ChangeTheChannel, a hashtag that gained some traction in the spring of 2018 as contributors and former contributors to Channel Awesome spilled all the beans about CA's incompetence and mismanagement. What started as a bunch of people sharing stories about how the scheduling page never worked right escalated to Channel Awesome leadership releasing a counterattack letter in which they inadvertently admitted to covering for a sex predator.
While the video talks mostly about The Lord of the Rings (1978) there is a discussion of Bakshi's earlier R-rated and NC-17 films, which deal with heavy subject matter like racism, police violence, transphobia, drug abuse, and various adult scenarios. This was intended to be a quick little video that I could churn out in a couple weeks at the end of June, but it's now taken almost the whole summer. I haven't done animation like this in years, and never with this kind of a coherent goal, so approximately 48 seconds of this video consumed 80% of the entire post production time.
Clickbait Title: Chefs Hate Him! Big thanks to Hot Dad for letting me use his absolute banger, you can put the whole song in your ear holes here: • Hot Dad - Suckin' on My Tendies I wanted to make this because I see this clip make the rounds again and again and every time I'm like "of all the arguments you could make, that's the worst one." So I decided to make a whole video around "of all the arguments you could make, that's the worst one." Jamie Oliver in particular seems to have that effect on people, he gets into this kinda crap all the time, and I think it has a lot to do with the sheer audacity of his lies or near-lies that make even people otherwise sympathetic to his goals wish that he'd just go away. The willingness to just brazenly misrepresent how and why things are the way they are demonstrates a fundamental disrespect for the intelligence of the viewer.
If someone pitches you on a "great" Web3 project, ask them if it requires buying or selling crypto to do what they say it does.
Clickbait Title: I'm here to teach you about an unmissable business opportunity!
You enter a bright new digital world, exited to explore and hyped just to enjoy the vibe. Ten months later you're yelling at someone for standing in fire. What changed?
Clickbait Title: I spent three months living in the metaverse and now I'm starving The metaverse salespeople have a weird fixation with Animal Crossing, in specific. The number of times we saw New Horizons specifically cited as an example of the metaverse was bizarre, like it was their first time experiencing a multiplayer game that wasn't CoD and it melted their brains.
Clickbait Title: if the price is zero then you can buy all the shares I tell you what, when you try and tell this story you either sum it up in ten minutes with the broadest strokes or you settle in for a rabbit hole made entirely out of onions and ogres. Conspiracy theorists flock together and constantly try and rope each other into the orbit of their personal hobby horse conspiracy, so once you break the surface suddenly you're digging through endless side stories, each with their own cast of characters, trying to figure out if some tertiary claim is true, was maybe true in the past but is no longer true, or was never true, and discover that the only sources on the matter are the same three people quoting each other in an endless circle of false legitimacy.
Clickbait Title: grown man gets owned by a line of people Blizzcon 2023 was an interesting experience. I personally had a lot of fun, but maybe not for the reasons or in the ways that the organizers intended.
Clickbait Title: Can this magical metal make you immortal? Godkings hate this one weird trick! This was a lot of fun to work on because I got to spend a lot of time learning THE TRUTH ABOUT GOLD and by that I mean actually interesting facts about how humans use gold. The mythology of gold actually makes a lot of sense through the lens of its physical properties, the fact that ancient humans could make things out of it and those things would outlive generations. It's just rare enough that societal elites can monopolize it, but common enough you can gather enough to actually make stuff with it. So these things, namely jewellery for the leaders, are so resistant to the elements that you can see how the gold itself became representative of the power of the kings, of their claimed immortality. Written and performed by Dan Olson
PHOTO-SENSITIVITY WARNING: occasional subtle flickering between 19:00 and 24:36 If ever there were a video I've made that required a companion essay or some kind of artist statement to go along with it I suppose it would be this one. It's a strange project that I've been working on for the better part of six months now, a process of trying to disentangle myself from myself. It's about a lot of different things, it's about James Rolfe but also not about him because we have so many versions of him and we can only react to those imperfect projections. He's been doing this for basically 20 years at this point, and out of that arise a million different ways to tell the story: AVGN is deeply influential, but what does that influence mean? I found myself fascinated with his creative fixations, the motifs and stories that he keeps coming back to, and felt like the only way to engage with that honestly was to expose all my own fixations, insecurities, and fears.
Dan and Kara begin the adventure of making an experimental short!
Production Vlog for Storyhive winner "A Red Pill"
