Okay, so, back in April I snapped at James in reply to a tweet that was linking to this video (which James has since delisted but not deleted) and I want to talk about the full context of that but I don't want to make a video, put your beatdown memes away.
The first bit of context is that I initially got keyed into James to fact-check his claims about indie filmmaking in Canada. As a filmmaker the entire Telos venture was immediately obvious as a juvenile fantasy dreamed up by someone with no idea how to make a movie.
Just wild claims about their plans that weren't worth debunking because they bordered Not Even Wrong. But in watching one of these pitch videos I noticed that he had a $4000 current-gen camera in the background as a prop, and that seemed both pretentious and weird.
You don't use your best camera as a prop, you use your second best camera as a prop. So being an obsessive weirdo I needed to know, and I watched his BTS stuff until I spotted his main rig, a $6000 camera with about $1000 in accessories.
Now, these in isolation are unremarkable because his Patreon at the time was bringing in ~$8000 per month, his channel was a full on Business business, and so investing in some professional equipment of that level is maybe a bit indulgent but justifiable.
What was weird is that he doesn't shoot multi-cam, doesn't shoot outdoors, doesn't shoot on location, and in a studio the two cameras kinda really step on each others' toes. Basically if you already have one and don't need a B cam there's no reason to get the other.
Again, on its own, this says nothing, it's just indicative of poor financial decisions, maybe impulsive purchasing, Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
Biblical sins, but not crimes.
Paired with the constantly inflating fantasy scope of the Telos films it was clearly an expression of a very, very common bad filmmaker habit of "if I just get the right gear then my movie will basically make itself"
Buying stuff because it feels like progress.
At the end of February he tweets "I want to start shooting anamorphic" and then three weeks later in March he posts the worst, out of focus, under-exposed "I just got a new lens!" video I've ever seen, showing off his trash-covered bedroom.
Based on what's available for his cameras and the lead time, that's enough time to get a Laowa Nanomorph or Sirui Saturn from B&H but not enough time to get a Great Joy from the UK or a Vazen from China. And with the flaring blah blah blah, $1300 lens.
Again, GAS is not a crime and these lenses are budget options. Bit of a pointless impulse purchase since he only used it for the Showgirls video.
But this is what he was doing just a few weeks before that above video came out: effortlessly impulse purchasing lenses.
James has (had?) a habit of regularly, aggressively driving viewers to Patreon by claiming that videos were getting demonetized. While tacky, it is something a lot of queer YouTubers have dealt with, so there's precedent there. But people were noticing he did it a lot.
Mid-March he humble brags about needing to work so hard to make 6 videos in April because he has over-booked sponsorships.
Then March 29th James posts this whole incel screed on Twitter about how sex work should be "subsidized as a mental health service."
He spends several days getting absolutely *roasted* for this, just dragged across the pavement and read for filth, and doubles down in the replies the whole way.
So this is the context immediately surrounding James waking up on Friday, and posts the above video and the below tweet.
Now, this unfolds in kinda two directions. The first is that I'm convinced he was just lying about this income shock in the first place.
There's a million theoretical edge cases about what maybe happened and if maybe he just misunderstood the data or saw a glitch and panicked, maybe one of those happened, I don't believe it, I think he just lied because he was salty about getting dragged and felt owed a win.
A big tell to me is that he doesn't blame Patreon. He says he doesn't know what happened, but let's be real, Patreon screws up all the time, they're the first people anyone blames if anything confusing happens, just as a reflex action, even if it's completely not their fault.
The only reason to not blame Patreon is if you already know that it's not their fault and that any investigation on their part might reveal embarrassing details.
Instead he indirectly blames his viewers for not watching enough, not sharing enough, and not turning on auto-renew.
So regardless of the unknowable truth, this segues into the second, far more offensive direction of the messaging itself.
"I don't know if we'll be making videos much longer."
"Maybe the end"
He explicitly framed this as an immediate existential threat to his channel.
In the video he is vague about everything, leaves a ton of hazy room for plausible deniability on how long the channel can keep going, but the messaging is "I need more patrons right this minute or my YouTube channel is over."
He repeatedly evokes all the "fun stuff" they had planned that would never see the light of day if this didn't turn around right away.
And his audience received this message loud and clear. Tons of people making far, far, *far* less than him left very heartfelt messages about digging a little deeper to subscribe or up their pledge or unsubscribe from other channels to move their pledge to his.
1200 new patrons in one day.
Since I simply don't believe the income shock was real in the first place that would put his post-"Maybe the end" Patreon income at around $10,000 per month. US. Add YouTube income, he's spent the last seven months making around $18,000 per month.
I have seen creators scale back their capabilities to the bone purely to keep making videos for the love of just, like, *making stuff* even as their funding evaporated and they needed to go back to a desk job to cover their bills.
You'd have to be so outstandingly reckless with your finances as a channel that a one month spook leads immediately to "channel over, sorry about all the fun stuff we won't get to do with you, our patrons, specifically because you, our patrons, aren't giving us enough money"
And not a spook where you then spend a couple weeks crunching numbers. Oh no. A shock so violent where less than two hours later you're weeping on camera about the channel being over.
Three weeks later he brought a brand new Sony FX6v for $8000 CAD to add to his pile of cinema cameras despite the fact that he was, but scant moments earlier, in such a precarious position that a single bad month would kill his channel.
He stole your money, and for that I'm profoundly sad and angry. That's why I snapped at him in April. I'm sorry I couldn't give you the full context then, and I'm sorry if that anger upset you.
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When Western Electric and Warner Brothers needed to agree on a standard speed for the Vitaphone sound system they picked 90 feet-per-minute, a nice round number that was already commonly used in the 1920s
This also translates to a 2.5:1 relationship with 60Hz electrical systems.
They considered a 2:1 relationship (30fps) but the 112.5 feet-per-minute speed put too much strain on the nitrocellulose film, resulting in a lot more breaks during recording and projection.
The reasons for it being "too slow" are actually pretty complicated.
For optical sound-on-film (which was in its roughest proof-of-concept phase at the time) 60 feet/m was way too low of a sample rate for pleasant audio.
I'm not doing an AI video because I promised myself no more moving targets, but this would be the thrust of a big chunk of it: there's a real good chance generative AI is just too damn expensive for a product that's rapidly displaying its fragility.
Also, like, for ChatGPT, every day on Reddit I see the dumbest people you know spam it with inane nonsense until it gives them the answer they want, and that behaviour just isn't sustainable at scale given the compute cost of every query.
I experimented with various generative art tools during the winter to get a sense of the user experience & what this stuff actually does and almost instantly I found myself coming up with a prompt and just recycling it 20, 30, 40, 50 times until it gave me something... tolerable?
Okay, so, GameStop earnings report came out yesterday. Apes in my mentions have been super dickish for the last three months insisting that the company "is now profitable" but, shocking only them, GS lost money this quarter.
The current cope is that GS lost less this quarter YOY, but they've also shrunk the company pretty dramatically in the last year. Loss relative to revenue is slightly improved but still bad. GameStop remains massively over-valued relative to performance.
Those are the boring numbers rooted in reality, though. What we care about are the insane theories.
Bolger and Ball both pitch Metaverse visions where you can hide a pair of digital sneakers in a spot and they'll still be there years later, but neither addresses the implication that this inevitably creates digital littering.
Also conspicuously absent in all the metaverse reading: no one talks about malicious design.
Multiplayer FPSs used to have user-generated skin systems, you could build and share custom character models and depending on server settings your skin could be automatically pushed to other server participants. Exactly the kind of self-expression the metaverse promises.
The thing that makes the meme stock saga keenly fascinating isn't that it's people piling in on a bad stock based on questionable hype, that happens all the time, it's how it's persisted and grown based on complete mythology.
The Ape theory of market mechanics is that these companies, GameStop, Bed Bath Beyond, AMC, are otherwise normal, healthy companies that are being targeted for destruction by predatory hedge funds who use criminal naked short sales to drive the company out of business.
And yet in Bed Bath's 93 page bankruptcy petition, which includes 25 pages of "here's what went wrong," short sales, hedge funds, predatory securities trading, none of that gets even glanced at. Not even mentioned, let alone cited as a material influence on the company's decline.
Honestly reading the Ape response to reality makes me want to scream. A common refrain is "nothing adds up" with the implication that there's some twist in store, when, really, it only fails to add up in their math because they reject any negative possibilities.
"Oh, they filed for bankruptcy? Well, did you consider that the fact they did it at a weird time of day on the weekend means it's actually fake bankruptcy? You're allowed to do that, right? Declare bankruptcy then yell 'sike!'?"