InnuendoStudios
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August Update: Unanticipated
🕑 Added 2020-09-03 18:15:11 +0000 UTCHey team! Welcome to September.
Ambivalence
The new video went up on Monday and is doing well. Surprisingly so, actually; it got more views in two days than the Kentucky Route Zero video got in two months. Due to the subject matter, YouTube has gone and age-restricted it, which I'm pretty sure kills whatever algorithmic momentum it had, but it's still going strong. And the response is very positive! The Far Right dinguses have (so far) left it alone, so, for the first time in ages, a video that's been online for several days still has a kind and wholesome comment section! I'm still kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop and for a batch of bearded white men to make response videos with seven ad breaks, but, for now, everyone is being incredibly nice to me.
So of course I feel weird about it.
While the video is pointedly oblique about my life, and even states plainly that I don't want people to invest in me as a person, this is still my most personal video by far. One reason the video is as funny as it is is because taking even this tiny baby step into confessional YouTubery was nerve-wracking, and I had to find ways of entertaining myself just to get through the edit. So to release something I'm so nervous about and have it do significantly better numbers and have an overwhelmingly kind and wholesome response?
It's intoxicating.
It feels good. And the more I think about how good it feels, the more uneasy that makes me. Like, these kind and wholesome comments are talking a lot more about me than about the actual subject(s) of the video.
To me, this is a video about how the Right reacts to polyamory, how their choice of insults reveal their fears and obsessions, how deeply-embedded hierarchical thinking is both in their minds and in society, the racial underpinnings of popular conservative terms, and the irreconcilable tension between romanticizing both the Stone Age and the Enlightenment. My experience of people calling me a cuck for money was the thing that tied it all together, made it entertaining, and purged some thoughts I'd had buzzing around my brain for a while. But, while I think that all comes through, most people seem to be reading those themes as supplemental to a kind of... coming out video.
Which is (to me) strange. Again, while it's not something I've talked about on my channel because my work is deliberately non-autobiographical, I've never been "closeted" in my polyamory. Honestly, polyamory is such a normal, no-big-deal part of my life that the language of "coming out" feels comically hyperbolic, though I know it can be way more fraught for other folks. But I've got all these people thanking me for the positive poly representation and feeling seen and validated, and, while I'm happy for them, it's not what I was going for and not what I expected.
In short: this response is waaaaaaaay more parasocial than anything I've ever made. I put a tiny bit more of myself into a video and people are eating it up. The number of people saying "I know this is entirely parasocial but I totally wanna get a beer with you now" is nonzero, and not just hypothetically! People are legit inviting me to get beers with them when the pandemic ends. And I'm like, if you know it's parasocial... why are you still inviting me for beers? We're not actually friends! You don't even know if I drink beer!
I always conceptually understood what Contrapoints was talking about when she said she let her subs and followers replace her in-person community, but I get it on an emotional level now. This many people caring about you is overwhelming, and it feels, at times, fantastic. I feel loved. But... I'm not. People love an idea of me; they don't love a real person. And I'm the guy who made This Is Phil Fish, and watched multiple friends get cast out by their communities because what would normally read as a disappointing decision by a content creator now feels, to their fans, like a betrayal from a trusted friend. And that makes me want to run for the hills.
I guess this is a longwinded way of saying: I'm proud of the video, I'm glad people like it, if you've sent me a kind message or comment I appreciate it...
...and, for my own sake, I probably won't make something like this again.
The Work/Life Teeter-Totter
Anyway!
I've been fiddling with my work-life balance this past month. For the first couple months of the pandemic, I couldn't accomplish anything. Then I managed to get back to work once I shifted on what kind of work I'd be doing. I found that this was doable basically because I wasn't doing anything else; I only had so much bandwidth and, if I devoted all of it to work, I could make videos. This eventually meant a lot of other tasks and responsibilities falling by the wayside; for years I've been keeping track of my tasks in a dayplanner, but I found I'd completely stopped looking at it. And, after the 20th-or-so non-YouTube task that I completely flaked on, I decided it was time to try something else.
So I finally started using a calendar app on my phone, because I'm certainly not gonna go days without looking at that thing. It goes ding before important events happen and has a convenient task list where I can check things off as I complete them. And it's working great! I've been able to keep track of all the other bullshit I need to keep track of.
But then there's a new problem: I'm still on limited bandwidth. The reason I was able to work was precisely because I was ignoring everything else. Once I started being a responsible adult, there was suddenly a lot less time to work. And it sucks! Because, before this fucking pandemic, where there's a piece of news about the ways my country has utterly fucked itself every 12 hours, I could do both! Not always perfectly, usually a little late or a little slapdash, but I at least kind of kept on top of my pile. And now... there just isn't enough of me to go around. I'm sure many of you are dealing with similar problems; the world is exhausting and trying to manage burnout is, itself, a second job.
So I wanna try something starting this month. At the beginning of August, I did something unprecedented: I took a week off. After I finished my contribution to Ragnar's video (which should go public in a few days), I did no work for 7 days. I spent time with loved ones and ate good food and played games and read a book in a hammock and called friends I can't visit... and it was great. I needed that.
So I'm making it part of my schedule.
It's a long while since "put out a video every Monday" was the plan (and it never was that successful), so we're going to make the target two videos per month. And the schedule is gonna be: 12 days for the first video, 12 for the second, and then 7 days off. Bumping video turnaround time up from a week to a week and a half gives me more room to keep on top of other tasks, and having a mini-vacation at the end of every month will help me decompress and stave off burnout. Who knows, maybe it'll free up time to work on those passion projects I keep fantasizing about, though let's not be too optimistic.
I hope this doesn't come off as rude; I know a lot of you are similarly stressed and don't have the luxury of radically altering your schedules on the fly. But, well... if you could, I hope you would, too. You deserve it. And I hope you're finding something that works for you. All we can do is our best under shitty conditions.
That's in for me this month, folks. Schools are reopening this month, which is a terrible idea but it's hard to predict how terrible. I hope you and yours are safe. Take care of yourselves and each other.
-I
Comments
AaronRobertoMusic
Hey, just wondering if you'd heard Noah Lugeons' diatribe in episode 397 of The Scathing Atheist and had any thoughts with regards to the Alt Right Playbook?
Crissa Kentavr
People invite people they don't know for drinks. Parasocial or not, it's a thing they do. I find it terribly awkward, but how about a movie and a cupcake or a hike in the redwoods? They didn't all burn down.
salmonandsoup
It's hard sometimes not to slip into parasocial wishful thinking; I'd love to have a friend like you, because you're articulate and funny and passionate and relatively popular (and I was a heavily bullied kid, so having a "popular friend" regrettably means something to the little "middle-school me" inside my brain). Being as socially isolated as I am and as many others are (the pandemic not helping), I think we're all starving for human connection. I can't speak for others, but the urges I feel are just... I dunno, I just wanna KNOW about you. It's curiosity about someone I admire. I know I'm not entitled to the information, nor would I ever want to make you feel that way, but you're really cool—to be a filthy weeb about it, you're a "senpai" in a way. I hope that you can make peace with the response, and I'm glad that it felt good, but that you're taking necessary steps to not let this go to someplace nasty. That's the rational response.
Bevibel Harvey
We've been a patron on here for I don't remember how many years anymore, and in recent years we have REALLY come to appreciate how you navigate this issue, especially in relation to a lot of your colleagues. Unlike a lot of other (wonderful) leftist youtubers we follow (who we've learned a lot from), there's never been a moment where we have to stop and ask ourselves "Wait, is this parasocial? Do we think we know this person when we don't?" It's always been really clear to us that we appreciate and learn a lot from your *work*, but we don't really know you and probably never will. So we just wanted to say thanks for being a rare youtuber who does a great job of avoiding the trappings of celebrity, and keep it up!
JinxedJoker
I can certainly understand folks appreciating you for talking about poly in a visible way that many cannot do (either competently or publicly) and the appreciation that folks may have for you doing that (both personally for your contribution and just for the fact this content exists and makes people feel seen and able to show those feelings to others through your video), I can even understand how folks would be grateful enough to wish you well or even want to buy you drinks (or other tokens of appreciation); but the whole people supplanting friendship and actual relationships with fandom of content creators has always seemed SUPER unhealthy and SUPER creepy, so I'm not surprised in the least that you've avoided that like the plague nor that after dipping a toe in as consequence to this video are squicked right the hell out. I hope in the end you still get more good feels out of it than bad, because this was a great video and deserves a lot of the good feedback it's getting (just not the creepy part) and you deserve to enjoy that and not have it soured. I hope that despite not doing any more content that is similarly open or personal that you may still explore spaces like this more in-depth, because zooming in from the often more macro alt-right playbook to specific topics and tropes within this similar worldview and how they play out outside our politics was both interesting in its own right, clearly meaningful to many, and feels like the other side to the coin of that other content. Either way, rest well and keep up the great work! (at a pace that is reasonable and kind to yourself, of course :-P)
Taking care of yourself should be your first priority, avoiding burnout being very high on that list!
Ian Danskin
me: talking about X makes me uncomfortable you: talking about X is always a relief!
The Packbats
Yeah, there's definitely a level of parasocial attachment that I've felt about you as a video essayist lately, and given that you've been pretty explicit about wanting to *avoid* creating parasocial attachments in your audience ... well, I have to challenge that tendency in myself. Because I like the way you tell stories and present ideas and make the world make more sense, but I don't know you and you don't want me to feel like I do. That said, however personal the framing of it all was, the stories and ideas in the video definitely made the world make more sense and I'm glad you put it out there.
Kdansky
Everybody needs to take vacation. I'm not going to stop supporting someone on Patreon because they take a couple weeks off every year. Your videos are some of the best on the whole platform of youtube, with or without the personal touch, and chipping in a trivial amount of money so you can keep making them (and that includes taking breaks) is the least I can do. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this way.
I feel instinctive solidarity towards anyone living a non-monogamous life because I understand how exhausting it can get -- not the relationships themselves, but the mystification, suspicion, and frankly bad faith slander around non-monogamy. So sympathy and solidarity to you too, person who's definitely not my friend. I don't want to get coffee with you, but I wish you, and all the rest of us, less unwarranted stress because of how we choose to love.
SpectralTime
...Now *I* feel weird, because I found you talking about your non-traditional love life to be extremely uncomfortable and was glad every time you reminded me that it was none of my business, and much preferred the intellectual themes dissecting the Far Right obsession with the black penis. If anything, I'd've preferred *less* about you personally (though I accept that if not for your personal experiences it never would've been made), and a bit more historical dimension to some of this shit, like the obsession in the *Arabian Nights* with wives cheating on their husbands with black men, or Napoleon's major contribution to the law code that bears his name being misogyny because of his paranoia following his wife's infidelity. But, at the same time... if being a bit more personal brought you a sense of happiness, however weird, I don't want to scold and shame you for it? I don't know. I am glad you're going out of your way to try to take care of yourself though.
JamesBergCanada
*thumbs up* You do you Ian, that's what we're here for. Take care of yourself first :)
Eli Bosnick gets to change his patron name because patreon gave up on his blog too
really glad to hear your taking care of yourself and time FOR yourself. You deserve it!
J. Francis
For what it's worth, I never realized until the Cuck video how little you say about your personal life here and in your videos—and once you pointed it out, I realized how completely refreshing that is! I am a fan of many other content creators whom I don't know personally at all and yet I know such personal things about them, and I guess there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but I really dig the way you keep yourself out of the spotlight when you make videos. Maybe that's why the small amount of info divulged in the Cuck video got such a big reaction? I dunno, but I dig the way you've approached this and I look forward to not knowing you in the future! 👍🏼
matt
I gotta say two things: one, even after *you* consider yourself 'out of the closet,' you will still be continuously coming out to other people for the rest of your life. It just comes with the territory of having any kind of nonconforming gender or sexual identity, and poly absolutely counts for that. two, it costs energy to strategically downplay a part of your life in order to keep yourself safe from other people - and it's always a relief to give that up, to be honest about who you are and what your life is like - and it always feels good to have people shrug and say "okay, no big deal." Relish the feeling! A lot of who you and how you live your life informs how you create your content - and as a fan, it's real nice to have a bit of a peek behind the scenes, where your own personal experiences with this absolutely ridiculous 'insult' the right has latched onto is germane to the greater discussion your video is taking part in. Thanks for letting us in, and it's cool if you're not in a hurry to retread this territory in the future. 😉
Kasra
Reading about your experience with the parasocial aspects of that video is fascinating. I've been baffled by some other creators increasingly indulging in the "confessional"/parasocial aspect of their videos, and it didn't quite make sense to me. I could see how parasocial relationships could be rewarding to the viewer (they get a "friend", etc.), but I imagined that for the creator that feeling would just be creepy and off-putting (strangers acting far too familiarly with them). But this makes a lot more sense. With the (arguable) benefits it has for both sides, I wonder if a community or creator could cultivate a kind of parasocial relationship that's beneficial without the creepy caveats. Anyhoo, apologies for the long post, and I hope the new schedule works well for you!
Chris Tierney
I'm continually surprised by how strong the parasocial energy is, even when I'm aware it's a thing. Like, I occasionally see you comment in a FB group we're both part of, and every time my brain goes, "hey it's Ian! We know Ian, say hi!!" and I have to be like, "no, brain! We don't!" Polyamory and how people react to it definitely brings to the forefront a lot of fears, obsessions, and assumptions. I really enjoyed your take on it.
Nikki
This is a great analysis of your video's behaviour and the effect that had on you - which I am now, parasocially, less surprised by, knowing you've been polyamorous for a long time, because being a consensual and respectful (and successful) poly person for a while requires a lot of self-analysis and meta-thinking. (I obviously don't know if you're any of those things. That's the parasocial aspect; I see your content and behaviour on social media and think, well, the guy has views I appreciate and presents them in a smart way, of course he must be a great partner.) But, relevant addition: I think there's no reason you aren't "allowed" to feel good about yourself and this new kind of appreciation by people. We all get way too little of it, especially now (and I suspect that the social isolation of the pandemic might amplify people's "thirst" for a personal connection, making them grasp at everything that's given to them), you already made the decision to not do it again (let alone elaborate on it), just claim that good feeling and let it pass, I think that would be a healthy, responsible way to deal with it. :)
I really enjoyed the last video, Ian! I'm not poly, but I support poly friends. Thank you for sharing a little about yourself and educating people like me on healthy polyamorous relationships. Glad to hear the chuds haven't ruined the vibe for you!
