Announcements, Questions, and Even Some Answers (Patreon)

Hi y'all!!

Big week coming up. Here's the breakdown. 

1. Tomorrow morning, an amazing audiovisual medley of basically every game from 2014 will come out on the official Cane and Rinse Youtube channel (see the last mix I edited here). The very talented Ryan Haman did the music mix, I edited the video itself. Won't be charging for this or anything, it's just a fun and (I think) very cool project. I'll be tweeting about it, and I really encourage ya to check it out. 

2. MY next big video will be out on hopefully Thursday for y'all, Friday for everyone. I'm really excited about it. Had to wait a while to get a particular voice, but I think it was worth it. 

3. I'm considering doing a stream on Saturday to talk about the video and stuff? I've never done one before, but I think it'd be fun. Let me know if this is appealing

4. Finally, here are the answers to the first round of questions. Big thanks to everyone who asked such thoughtful stuff! 

If you've already got questions queued up for next month, feel free to leave them as comments on this post. 

Fletcher Porter-

What’s your background?

This question  could go in a lot of different directions- I’m going to do my academic background, but feel free to clarify. 

I studied political science and sociology at UNC. Poli-sci was what I started out with, but I was pretty quickly disenchanted with it and absolutely fell in love with sociology. It’s a huge field, but a lot of what I studied was inequality-focused, and often specifically focused on race (that Wolfenstein vid was adapted from a paper I wrote for a sociology class). I love looking at things on a macro scale: institutions, mass movements, global trends. Sociology really fostered and encouraged that love, and even when I’m not writing something that’s specifically political or society-based, I feel like I approach it ~sociologically.~

When you’re creating your videos, is there a particular audience you have in mind?

Honestly, not really. My number one criteria is just “would I want to watch this?” I think the most talented writers can take a topic and convince you to be interested in it, and the things that I write about are so eclectic that I kinda hope my audience is just “people who know that Jacob will have something good to say about this.” THAT BEING SAID, I do still see myself as mostly a video game channel, so I try to incorporate games into my topics in some way, to not totally alienate the people who just signed up for takes on Super Mario Galaxy or whatever. 

Will Corbett-

Which YouTube channels do you take inspiration from?

Oh man, so many. Ian Danskin (InnuendoStudios) was my first real exposure to this kinda content, and I think it’s obvious that a lot of my writing and delivery style is inspired by him. Right now, I’ve been really drawing a lot from both Movies with Mikey (“FilmJoy”) and Jon Bois. Neither of those are channels that talk about games, but they both have this ability to craft exceptionally satisfying emotional arcs into topics that you absolutely wouldn’t expect to have an emotional arc. Jon Bois is just about my favorite writer on the planet right now, and even though I can’t even approach his editing style, his kind of stories are the ones I most want to ape from. 

If you could design your own video game with an unlimited budget, what would it look like?

 A maybe-unexpected answer: I absolutely love character action games (or spectacle fighters, or whatever they’re called.) Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising, Devil May Cry, they’re my absolute fave. I’m not someone who thinks up game ideas really, but I’d just love to throw a hundred million dollars at Platinum and see what they come up with.

A different answer is I’d love a Studio Ghibli-esque game that’s uhh, not turn based. Ni No Kuni looks great and is probably super fun, but I’d love one that’s more exploration and location-based. Ya know, Breath of the Wild in the valley from the beginning of Castle in the Sky or something.

Jesse Robertson-

What was the first game you just couldn't stop playing? When you pick up the controller and don't realize it's been six hours?

Really hard to say my first one, probably some terrible flash game with a million levels. I remember some turn-based, worms-style game with stick figures that I played for hours on end? 

The game that springs to mind is really the (recent) XCOMs. I think it’s how you always feel like you’re right around the corner from something huge- just 5 more days til plasma weapons! Just 2 more days til this autopsy finishes!- that really kept me in there. XCOM is the only game I specifically remember making me late to class in college, because I just couldn’t put it down. 

Nicholas Lariviere

What has the past month been like for you, with the success of the last video? It's great to see the increased exposure, but has it been putting any pressure on you, or had you thinking about earlier projects differently?

Ugh, great question Nicholas. To be honest, it’s been crazy stressful. I mean, I’m overjoyed to see my videos doing so well. The SotC one took off like a rocket, but having so many people discover my older videos has been super gratifying. 

But. Despite my best efforts, it has kind of reframed how I look at the channel. The content won’t change! I’m still going to be doing weird stuff that I want to talk about. But like, I wasn’t even monetized three weeks ago. I just didn’t assume any of my videos would get more than 10k views, so I never really thought about putting copyrighted music in or anything (I hope that Castle in the Sky track at the end of the SotC vid really worked, because it means I’ll never make a cent off that video). Now that I can make a non-insignificant amount of money off the views alone, it just means I have to be a little more careful about what I choose to throw in there. 

I don’t think it’s changed how I feel about my older videos, but it’s certainly changed the kind of comments I get on them. For a long time, the only people who saw my more overtly political stuff were people who were really specifically looking for them. Now I’ve got youtube-algorithm-driven eyes on my Wolfenstein and Modern Art pieces, and I could really do without all the crap that people are posting on there. Still! Despite all that, I totally feel like I won the youtube lottery and couldn’t be excited to do more.

Pace Smith

How do you come up with topic ideas, and how (if at all) do you filter/prioritize them?

There’s truly not much prioritization, haha. The closest I’ve gotten is probably the most recent vid about Control (coming soon!), or the Red Dead one that I released fairly soon after that came out. But I’m not really someone who works on a lot of projects at once. I’m kinda seized by a specific idea, and just work on nothing but that until I’m done. It’s really a fixation- I was dreaming about Wolfenstein when making that video. 

Topic ideas are just kinda vacuumed up by other things I’m consuming. I try to read a lot, and I listen to a lot of podcasts, and every so often there’s something that just strikes me as begging to be explored more. There’s a great episode of 99% Invisible on Red, Yellow, and Blue that started me on that vid’s path, and I heard about Amanda Phillip’s headshots paper from Game Study Study Buddies, another excellent podcast. 

Thank you all so much, this is the very early days of the Patreon, so feel free to reach out with suggestions or comments or anything else. You're the early birds, I want to make sure you get the worms.