#Games and Movies

[goombasa]

Youtube Recommendations: Folding Ideas

You know what? I really like video essays.

A good video essay, a really meaty, well researched expose on any topic is not only a great thing to have on the background, but I do legitimately find myself learning something when I listen to them. Even if it's on a topic I am not particularly interested in at the time, a well made and well crafted video essay can easily get me interested or get me to care about something that I knew nothing about just a few minutes earlier.

Enter Folding Ideas, a youtube channel operated by Dan Olson, who basically specializes in video essays. His main claim to fame was originally analyzing different films and discussing the various editing techniques and decisions used, drawing upon his own knowledge as a film school graduate. However, since then, he's started covering a lot more topics beyond just films, or even popular culture in general, talking about online culture, particularly scam culture, or covering things like the failure of the metaverse, the failure of bitcoin, online scam culture, the failure of wall street apes (like most of us, failure is quite a fascinating subject). He's even done some very in-depth and interesting analyses of fellow content creators such as Doug Walker or James Rolfe, bringing to light some very interesting insights into the way that they operate and think and analyze the media they're critiquing.

Dan's style of narration is fairly dry, but his strength is definitely in his writing and word choice. If you're looking for someone who is going to be very jokey and humorous about what they're talking about, Folding Ideas isn't meant to be a comedy. He does insert jokes and humor here and there, but his focus is often on delivering information on the subject at hand, with a quick and deft hand.

His videos vary wildly in length, depending on the level of depth he goes into on certain subjects. His video on the Blizzard Darkmoon fiasco is a fun, eight minute long romp describing some convention incompetence on the part of Activision Blizzard, for example. Quick, without the need to go into much depth. Compare that with his video on the Stock Market Ape culture, a two and a half hour long epic that goes into massive detail on the events leading up to the GME short squeeze, what happened during it, and the fallout afterwards. It's a much more nuanced topic, obviously, with a lot of history, a lot of rhetoric that can be difficult to understand, and a lot of misinformation that floated around at that time that sort of embedded itself in everyone's memory as what happened. It's a long, but amazing watch as Dan systematically breaks down every single aspect of the insular culture of people who are cultishly devoted to the idea that buying stock in a failing company could trigger an economic apocalypse.

And from there, his videos run the gamut in terms of length between those two extremes, and I'd highly recommend any of them. Like most great video essayists, his upload schedule is a bit on the slow side, but for the amount of work put into each episode, that's more than understandable.

I can't really think of a negative with Dan's videos other than the fact that it might not be for everyone, but that's a blanket statement that could be applied to anything that isn't focus tested to hell and back to reach the widest possible audience. Trust me, all it takes is a single video into a topic that you had no knowledge or interest in to get you hooked.

Recommended Videos

The Art of Editing and Suicide Squad: This was the video that introduced me to his channel. It analyzes the failings of the first Suicide Squad movie through the way the film is cut and edited, pointing out how plot points seem to phase in and out of existence, how the film has a penchant for assuming its audience has no short term memory, and how the movie's choice in color really hurts it. Even if you know nothing about film editing, it's a great primer on what does and doesn't work for sequential storytelling.

A Lukewarm Defense of Fifty Shades of Grey: As the title suggests, this is part of a two-part series discussing the fifty shades movies, not just as adaptations of the text, but also the hate culture around it, and a critical look at what the films did right, rather than just bashing it for the sake of bashing. Of course, when the films DO do anything wrong, he doesn't pull his punches.

This Is Financial Advice: A massive two and a half hour exploration of the Gamestop stock boom and bust, what led up to it, what caused it, the aftermath, and the cult that has sprung up around it afterwards. While it is intimidating for its length, and even when primed for it, the talk about various finance terms and wall street language still manages to go over my head somewhat, it is a surreal look at the before and after of an event that, while a part of recent history, feels incredibly misrepresented in how it was shown off by the media.

An Exhaustive History of Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings: As the title says, it is very much a thorough exploration of the animated adaptation of Lord of the Rings, headed by one Ralph Bakshi. The video goes into detail on Bakshi's strange and interesting career in animated films and his attempts to create more adult oriented animated films (this is the guy who made the Fritz the Cat movie and Coonskin), and the very long, twisted, and unusual attempts to try and get a LotR project up and running well before Peter Jackson would manage to get his trilogy working.

Comfortably Doug: An analysis of the Nostalgia Critic's review of The Wall. Rather than just bashing the review, Dan takes this as an opportunity to pick apart Doug Walker's style of video making and how it just doesn't work, how he wants to be a film maker without really having any idea of what makes a good film, and how his messaging in the review itself is confused because he never really has a unified point to make. But most of it, it's a critique of how Doug just refuses to intellectually engage with what he's watching, only gleaning the absolute surface level of anything he's interacting with. You can imagine then that him trying to take on The Wall, a movie that is very heavy on allegory and symbolism, isn't going to go well.

[septemberkisses]

the fact that i'm no longer the same age as the protagonists of novels and films i once connected to is so heartbreaking. there was a time when I looked forward to turning their age. i did. and i also outgrew them. i continue to age, but they don't; never will. the immortality of fiction is beautiful, but cruel.

[chloesimaginationthings]

Happy 10th anniversary to FNAF!!

[aspiringwriter1111]

RB for a bigger sample size please!

[retrogamingblog2]

[bl00dfroma-fairy]

[captainsaltypear]

this. this is what happened in that scene right

[mushramoo]

I am losing it

[thelosercenter]

so the fnaf movie huh

[blueeblurb]

a helping hand

[akanemnon]

Despite everything, it's still you.

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MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[thestuffedalligator]

My brother-in-law has a Thing where he gives me increasingly rare copies of The Bee Movie and it’s long since gone from “Goofy running gag” to “I don’t know how much money he’s willing to commit to this bit and it Scares Me.”

Where the fuck can we go from here

[skull-pun]

God is dead and we killed him

[chloesimaginationthings]

He has no mouth but he must scream in FNAF..

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Minecraft had to pull the Minecraft movie and fully animate it and they deleted the trailer and shii. They also send the producers to jail for like 6 months for making a bad movie so far. I fear.