I made another high effort video. I spent like 6 months writing and rewriting this. The original ending was me taking the flowers to the spot O'Shae Sibley was shot and asking audiences to think about why so much ballroom slang has to do with mortality and the mic drop is asking "why I am at a gas station."
The ending felt flippant and so I returned to the spot in the next morning and shot what I shot. I consider my video essays slowly building an argument and this being the first time I introduce my feelings on reparations - I kinda was using illustrative language by saying "white people owe reparations but also we owe reparations," and I'd like to think that sentence stands on it's own but my feelings on the matter is white institutions owe material reparations but also us white people, individuals, owe interpersonal acts of healing and repair. The ballroom scene is owed your consideration for providing language that a lot of us are so flippant about.
A long, long, long term goal that no one should wait on because I already have a lot on my plate right now is I wanna do a video essay "The White People's Case for Black Reparations," because I like framing white anti-racism as ultimately a selfish self-interest ordeal. Acts of reparation, of repair, benefits the repairer as much as those who receive repair.
I got a couple of big video essays I wanna do, but I think from here I want to take another short break to finish my YouTube video essay, because I'm really burned out on TikTok and I've started making more and more Tiktoks about Tiktoks which is never a good thing.
Ratched Season 1 Coming Out at September 18, 2020 on Netflix
Animation, Action, Adventure | TV Series (2020– )
From Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, RATCHED is a suspenseful drama series that tells the origin story of asylum nurse Mildred Ratched. In 1947, Mildred arrives in Northern California to seek employment at a leading psychiatric hospital where new and unsettling experiments have begun on the human mind.
On a clandestine mission, Mildred presents herself as the perfect image of what a dedicated nurse should be, but the wheels are always turning and as she begins to infiltrate the mental health care system and those within it, Mildred’s stylish exterior belies a growing darkness that has long been smoldering within, revealing that true monsters are made, not born.
Creators: Evan Romansky, Ryan Murphy
Directors: Ryan Murphy, Michael Uppendahl, Nelson Cragg, Jennifer Lynch, Daniel Minahan, Jessica Yu
Writers: Evan Romansky, Ian Brennan, Jennifer Salt, Ryan Murphy
Stars: Sarah Paulson, Alfred Rubin Thompson, Judy Davis, Harriet Sansom Harris, Cynthia Nixon, Hunter Parrish, Amanda Plummer, Corey Stoll, Sharon Stone, Daniel Hagen
is your video on the word "slay" out I'm curious about it
It's like I'm gonna try and do it next week. I gotta do one or two "for the aglorithim" shitty lower efforts videos to burn off the aglorithim and then I'm thinking like the friday or saturday after next.
I thought I'd talk about my tiktok channel (Amber Flannery Field, the trans "only good tour guide in New York") since a few of you all know me through tiktok and I wanna get my thoughts out.
For videos, I think to help root and organize my thoughts I kinda think myself as doing an HBO-style prestige TV show and letting my emotional and intellectual growth over a course of a year being my "story arc." And I kinda especially like the idea of collecting all my videos at the end of a year and posting on YouTube it as a compliation of a "season," and that kinda structure I think helps motivate me and think of ideas and where to take the next video.
And TV structure is this kinda thing that's shared with TikTok, where I'll always have a large audience of people watching me for the first time but then loyal viewers following me every episode. So, as a TV show, I'll have "filler episodes" where I'll either do a silly shitpost or just a general fun "fast fact" video, but then I have "continuity episodes" where I do video essays, some of which actually have an internal stand-alone story structure to it and slowly little by little reveal my weird backstory (I haven't even begun on the reveals) that also advances the "plot" or shows my growth and reveals information about myself to the point where you can see a lot of growth between my first couple of videos and my most recent ones.
I have like three more videos I want to do and then I'd hit a year on TikTok and I kinda want my final video to be a "season finale" of sorts. The video I'm probably most known for is on White People Jazz, and the season finale will be a sequel to that one (and a less popular one, on Game of Thrones/transmisogny) - specifically again revisiting the subject of appropriation through the word "Slay," and it'll have it end with what I think would be a very dramatic mic drop to leave viewers hanging on.
And then coming back, kinda thinking of prestige television, the first episodes of a new season sets up new problems and new motivations for a character based on what happened in the previous year, and I think a fun semi-fictional motivation to come back to is "my New Years resolution is to get more enemies."
I think it's especially a fun contrast to the previous "season" where a lot of it was about my survival and search for community, and then I sorta cleave into tiktok etiquette and start trying to (lightly) start shit with random tiktokers.
And after a couple of "filler" episodes (it takes the algorithm to catch back up after hiatuses) I wanna do this series of three video essays - effectively a story arc - on "transtagonism" and basically my relationship with negative feelings towards people; competitiveness, pettiness, envy, jealousy and so on.
And I don't know where to go from there. I mentioned HBO Prestige shows as being the sorta structure of my videos, but another structure I borrow from is professional wrestling. There, they do long-term storytelling but they can't really plot everything out because wrestling is so unpredictable that they basically make it up on the fly; you can't plan a long-term storyline if a wrestler gets injured.
So you kinda have to rely on strong motivations and improvise, which I think is one of the things I do with my videos. A lot of them are like 40% improvised, where I'll go in with an essay already written but then completely throw it out and arrive to a different conclusion or location on the day of shooting.
Anyways, this is all pretentious nonsense, but it's fun.
Thanks for following me and thanks to the two or three people who read this.