Folding IdeasClickbait Title: The Ending of Annihilation Actually Explained For Real
There was a lot of anxiety in the final stretch of this one, I got really worried that the front half was too mean. I wondered what Mikey would think of me. I always admire his commitment to optimism, but I also envy it, because I am an envious person. So you'll have to forgive me for my weakness.
Annihilation and Decoding MetaphorFolding Ideas2018-11-01 | Clickbait Title: The Ending of Annihilation Actually Explained For Real
There was a lot of anxiety in the final stretch of this one, I got really worried that the front half was too mean. I wondered what Mikey would think of me. I always admire his commitment to optimism, but I also envy it, because I am an envious person. So you'll have to forgive me for my weakness.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanThe Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the MetaverseFolding Ideas2023-03-26 | Clickbait Title: I spent three months living in the metaverse and now I'm starving
The metaverse salespeople have a weird fixation with Animal Crossing, in specific. The number of times we saw New Horizons specifically cited as an example of the metaverse was bizarre, like it was their first time experiencing a multiplayer game that wasn't CoD and it melted their brains.
00:00:00 Chapter 1 - Welcome to Decentraland 00:05:31 Chapter 2 - The Metaverse 00:21:35 Chapter 3 - The Dead Mall of the Future 01:06:27 Chapter 4 - Clap your Hands or Tinkerbell Dies 01:22:02 Chapter 5 - A Child’s Vision of Governance 01:38:05 Chapter 6 - A Magic CircleWhy Its Rude to Suck at WarcraftFolding Ideas2022-11-25 | You enter a bright new digital world, exited to explore and hyped just to enjoy the vibe. Ten months later you're yelling at someone for standing in fire. What changed?
Produced by Dan Olson Written by Nathan Landel and Dan Olson
Bibliography A Reports/Books/Articles Ask, Kristine, ‘The Value of Calculations: The Coproduction of Theorycraft and Player Practices’ (2016) 36(3) Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 190. Boellstroff, Tom, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University Press, 2008) Chen, Mark, ‘Leet Noobs: Expertise and Collaboration in a World of Warcraft Player Group as Distributed Sociomaterial Practice’ (PhD Thesis, University of Washington, 2010) [Not: College of Education]. Consalvo, Mia, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (MIT Press, 2007) 28. Egliston, Benjamin, ‘Play to Win: How competitive modes of play have influenced cultural practices in digital games’ (Honours Thesis, University of Sydney 2013) [Not: School of Art, Communication and English] 24. Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Glas, René, Battlefields of Negotiation: Control, Agency, and Ownership in World of Warcraft (Amsterdam University Press, 2013). Golub, Alex, ‘Being in the World (Of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game’ (2010) 83(1) Anthropological Quarterly 17. Iser, Wolfgang, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) Lehdonvirta, Vili and Edward Castronova, Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (The MIT Press, 2014). McArthur, Victoria et al, ‘Knowing, Not Doing: Modalities of Gameplay Expertise in World of Warcraft Addons’ in CHI ’12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM, 2012) 101. Prax, Patrick, ‘Co-Creative Interface Development in MMORPGs - the Case of World of Warcraft Add-Ons’ (2012) 4(1) Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 3. Skare, Roswitha, ‘Paratext’ (2020) 47(6) Knowledge Organization 511. Skare, Roswitha, ‘The paratext of digital documents’ (2021) 77(2) Journal of Documentation 449. Steinkuehler, Constance, ‘The Mangle of Play’ (2006) 1(3) Games and Culture 199. Taylor, T.L, ‘Does WoW Change Everything?: How a PvP Server, Multinational Player Base, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause’ (2006) 1(4) Games and Culture 318. Taylor, T.L, ‘The Assemblage of Play’ (2009) 4(4) Games and Culture 331. Taylor, T.L, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006).
B Other Crusader3455, ‘MIESTRO DOES A LEGIT 2v3 AT 2500 CR’ (YouTube, 30 August 2022) AzAMOus, ‘It’s 2922 and You Enter Utgarde Keep’ (YouTube, 29 September 2022) Mark Chen, ‘Mark Chen presenting Leet Noobs 10 years later’ (YouTube, 12 March 2021)
00:00:00 Preface 00:01:28 Chapter 1 - Instrumental Play 00:17:58 Chapter 2 - Paratext 00:31:44 Chapter 3 - How Add-ons Ruined my Manchildhood 00:40:50 Chapter 4 - Join a Guild, They Said 00:56:45 Chapter 5 - WoW Classic, A Hellscape of Instrumental Practices 01:12:03 Chapter 6 - Decomposing the World 01:19:37 ConclusionContrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen TwinsFolding Ideas2022-09-27 | Clickbait Title: I'm here to teach you about an unmissable business opportunity!
Thank you to Savy over at Savy Writes Books for helping out with this video - youtube.com/c/SAVYLEISER
I spared everyone the part of the story where I got COVID and spent months recovering. A Skeptic's Guide to Hypnosis is available for you to read for free, the hitch is that it's been distributed to Patreon subscribers who have permission to hand out as many copies as they want.
00:00:00 Preface 00:05:03 GRIFTMAP 00:22:19 SAUSAGE FACTORY 00:34:12 I WROTE A BOOK 00:45:39 LET'S GET SOME CHARTS 01:01:11 SAVY WRITES BOOKS 01:11:00 LET'S WRAP THIS UPLine Goes Up – The Problem With NFTsFolding Ideas2022-01-21 | If someone pitches you on a "great" Web3 project, ask them if it requires buying or selling crypto to do what they say it does.
Crowdfunding: patreon.com/foldablehuman Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHuman 00:00:00 Preface 00:01:12 0. In 2008 The Economy Collapsed 00:07:09 1. Bitcoin 00:18:18 2. Ethereum 00:24:34 3. The Machine 00:39:07 4. NFTs Exist To Get You To Buy Crypto 00:57:54 5. The Unbearable Cringe Of Crypto 01:11:46 6. A Self-Organizing High Control Group 01:16:57 7. Crypto Reality 01:25:36 8. There Is No Privacy On The Chain 01:32:52 9. If This "Looks Like Scam" Then Every NFT Room I'm In Looks Like Scam LOL 01:38:29 10. Play To Earn Exists To Get You To Buy Crypto 01:46:39 11. We're All Gonna Make It And By "We" I Mean "Us" Not You 01:56:08 12. DAOs Exist To Get You To Buy Crypto 02:13:21 13. I Know It's Rigged, But It's The Only Game In TownJamie Olivers War on NuggetsFolding Ideas2021-10-29 | Clickbait Title: Chefs Hate Him!
Big thanks to Hot Dad for letting me use his absolute banger, you can put the whole song in your ear holes here: youtube.com/watch?v=qr-sDJX72WY
I wanted to make this because I see this clip make the rounds again and again and every time I'm like "of all the arguments you could make, that's the worst one." So I decided to make a whole video around "of all the arguments you could make, that's the worst one." Jamie Oliver in particular seems to have that effect on people, he gets into this kinda crap all the time, and I think it has a lot to do with the sheer audacity of his lies or near-lies that make even people otherwise sympathetic to his goals wish that he'd just go away. The willingness to just brazenly misrepresent how and why things are the way they are demonstrates a fundamental disrespect for the intelligence of the viewer.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Crowdfunding: patreon.com/foldablehuman Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanAn Exhaustive History of Ralph Bakshis Lord of the RingsFolding Ideas2021-08-20 | While the video talks mostly about The Lord of the Rings (1978) there is a discussion of Bakshi's earlier R-rated and NC-17 films, which deal with heavy subject matter like racism, police violence, transphobia, drug abuse, and various adult scenarios.
This was intended to be a quick little video that I could churn out in a couple weeks at the end of June, but it's now taken almost the whole summer. I haven't done animation like this in years, and never with this kind of a coherent goal, so approximately 48 seconds of this video consumed 80% of the entire post production time.
"Pink Floyd - The Wall" deals with mature subject matter and contains intense imagery some viewers may find distressing.
As a full disclosure, I was briefly a contributor to Channel Awesome for about six months in 2014/15. Channel Awesome CEO Mike Michaud severed the relationship after he received angry emails about an exposé of 8chan I had published on Medium and I refused to take it down or commit to not doing "anything else like that." Several of the songs are a roundabout veiled reference to #ChangeTheChannel, a hashtag that gained some traction in the spring of 2018 as contributors and former contributors to Channel Awesome spilled all the beans about CA's incompetence and mismanagement. What started as a bunch of people sharing stories about how the scheduling page never worked right escalated to Channel Awesome leadership releasing a counterattack letter in which they inadvertently admitted to covering for a sex predator.
0:00 - The Wall 7:37 - Doug 19:13 - We Need More Victimization 25:51 - So Long, Weird Song 33:34 - Comfortably Dumb 34:48 - It's not that vague, Doug 38:44 - The TrialLets Argue About Christmas Movies (ft. Movies w/ Mikey)Folding Ideas2020-12-24 | Clickbait Title: Die Hard Isn't A Christmas Movie
Go watch Mikey's companion video for the other half of the Dan and Mikey Christmas Special. His is way better and he put so much work into it.
We had a proper blizzard a couple days ago, so I just had to dig my car out from under over six inches of snow. And that's not like "oh, we got six inches" but it's kinda spread all around, this was six inches at the shallowest. It actually snapped my car's radio antenna. Anyway my arms feel like noodles from all the digging so I'm just going to wish you all happy New Year.
Shortly before the election my cat escaped the house and got her belly covered in sticky mud which then picked up all sorts of junk. During the extremely needed bath, which she hates, I lost control of her head and she managed to latch onto my arm and break the skin with two teeth. It looked kinda rough, so I figured I should get a tetanus shot in the morning. By the time the clinic opened I was in some of the worst pain of my life, the swollen bite looked like a tennis ball was embedded inside my arm, and the selling was pressing constantly against my ulnar nerve. The pressure was so intense that I could feel gravity pulling on my skin and fingers. Anyway, that's a big part of why this is late.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Crowdfunding: patreon.com/foldablehuman Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanThe Minnewanka Curve Experiment [2K/1440p]Folding Ideas2020-09-18 | A companion video for "In Search of a Flat Earth" containing the details of the Minnewanka curve experiment in greater detail. Appropriate for a classroom environment.
00:00 Preamble 00:23 Part 1 - The Math 04:34 Part 2 - The FootageIn Search Of A Flat EarthFolding Ideas2020-09-11 | Clickbait Title: The Twist at 37 Minutes Will Make You Believe We Live In Hell
This has taken a long time to make, and it was a very winding road, but I'm glad I did it. Hiking out to the north shore of Minnewanka, a 19km round trip, is one of the worst decisions I've ever made but I'm glad I did it. I'm not sure what else to say. I'm so tired. So very, very, very tired.
If you want to stay up to date on QAnon, The QAnon Anonymous Podcast, YouTube channel Some More News, and the work of journalists Will Sommer and Alex Kaplan will give you a place to start.
Music: Isolated by Kevin MacLeod (prologue) Oxygen Mask by Andy G. Cohen (title/credits) Sunset by Kai Engel (across a curved lake) Fastest Man on Earth by Jahzzer (they're all going to Q) Released under a Creative Commons Attribution International License
00:00 Prologue 03:21 Intro 05:01 Part 1 37:39 Part 2Cooking Food On The Internet For Fun And ProfitFolding Ideas2020-05-16 | Clickbait Title: World's Largest Activated Charcoal Superfood Epic Burger Made With Acai Cake
In this video I mention Gourmet Makes a bunch and I actually felt really insecure about that just because for a long time during the edit it was feeling like I only had one example. But the reason it was on my mind so much is that the recent video with the gourmet Tater Tots was just so perfect with the intro where a parade of chefs, cooks, and foodies, the kind of folks who regularly cook hundred-dollar cuts of meat with obscure Italian names, stop by to talk about just how much they love frozen potato nuggets.
The one thing that I'm expecting someone in the comments is going to latch onto is the exact timeline of the abolition of serfdom in Europe because it was very much not a uniform thing and the process took a couple hundred years to encompass the entire continent. It's a super big and complex subject because it encompasses both the fallout of the Black Death and various technological developments. But some of those developments were, themselves, responses to the plague, built to solve problems it created. Ultimately I chose a super simplified, ultra-compressed version of history because the story of history is ultimately the story of the present. We can come out of this crisis better than we went in.
The Snowman has been a bugbear on my back for years now. I first tried to make this video January 2018, but skidded out when I got distracted by Fifty Shades Freed, which inspired me to expand my already-in-the-works Fifty Shades video into a full three-part series that took most of the rest of the year to make. Then I tried again in January 2019, but things were moving along poorly, the script just wouldn't crack, and eventually I ran out of winter when I decided to Pivot to Fortnite, a video which took a huge number of hours to make. So it feels good to finally have this off my plate, even if it doesn't feel like a video that should have taken two years to come out.
To add to all that, because The Snowman is cursed, it took ten hours of revisions, fifteen different versions, to get this video past Universal, who would flag it instantly with a total global block.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Special thanks to Kara and Crystal and all my Patrons.
CATS is poised to be one of the biggest box office bombs in terms of both % gross and absolute dollars lost. I'm not sure if it'll take the throne, but it's definitely up there, having made a scant $6.2m against its $95m budget. It averaged less than 200 tickets per cinema over its entire weekend. At this point anyone and everyone who wants to see it purely to gawk could do so five times each and it would still be an utter financial disaster.
I do talk about the recent rumours with HBO Max, but it's not until the end of the video, so it's basically a guarantee that the comments are going to be full of commenters telling me I didn't talk about things that I definitely did talk about. I know mocking knee-jerk comments in the description is pretty hack, but knee-jerk comments are also pretty hack, so a hack for a hack I guess.
I have spent an unusual amount of time agonizing over the title and thumbnail for this video. I'm not sure I can vocalize exactly why they've been so difficult, but they have. I know I usually write a lot more here, but I'm very hungry and want to catch Pokemon and get a pizza.
While voluntary content flagging is useful and a good measure, and some measure of automated detection is likely necessary, YouTube’s response has been deliberately broad, utilizing their status as a monopoly in online video to force creators to bear the burdens of compliance without providing them with the tools and data to do so in a meaningful, educated manner. Written and performed by Dan Olson
I had to go home and take a nap in between viewings because the 3D HF DBOX UltraAVX Experience™ was just that draining.
Presented in 60fps because I've fallen victim to my own weird quirks of replicating carious elements of a film in the videos I make about those films. In the last two days I've had a bigger existential crisis about the narrative value of HFR than the characters had about being clones/cloned. I broadly agree with the sentiment that audiences can and will acclimate to HFR as they watch more of it, but that's definitely never going to happen if it all looks like this. I can settle in and feel comfortable and normal watching HFR footage of my own creation, like this vlog, but Gemini Man resisted that at every turn. Everything looked bad, sped up, and cheap. Ang Lee seems to have decided that a "real" explosion looks like a firework, with a bunch of sparks in the mix, because sparks are really easy for the brain to track in HFR, so they look neat. But I couldn't ever get past it looking "neat". It was like watching stock footage or a tech demo for two hours. There's no attempt at using the frame rate to enhance the emotional state, it's just "turn it up to 11 and leave it there" which makes the experience just tiring.
I'm really excited to see where Classic goes down the road. The predictable outcome is that Classic rolls into Burning Crusade and Wrath with essentially the chaos of legacy servers that we see in EverQuest and many of the other surviving MMOs, but there's the tantalizing, though slim, possibility of an alternate development path, where Classic becomes a second attempt at history, basically WoW 2, but starting from where things were 13 years ago. I wouldn't even entirely mind if some of the hazier, less balanced sensibilities of Classic cropped back up in the future, if the pace of the game slowed a bit without necessarily just making things bad and inconvenient to get there.
This video has been "done" for a while now, but I had a lot of trouble finishing it owing to a lingering sickness in my lungs that has made it difficult to record vocals that don't sound froggy and gross. Aside from that bit of TMI I do want to stress that I really love Minecraft, I love creative games, I love construction games, I love logistics games. All of the game footage in this video is mine. I have it because I own all these games and have played them all for somewhere between dozens and hundreds of hours each.
Music used: Minecraft OST Visager - Windy Bluffs
Bibliography: Video Games and the Global South, 2019, Phillip Penix-Tadsen ed. http://press.etc.cmu.edu/index.php/product/video-games-and-the-global-south/ Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, 2017, Caroline Frasier
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanIs Detective Pikachu Mathematically The Worst?!Folding Ideas2019-05-11 | Clickbait Title: A Short Review and Discussion of Detective Pikachu and The Broader Subject of Video Game Movies
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHuman Support the Channel: https://d.rip/foldablehuman/Lets Spoil The EndgameFolding Ideas2019-04-27 | Clickbait Title: Everyone Who Dies In Avengers Endgame
And, yes, I realize that even by suggesting that someone does, in fact, die in Endgame could be construed as a spoiler because addressing the idea of a subject, even devoid of details, is already an indicator that the subject is relevant to the film.
I feel like with Endgame we have truly reached the apotheosis of spoiler-aversion. It has been so thoroughly hijacked by marketing forces that even reasonable discussion is viewed as hostility, that wanting to talk about movies is characterized as a betrayal of the movie itself.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHuman Support the channel: https://d.rip/foldablehuman/Manufactured Discontent and FortniteFolding Ideas2019-04-01 | Clickbait Title: Dab your hearts out and jump on the battle bus, I'm dropping in to Retail Row and I've got an orange pump pointed right at your default.
If you want to know one thing about making a machinima in Fortnite it's that it's super, super rad when you spend several hours late at night setting up footage in your virtual digital studio with the intent that you'll record the properly-composed shots in replay mode in the morning, only to wake up to a minor patch that breaks all your replays. It's extra rad when this happens three days in a row.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Music used: "Airship" by Visager "Shrine" by Visager "Fortnite Lobby Theme" by Epic Games
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHuman Support the show: https://d.rip/foldablehuman/Wonder Park: Why Movies Generally Need DirectorsFolding Ideas2019-03-15 | Clickbait title: 5 Broken Things About Wonder Park
If anything my experience with Wonder Park was a double stack of disappointment. It's not good, but it's also not the spectacular train wreck I was hoping it would be.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHuman Support the show: https://d.rip/foldablehumanWhat Is Vsauce?Folding Ideas2019-02-15 | Clickbait title: 10 WILDEST Geek Girls OMG!!!
I found myself stonewalled on a number of other projects, to the point that I needed to make something just to get something done. More specifically I needed to finish something. Starting projects is easy, finishing them is hard. This isn't a thorough historiography of Vsauce, it's a story. It's not about the business of running the channel, the ways that it has fractured into sub-channels with multiple hosts and how the stand alone DONG channel functions as its own version of what Vsauce was, it's about the narrative created by the channel itself. Part of why I didn't go into all that is because the self-contained story is applicable to so many channels. It's a very prototypical story unique to the structure of YouTube itself. As much as there's a possible future where Mind Field is done, cancelled, over, whatever, and Vsauce goes on to do something else, something old, something new, there's as much a possible future that this is it, that when Mind Field is over so is Vsauce. Either way when you walk from one end of Vsauce to the other it's quite a journey.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHuman Support the show with money: https://d.rip/foldablehuman/That 2019 Movie Called Serenity About a Fish Named Justice - a Spoiler Rich vlogFolding Ideas2019-01-25 | Clickbait title: You Literally Won't Believe The Twist In This Movie
This movie really kinda defies classification. I'm not sure it's a bad movie, but it's not quite a good movie either. If they had stuck to just the A plot it would probably have been a passible but forgettable thriller, but they didn't, and we have been blessed with the result. Jenny Nicholson's vlog is going to be so much better than mine.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHuman Support the channel: https://d.rip/foldablehuman/Glass Isnt a Very Good Movie - A Spoiler-Rich VlogFolding Ideas2019-01-18 | Clickbait title: Glass Isn't Very Good
One of the most remarkable things about the film is that it leaves you consistently bewildered about which characters you're supposed to care about, and it's almost impossible to parse who the story is supposed to be about while you're sitting in the theatre. Whole swaths of confusing character behaviour are waved away with sloppy last-minute reveals that play less like reveals and more like excuses.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHuman Support the channel: https://d.rip/foldablehuman/The Art of Storytelling and The Legend of Chun LiFolding Ideas2019-01-11 | Written and performed by Dan Olson
Clickbait title: You won't believe what these videos look like now! Support the show on Drip: https://d.rip/foldablehuman/ Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHuman
This is my first attempt at doing a second edition of an old video. I like the original (link below) but there's a bunch of jokes in there that didn't really land, the audio was awful, and a couple assertions that just didn't hold up. I'm leaving the original up and marking it as "first edition" but it's pretty much just staying there for posterity. This is the better version in every way. It's the second edition.
First edition: youtu.be/XBS5ywyngxYA Christmas Story: A Tale of Technological NostalgiaFolding Ideas2018-12-24 | Clickbait title: This Christmas Video Gonna Get You Hornt
Oh my, what a year it has been! The upside to awful is that it pulls personal successes into stark contrast. I'm trying really hard to focus on those and not on everything else. I do think that, despite everything, I wrote some of my best work this year, and I got to perform at SGDQ which was a total blast, and I helped make one of the best Youtube documentaries on the site with Lindsay Ellis' Hobbit videos. 2018 has been two years long, but it hasn't all been awful.
Well, here we are. I want to say I'm done with Fifty Shades forever, but given the legacy it's leaving behind, the upcoming slate of fanfiction-turned-novel-turned-movies, I'm sure we'll be back sometime. There's always more that I can say. I just can't stop talking about it.
Also Charlie Tango, Eurocopter EC135, is played in the film by a Eurocopter EC130 because Seattle noise laws prohibit civilian use of a helicopter as large as the EC135 within city limits. I do not know how this impacts Charlie Tango's safety rating.
Ana: Crystal Rhoney Christian: Mike Rugnetta Taylor: Mikey Neumann Kate: Lindsay Ellis Dr. Flynn: H. Bomberguy SnowQueen’s IceDragon: Jenny Nicholson
“Charlie Tango” written by James Fairlie, Performed by Crystal Rhoney
Camera: Kara Artym
GarBox art: Magdalen Rose
Special thanks to Jenny Trout for her amazing read-along blogs and Anne Jamison for both her writing on the subject of Fifty Shades and fanfiction and for tolerating my emails.
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanZero Dark Loxley - A Robin Hood Bad Movie VlogFolding Ideas2018-11-22 | Robin of Loxley's Long Halftime Walk The Hurt Loxley Thin Red Loxley Full Metal Loxley Saving Private Loxley
There's so much to talk about I didn't even get around to mentioning the wall of fire that soldiers just push open like a door, the way characters will just stand and have Very Important Conversations at full volume in the middle of crowds of snooping nobles, Little John's iron arm stub that he makes so that they don't need to keep disguising Jamie Foxx's real hand, or how Friar Tuck is simultaneously the most entertaining and least meaningful character, largely present out of obligation.
If you want a better Robin Hood watch the Errol Flynn movie, and if you want more entertaining cheese watch Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
I will say this was more entertaining than the endless bore of the 2010 Ridley Scott film.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanAn American Tail: Fievel Goes to Video Game HellFolding Ideas2018-10-04 | Clickbait title: THE WORST VIDEO GAME EVER!? [gone wild] [prank][TWIST ENDING] Frozen Elsa Spider-Man
This video would not have been possible without the generosity and help of Nathan, who was able to send me both a PAL PlayStation 2 and not one but two copies of An American Tail, and then didn't freak out when I decided to open the PS2 and swap the power supply with a North American PS2 so I wouldn't need to use a voltage converter. It worked just fine because all PS2 motherboards use +12 v DC power to minimize the cost difference between regions.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanA Lukewarm Defence of Fifty Shades Part 2: Things Go Downhill Very QuicklyFolding Ideas2018-08-31 | Clickbait Title: Does This Video Have a Direct Line to Your Inner Goddess? Of Course It Does.
I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure that I can identify the exact scene where Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson started drinking to get through the nudity and sex, and it’s the shower scene where they’re on the boat. The reason I pinpoint this one is because we have so many examples of Johnson doing an admirable job at acting while crying, but in that scene she’s suddenly delivering her lines like she just got home from the dentist.
At the time of publishing the run is scheduled for 5:10am Central Daylight Time.
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHuman Twitch: twitch.tv/foldablehumanBook Club Is A Theatrical Made-For-TV Movie: A VlogFolding Ideas2018-06-01 | Book Club isn't very good, but you probably already guessed that, so instead let's talk about why and how it exists in the first place.
Erin Simms' bio makes it sound like she actually was on the Power Rangers, but she apparently left the show before filming anything.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanA Lukewarm Defence of Fifty Shades of GreyFolding Ideas2018-05-25 | Clickbait Title: A Lukewarm Defence of Fifty Shades of Grey
It's been a long time coming. This was originally supposed to be ready for the release of Fifty Shades Freed back in February, but that clearly didn't happen. I know I like to try and write little mini-essays down here in the description, but I'm hard pressed to think of something to put here that isn't already in this video. It's over an hour long.
twitch.tv/foldablehumanThe Art of Storytelling and The Book of HenryFolding Ideas2017-12-20 | Clickbait title: 7 Reasons The Book of Henry FAILS
The Book of Henry is pretty close to an ideal awful movie. There's dimensions to watching the film that I can't convey fully in a condensed video, like how stop-start the plots are, how Henry gets sick and the movie basically stops what it was doing for twenty minutes waiting for him to die, and how watching the film is to go through a rolling process of trying to figure out what the film is trying to actually tell you. People who are familiar with Jurassic World should catch the similar ways that Book of Henry demonizes a woman for not behaving exactly and precisely as the mother figure that the filmmakers think she should be. Susan gets off light, though, since she isn't executed by dinosaur for the crime of texting.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanThe Last Jedi Vlog - It Made Me Feel FeelingsFolding Ideas2017-12-16 | There's a lot of things that I didn't get around to in this video, but I wanted it to be a mix of criticism and the things I liked the most from a storytelling perspective, rather than just being a rundown of suff.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanThe Disaster Artist Vlog (and stories about awful movies Dan has worked on)Folding Ideas2017-12-08 | I enjoyed The Disaster Artist. It's a good film for people who probably already know they want to see it. It's a bit Inside Baseball for a wide audience, not as accessible as its comparison Ed Wood, because there's a lot of moments that rely on the audience knowing just how awful the final product actually is, but if you think you're gonna like it, you're probably going to like it.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanWeird Kids Videos and Gaming the AlgorithmFolding Ideas2017-11-22 | Clickbait Title: Video Criticism YouTube Exploitation Meta Commentary Pregnant Algorithm Educational Spam Fidget Spinner Buried Alive For Kids
Very late in the process of making this I decided to change the name, largely because the moment I made the original title "YouTube and the Business of Exploiting Children" public in a promotional Tweet I realized that there was an entire constellation of related issues that I wanted to talk about. From channels that exist to get kids hooked on gambling to parents subjecting their children to abusive conditions as "pranks", there's a lot of shady stuff going on. In that context, weird spam and unsettling videos about poop didn't rank high enough to warrant burning a title that good.
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanJustice League VlogFolding Ideas2017-11-17 | Justice League isn't good, but I didn't hate it. If you want a bottom line, that's it, but if you watch the video I go into a lot more detail. Because I couldn't take notes in the theatre there's a bunch I forgot, like a completely misplaced scene near the start where Batman's beard disappears, a sequence set to Icky Thump that seems to have been left in purely because they already paid the licensing fee, how Steppenwolf looks like he's been lifted from a Dragon Age: Origins cutscene, and Cyborg's uniformly weird, floaty movements that aren't strange enough to feel intentionally alien nor normal enough to feel natural.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanCinematic Trainwreck – The Snowman: A VlogFolding Ideas2017-10-25 | Hello mister police. I forgot to mention this in the body of the vlog itself, but the lighting is ass. Sometimes it's good, but most of the time it's ass. This extends to the grade as well. One little girl looks green. It's almost as bad as Sherlock season 1.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanFolding @ PAX Interview: FrostpunkFolding Ideas2017-09-14 | Dan @ PAX talks with Paweł Miechowski about Polish developer 11 Bit Studios' past game This War of Mine and their upcoming Frostpunk
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanFolding @ PAX Interview: Children of MortaFolding Ideas2017-09-05 | Dan @ PAX talks with Jakobsen Beck, narrative designer at Dead Mage Studios about the upcoming title Children of Morta.
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanThe Stanley Parable, Dark Souls, and Intended PlayFolding Ideas2017-07-27 | Clickbait title: Watch These Hot Games Intentionally Misbehave
The cough hasn't gotten any better. If anything it's worse now. I had to stop and hack a good, rumbling cough for a solid few seconds every other line. I wouldn't be surprised if it shows in the performance. The other thing, and this is petty I know, is that I'm dreading the inevitable wave of single commenters pointing out that my shirt is missing a button. They'll probably mostly assume that I missed a button, maybe make a crack about how I forgot how to dress myself, but, no, the shirt is just missing a button. I actually meant to take the spare from the fringe and repair the shirt before filming, but between the cough and the three hours of sleep it pretty much slipped my mind until recording was already done. Anyway, The Stanley Parable and Dark Souls are both really good games with very different approaches to narrative, you should check them out.
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: twitter.com/FoldableHumanLudonarrative DissonanceFolding Ideas2017-07-20 | Clickbait Title: this happened to me ~~~~pseudo-intellectual nonsense~~~~ STORYTIME #SocialExperiment
When I teased this video the initial reaction was a near-unanimous slow-motion "oh no," like a comedy action hero leaping on a grenade that's revealed to be a dud or a prop or it was actually just a bagel. I'm not saying this looks like a grenade, but is really just a bagel, but I am saying that I find the tepid anti-intellectualism that has become calcified in video game circles to be exhausting. It's reached a point where so many intelligent, engaged people are on the brink of giving up entirely because any attempt to improve the language we use to talk about games as they exist and operate is met with suspicion and mockery, painted as little more than bloviating wankery, and trotted around like Quasimodo as a target for rotten turnips. Ludonarrative dissonance has earned a reputation not through any irreparable flaws in the concept, but because pundits catering to an anti-intellectual base coined stupid names like "ludonarrative disco biscuits" because pretending big words are hard is a sure way to get a laugh from the worst kinds of people.