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2021 Roundup!
🕑 Added 2021-12-08 23:51:23 +0000 UTCHello lovely Patrons!
2021 is drawing to a close and as usual I'll be taking a little time off in December. I like to keep you in the loop, so here's my annual roundup post!
It's been a heck of a year for Philosophy Tube. I've made eight episodes, starting with my coming out video! All of them shared a common theme: the way that power shapes knowledge, including knowledge of the self. Every episode cleared half a million views and the show broke through a million subscribers. In response to that growth I brought on a regular stylist and regular makeup artists - properly paid, thanks to your generous pledges - and started filming on location rather than in a regular studio. I hope you can see the increase in production quality!
Outside of the show my acting career has kept me busy: I've been filming with the BBC and ITV, and I was actually in Romania a lot of the time shooting Django, which will come out in 2022. I also started a podcast - Kill James Bond - with two of my friends. It was a challenge to fit Philosophy Tube in around all that but I'm very pleased with the work that resulted - I think it's struck a nice balance between informative, educational, and spectacular.
Looking ahead to next year, I'm toying with the theme of 'The Individual in Society.' Here are some topics I'm curious about:
- Bodily Autonomy
- Assisted Dying
- Social Contracts
- Machiavelli
- The Gaia Hypothesis (Mary Midgely perhaps?)
- Family Values
- The Philosophy of Complaint
- Some aesthetics focused videos, I want to talk about the philosophy of art more
In terms of finances, money comes in from you patrons, from advertising, and from merch. The biggest slice comes from you: ad dollars are pretty negligible for educational channels. Money coming in is spent on the show, the main costs being location and equipment hire, locations, props, music licensing, research materials, styling, and makeup artists, which all vary a lot from video to video. It also goes on my living costs. There have been some brand sponsorships this year, one of which was donated to Sisters Uncut and the rest of which went towards creating the Philosophy Tube Behind the Scenes Documentary, which will be released soon on Nebula. Like I said last year and the year before, the amount pledged on Patreon is kept private for a few reasons: firstly it bears very little relation to how much I actually get, and secondly, once I started getting enough to make this my job I was bombarded by companies, journalists, and in a few cases sexual harassers wanting to muscle in. This year more than ever I've appreciated you all respecting my privacy and being such a wonderful audience; it's a significant time of life for me - my first year out publicly - and whenever people ask me how my audience has reacted I say it's been overwhelmingly positive!
I'll be having surgery in January. If all goes well and I make a speedy recovery, the show should be back around February.
Have a Merry Christmas!
Abi XXx
Comments
The Children of Jack Acid
And perhaps this might lead to discussions of why populism and the masses are always associated with riots and revolutions, and how, just maybe, Stoicism is an attempt (almost like it's a religion!), to get the downtrodden to stop and think about things juuuuuust long enough that their zealous urge to SMASH fades away. And maybe this can lead to a broader discussion of thinking vs. feeling, highbrow vs. lowbrow, Apollonian versus Dionysian art, words in books versus graffiti on walls, strength vs. technique, etc. Is there a happy medium? Sure, cool-headed Roman soldiers with proper formations could always defeat mindless bands of Gauls running at them hither and thither. But surely the Vandals and the Huns were more emotional fighters than the Romans, and yet they ran rings around them? Maybe a healthy dose of anger (or frustration, or fear, or pride, or confidence) CAN be better than pure intellect and reason? Perhaps there's a reason why baseball teams have a "hometown advantage?" Anyway, I think at this point I am just typing to myself and will take the rest of this conversation to my diary.
The Children of Jack Acid
There's something in there that seems very familiar... quite a bit like the Social Contract theorists of the 18th century, preaching the virtues of life, liberty, and property while also owning people. In both the cases of many well-off Social Contract theorists and (at least some) Roman Stoics, they didn't seem to notice that their philosophies came not from a place of objectivity but from a place of privilege. They didn't see the conflict of interest in believing in a philosophy that was easiest for people just like themselves, and basically mandated that they do nothing and just cruise on autopilot (minus a revolution or two). It's like "Okay, dudes, it's probably easy for YOU not to let your reason be the servant of your rage. YOU have a full belly! And YOUR wife didn't lose her foot last winter from having to do prostitution in the snow. You may not understand 'rage' in the same terms I do."
The Children of Jack Acid
How about some Stoics? You could talk about how Seneca recommended people to live within reasonable limits and to keep their lives chill, while at the same time directly/indirectly being responsible for the Iceni tribe in Britannia being brutalized, including Boudica's daughters being sexually assaulted by centurions, all basically because of land speculation over his holdings in England.
Good luck for your surgery 💖 wishing you a speedy recovery!!! am super excited for a vid on family values!
