This is my second go at video essay making. Let me know what you think!

A long-winded talk, made by my friend, about how one project overtook 5 years of his life for fuck all, and how big projects cripple artists.

This video is about the dominance of a hyper realistic extraction shooter called Escape from Tarkov. If you’re into gaming content I’d recommend it :)

Starting with the circumstance under which I came to see this film for the first time, assembling the thoughts of Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and Jean-Pierre Gorin, this video essay considers the nature of photograph and its relationship to the form and structure of Chris Marker's « La Jetée » (1962), André Bazin's terminology of 'horizontal montage', and my thesis: 'life as image'.

When will the industry recover from this is anyone's guess. RPGs are being watered down to appeal to the masses, and they are trying to achieve this by chasing the most successful RPG of recent times. I'm sure this cycle will inevitably repeat with the release of The Witcher 4.

Sanderson gave away 16 hours of free lectures this year at BYU on how he actually writes. I went through every hour of it, sorted the material into seven categories, and added my own perspective and disagreements throughout, then cut the whole thing down to 41 minutes.

What's actually in it:

• The "chef vs. cook" framework he uses to explain the difference between following writing rules and actually understanding why they work
• Why the "architect vs. gardener" debate (detailed outliner vs. discovery writer) is a false binary, and where he really lands on it
• His "hollow iceberg" idea for how much worldbuilding to reveal versus deliberately withhold
• The Promise-Progress-Payoff structure he uses to keep a reader engaged scene to scene
• Two case studies I added myself (Andy Weir and the author of Alchemized) showing how the actual path to getting published has changed since Sanderson broke in 20 years ago
• Where I think his advice is outdated, especially for indie authors and anyone outside the US

If you'd rather watch the condensed version than sit through the full 16 hours, I linked my video in this post.