 This was intended as a fun little follow-up to last month, but, uh, the more I wrote, the less fun it got. Classic Alec. A month and a half ago, I sat on this couch and proposed something kind of absurd. I would post a video every single day for a month, 30 reviews plus a new cut of my music video about turning 30. And what's more, I didn't know what 90% of my subjects would be. Because, for the first time, I would ask that viewers choose for me. It came out of the lamentations present in my review of turning 30, in which I professed a deep uncertainty about my place on this platform. I needed to see what would happen if I tried something different. And when the idea for 30 days of the week I review popped into my head, it seemed perfect. I joked at the start that January wasn't an ideal month because ad rates plummet relative to December, but that potentially meant less competition actually since many YouTubers post less as a result. In theory, this should have benefited me. Plus, a month seemed like exactly the right amount of time for such an experiment. Long enough for conclusions drawn to feel meaningful, but not so much that I couldn't see a light at the end of the tunnel. And doing an average length of 6 minutes, 42 seconds video each day is not in and of itself that ridiculous. Each one took somewhere between 3 and 6 hours from starting the script to pressing upload in the YouTube studio. When you add the couple of hours required to experience each thing, it's rarely above your average American work day. I'll be it with this 7 day week. It's a lot, sure, but it's nothing compared to what you hear from folks who make feature or even series length epics on this platform. Then again, a lot of those people do this as their primary source of income. I don't. I make occasional illusions to my other life as a cubicle kid, but that reality is pretty disconnected from what I do here. Like, I have a degree in liberal arts, but my job title has the word data in it, which is gross. Still, it's something I consider cosmically neutral, and it means I'm not starving on the street, which is ideal. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly stressful over the past few months with the back half of January being as busy for me as it really ever has, which wasn't ideal in the context of this experiment. Though that was offset somewhat by the fact that this company, which is generally against remote work, asked all of us to stay at home while Omicron ripped through New York City, pegging our return to the day after the project's completion. And thank gosh, because there were multiple times I finished editing literally minutes before the morning team call began, and I'd end up having to like do my thumbnail on a break or whatever. Other times I would put something on in the background while working through a particularly mindless Excel task. Had I needed to go into the office every day, I don't know how it would have gone. As it was, I only went to sleep before 12, like three nights out of the entire month, and my alarm would be ringing by seven because I needed to start up on the next one. But I did it. 30 days of the week air review was successful in the sense that 31 videos plus a livestream were posted to this channel in January. It's more than I uploaded in all of 2021. Heck, it accounts for one fifth of everything on the channel. It was not successful in the sense that my numbers for the month of January were okay at best, higher than they've been lately, but only because of the general flatlining that followed my Anthropocene review to lead hiatus last August and September. If you look at my overall viewership for the past year, you'll see January appears at best like a return to normalcy. While I never dropped below 1,000 daily views across the channel, my best performer didn't even really approach 2K with 1,767 views on the day I posted my review of Shiny World Best of 2018 from now on, easily the most out of left field suggestion of the whole month and currently it's most viewed. Now, there's a valid argument to be made that perhaps this is a result of the oldness and niche-ness of so many of the subjects. Certainly if I had chosen 30 super trendy topics, I'd have done better. Like, the average view count after the first seven days was 576, median 491. Not great. But my matrix review, arguably the most on-trend video I did in the back half of 2021, got 1,737 in that time. And I'm pretty happy with that number, but if a real YouTuber saw that, they would metaphorically and maybe literally kill themselves on a live stream. Thirty days of the week air view made abundantly clear that I will never be a YouTuber. And I never thought of myself as one. And what some might have considered pessimism really has been vindicated. This implementation of this format doesn't work. To become successful as a content creator would require an even more drastic change. And I'm just not interested in doing that. But neither do I want to lose my place here, small as it may be, which means I have to figure out a sustainable way to proceed. Financially, I largely break even at this point, mostly thanks to the generosity of my patrons from whom I really don't do enough. And I feel bad about that. So it's more about finding a place that's like emotionally stable. I've been saying for years that I put too much brain into this. And now it's time to step back for actually for real. And that probably doesn't mean what you think it means. But before I get into that, I want to talk a bit more about January. Last month was unquestionably the most creatively prolific of my life. Over the course of 31 days, I posted three hours, 22 minutes, and 21 seconds of stuff based on 27,080 scripted words, with a whole lot more of both on the cutting room floor. This averaged to 903 words per video, intro, outro, and ad-libs accepted. More or less where I hoped to be when I set the 1000 word limit, which I ended up breaking seven times, though rarely by much. The last sub 10 minute video was posted this channel back in July of 2020 when I did three 9-ish minute videos in a week. But it has been much longer since that was any sort of habit. I typically aim to be at least in the vicinity of 2000 words, which is something like 13 minutes at this talking speed. Like, if I can't talk about something for even that long, I probably shouldn't bother talking about it at all, right? What can I add to the hashtag discourse in less time than that? But that's how I thought about it anyway. On the other side of January and particularly following my back to back slog watching through it all on stream last weekend, I'm less bullish on that position. I definitely had some good lines and made some good points here and there. A number of commenters noted no apparent drop in quality, which almost feels insulting given how much less time I spent on them than the videos I was making last year. But oh well, the issue is that in order to be anything like insightful in that time, I had to remove myself from the story. Well, I have never seen anyone on YouTube with the same sort of scripted but jump cutlass style that I use. It's not really what makes the week air of you unique. That is the eye of it all, the personal context that I bring to each review. No one has had my exact set of experiences, so no one brings my exact perspective. If analysis is all you're after, you will find more and better options elsewhere. If you want me, this is the only place you're going to get it. And regular viewers told me that they had more difficulty engaging with reviews about subjects they had no prior familiarity with last month because of that missing context, which I consider one of the fundamental failings of the whole endeavor. And while not choosing the subjects meant I inevitably had less connection to the material, it's not like there wasn't personal shit I had and wanted to put in there. Secret Little Haven brought back all kinds of memories about my time on the early internet that I could only allude to. A Stereo's Pallet reminded me of my high school senior project wherein I completely failed to make a dystopian graphic novel, etc. etc. So I'm not surprised that the reviews featuring more context were the best received. Obviously, Mushy Peas was the most beloved video, but more emotional entries like Lingua Ignota's Caligula and Shiny World were called out as well when I asked what people liked. Those had the most of myself in them, given folks who aren't already invested in those subjects the most to connect to. It's too bad how few musical subjects made it through the process, especially given that they were the second most common suggestion type. Forty-five of the 276 were music-adjacent, but only two-one. And one was actually a tie that I chose the winner for. The top type was, of course, movies from which 104 suggestions begot 12 videos, but there were only 30 TV shows suggested and I reviewed five of them. I also reviewed five video games based on just 18 suggestions, though most of those were made multiple times before taking the crown. Actually, half of all winners were repeat suggestions. Reviewed the final selection of the series lost 15 times before technically losing again to Paddington 2, but me choosing it anyway for the thematic value. That's a lot of times to be rejected, even if that one subject was actually suggested by three different people over the month, so none of them felt the hit quite so many times. Jolly Huff did, though, and then some. He suggested Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals literally 23 times. The suggestion never got more than six likes, and on three days got none at all. And it made me feel bad to see that sort of thing, and so to honor his dedication, I will be reviewing Nocturnal Animals as well as a few other suggestions that didn't get the votes that I think that they deserved over the next month and a half, two months-ish. Stuff that sounded cool, but in most cases just came in too late. Because the most damning data point of the entire project is that the average time from video premiere to winning comment was just 28 minutes and the median was 13. Only four suggestions were posted an hour or more after Video Go Live that won, which is to say anyone who didn't get there immediately had basically no chance. And there's no secret why. These videos get an initial rush of viewers and then almost immediately fall off a cliff. Suggestions made a few hours later may only be seen by a handful of people, which frankly sucks on a lot of different levels. It shut out anyone who was either busy or asleep during the times when I posted, so people on the other side of the world were screwed and I have no doubt that that's why I reviewed as many British TV shows as I did projects of any kind from any part of Asia and that those suggestions for Asian works all came from white guys, one of whom was me. And this became increasingly apparent as time went on, which I imagine was a key factor in the clear downward trend of suggestions as the month progressed, though I do wish I had some more qualitative stuff to go alongside those numbers, like Lisa Kudiras suggested 17 different subjects over the month, far and away the most of anyone, but it wasn't really about winning for her. While I'm sure she would have liked to see one of her suggestions selected, she was using the whole thing as a way to work on her English. I know that because she mentioned it in one of her last comments. That's the sort of insight you can never get from a spreadsheet. So the implementation of this suggestion concept wasn't great, but I think the idea itself was good, which kind of surprised me because it's not something I ever really wanted to do. Like I made it the one goal on Patreon, but I was I was pretty sure I would never hit 75 supporters over there, so it didn't feel like a real possibility. And even if I had, I only promised it occasionally, which is frankly bullshit and have changed my mind. I really enjoyed almost everything I experienced, hence the 8.0 median score, which is dragged down to a 7.5 average, mostly by starting off with the second lowest scoring subject in the channel's history, but a lot of the things that I experienced I wouldn't have otherwise, or at least not in any kind of similar timeline. And I think doing it was and can continue to be a good way to get myself out of my usual zone. Clearly there is something to the idea, so I want to keep it going, but in a way that addresses the access type issue. Once I have finished up with the stragglers, I will begin doing one video each month by popular demand. Maybe some months could be more, but one should be the expectation, and it will trade off between the full collective and then patrons, since, you know, they were promised at first. At the start of a collective month, I will post to the community tab looking for suggestions, as well as have a new dedicated channel on the week I review Discord. After a couple of weeks, I will choose the 5-ish most interesting and make a YouTube community poll and review its winner. That way, everyone has an equal opportunity in both suggestion and selection. And I have a fairly straightforward timeline that shouldn't be too difficult to meet. All of this comes as part of that sustainability thing I mentioned earlier. I need to set realistic goals for the long term, and also put myself in a position where this no longer has so much sway over my life. Historically, I have gone into so many movies or plays or whatever is thinking, oh, this could make for good hashtag content, and I'll definitely review this as well as not doing things because I needed a subject to review and whatever I was actually doing wasn't a viable option. Having subjects chosen for me with a short turnaround time minimizes the stress. Actually, it's a weirdly enough 30 days of the week air review was exhausting but not stressful. And while I'm not about to turn the whole channel into a suggestion show, I like that aspect of it. Also, for the first time ever, I really didn't care about any given videos apparent flaws because I knew there was something else coming the next day. And so what difference did it make? Onwards and upwards. I want to feel that more. I want to be able to make something that I feel good about but not have the emotional investment that has caused me so much frustration over the last few years. What it really boils down to is that I want YouTube to be less significant in my life, not just from a creation perspective either. I want to watch less YouTube and go back to like reading books and playing video games. I completed more games in January than I had in the six months before it. That is absurd. I like video games way too much to not actually play them. Something's got to give and it's obvious what that has to be. I will still be here. I'll still be making shit but I'm disengaging a bit. To that end, I have uninstalled the YouTube studio app from my phone. It is something that I've done in the past with caveats like oh I'll reinstall on posting day so I can interact in the first few hours and maybe that'll juice the algorithm but it definitely didn't do that and inevitably just turned into more obsessive checking albeit with extra steps. So I'm over it. I'll check this suggestion post and like maybe I'll pop over to the studio page on my laptop from time to time but also why. Having my metrics shoved in my face isn't fun and reading comments really isn't either. Realistically there are only a few types of them. I love getting external validation but meaningful discussions are better had on other platforms and I'm over subjecting myself to negativity. You got a problem with me or my videos? Great I don't care. Dozens of hours of new stuff has been uploaded to this platform in the time it took me to read this sentence. Go watch some of that instead of crying about how I sound dehydrated or the shadows in the background aren't perfectly symmetrical or whatever. There are tons of people whose work I don't engage in for dumb superficial reasons but the key part of that is that I don't engage doing so is pathetic and I'm furious that so much of it lives in my head rent free and not in a way that's cutting or anything the existence of these deeply dumb people just irritates me and I think about it too fucking much. Like my one rule is that I will never tell a rude comment or to kill themselves in the fact that it's as hard as it is sometimes means I have gone too far I'm done. The comments will remain as a place for people to have feelings but going forward consider them a me-free zone. Unfortunately this means people who have something valuable to say that they want me to see also have to put in some work but not that much. Join the discord or wait for a video premiere or livestream both of which I will continue to do as appropriate. And as appropriate it's going to kind of be my model. I hope to do two to three videos a month including the community selection. They'll be however long or complex as they have to be. That means you are likely to see sub 10 minute quick takes and 20 plus minute deep-ish dives sitting side by side. Heck maybe I'll start doing some minute long hella hot takes on shorts like I used to do on TikTok. Similarly any limitations I had placed on subjects in the past are going away. If a work resonates with me and I have something to say I will say it. Hopefully what I have to say is meaningful but even if it's not that's fine. A kind of bleak reality is that not only has YouTube not meaningfully changed my life it's probably impeded my life from meaningfully changing by becoming my sole creative outlet and keeping me working more or less on my own instead of building connections with others and branching out to different types of work. But I don't regret what I've done here nor do I want to give it up. I like having this place where I can express my thoughts and do so entirely on my own terms. A place where I can look back and see how I have and haven't changed over time. An archive of my personal experiences and perspectives. There's value in that for me and clearly others as well but it's time to stop pretending like the weaker of you could be anything more or less. And it's time to be okay with that. Thank you so much for watching and thank you particularly to those patrons I keep neglecting. My mom, my cat, Kat Saracada, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I am the sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindease, Andrew Madison Design, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you like this video, cool. If not, don't want to hear about it. If you want to see more, subscribe. See you in the next one.