I Just Think That, Most Of The Time, You Really Do Need To Teach People How To Love You. And Equally,

I will get off the bus, and I will go to my girlfriend's apartment, and I will say "I don't think I did it all right, I don't think I remembered everything, but I know I am still good, and I know that I will go back tomorrow and get another chance, and it may not be perfect but the way you say "perfection stops movement " echos through my mind whenever I start to worry too much, and I think all that means that I love myself, and I think it means that you love me, too."

anyway when Susanna Clarke said "Horror novels have this idea that there’s a secret at the center of the world. And that secret is horrific. [That ] isn’t much of a secret, really. So this would be more about the fact that, at the center of things, there’s a secret or mystery, and it’s joyful" that actually changed my entire life and how I approach any fiction and I think about it constantly

Book club paintings vol. 2 ♡ Reading (2004) by Vladimir Gusev / Deliciosa soledad (1909) by Frank Bramley

Us

"Un-uhlaive? UN-UHLAIVE? Ma'am, that man has been killed. He has been MUHDUHED. To DEATH."

thinking about this today

Marie-Joseph Clavel - The lake of love - the weeping willow (ca. 1918)

I'm still seeing a lot of angry takes in the tags about how excessive Watcher's current costs are and how all fans really want, apparently, is "just shane and ryan sitting in a basement" back again. While I do think Watcher is probably spending over budget and that's a real issue, a lot of the takes I'm seeing show a fundamental misunderstanding of how video production works and where costs actually lie. So a few quick things that I just keep seeing that are bothering me:

It was never just Shane and Ryan in a basement. BFU did a great job selling that conceit and making sure you never saw anyone beyond them and maybe TJ, but they absolutely had other crew members with them on ghost hunts and they didn't do all the work on BFU themselves. This Q&A from Season 2 lists 36 people on staff for Buzzfeed Unsolved. It's fair to make arguments that Watcher may or may not need 25 people, but those arguments should not be coming from a place of "before it was just Shane and Ryan and nobody else."

If you don't know how many people are needed to make a professional video from a TV/film standpoint, you will not have a reasonable grasp of why Watcher wants to keep 25 people on staff. Sure, some YouTubers get by with a ring light and a contracted editor. The Watcher team have stated repeatedly that they do not want to work as just YouTubers and see themselves more as a production studio—so why do people keep referencing the YouTube model to understand their business? This is like asking the local shake shop why it doesn't function like the kids' lemonade stand down the block. The item category is similar but they're not trying for the same products or process.

The "gold dusted food" is not the big budget sink you think it is. On most TV shows I've worked on it's normal to partner with businesses that are shown onscreen and work out a deal where the price of the product (in this case the gold food) is reduced or eliminated in exchange for the free publicity. Watcher very likely made a deal with every restaurant it worked with to make the Korea trip affordable for the company. The real budget spends are on things you're probably not seeing but that still matter: camera and lighting equipment is expensive, insurance for that equipment is expensive, business overhead and paying your staff are expensive. So again—it's fine to critique Watcher for the streaming plan and the perceived budgetary issues, but go into this knowing the costs might not be coming from the things you see onscreen.

My source is that I work in TV and film and actually have a clue on how the industry functions. Again, 36 people worked on Unsolved (and those were the people mention in Season 2—who knows how big the team blew up past that in later seasons). Entertainment work is real work, and demands decent equipment, competent staff, and the same types of business and budget problems you'd find in any other business (overhead, staffing, etc.). Feel free to critique Watcher's business model, but first try to understand where that model is coming from and what goals it's attempting to serve.

Daniel Garber, Evans Road