Tom Nicholas
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My Next Video is About...
🕑 Added 2023-11-28 18:00:06 +0000 UTCWelcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.
Another belated Friday Update this week as life has continued to be incredibly busy! But we'll catch up, I promise!
What have I been up to this week?
This week, we’ve been making some great progress on the next video. Which I suppose means it’s probably time to tell you what it’s about…
For the past couple of years, I’ve been keen to close-out the year with a slightly more fun video. Not necessarily topics which aren’t worthwhile or interesting, but certainly one’s that have a bit of festive joy to them rather than just being doom and gloom.
Last year was my first real intentional stab at this with my video about Monopoly. There’s was certainly a decent chunk of economics and history in there, but it was still fairly lighthearted!
This December, we’re doing a similar thing and making a video about…
…drumrolll…
YouTubers holding microphones.
There’s been a trend on YouTube (and TikTok) over the past year or so of YouTube creators holding microphones in their videos. Often very tiny microphones.
I wanted to take what at first glance might seem like a fairly small little gag and see what it could tell us about where YouTube is as a platform in 2023 and how it might be changing.
I think it’s going to make for a nice, lighthearted piece to be sandwiched in between the slightly weightier Bibby Stockholm and disposable vape videos.
And the venue we filmed it in is great! I think it’s one of the most interesting things we’ve shot to date!
And outside of work?
Last weekend was my best friend’s wedding!
I therefore spent Friday working-from-train as I headed to London with a speech in hand to be his Best Man!
I’ve got a lot of weddings coming up this year. Dedicated readers of the Friday Update will know that I got married this summer. And, including my own, by the end of next year I’ll have attended 10 weddings in an 18 month period.
But this was a really special one. It was a very grand, formal affair and I think I managed to not look too scruffy!
As well as a really, really lovely day, it also ended up being just the two of us together the evening before as none of the other ushers could make it. We therefore had a really great evening playing table tennis in a games bar in Stratford and having a few drinks as well as rehearsing his speech!
What have I been reading/watching/listening to?
This week, I finally finished Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger.
I’m currently in a spot where I’m reading quite a few different books at the same time. Previously, I’ve had a problem where the periods of my life where I’ve read a lot have been brought to abrupt ends whenever I’ve read a slightly dud book.
In a recent podcast chat with Leena Norms (mentioned in a previous Friday Update), she suggested that reading a few books at once would mean I’d always at least be reading one which wasn’t dull!
So, while I strayed away from it for a while with just the last chapters to go, it was great to get back and polish this one off.
It really is a great exploration of the confusion that modern politics (and the modern world more broadly) tends to install in us.
It begins by focussing on the conspiracy movements which have arisen in recent years but gradually expands out to talk about so much more.
A definite must-read!
That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.
Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!
Comments
Tom Nicholas
I've had a few slightly heavier books to wade through lately (not always ones I thought were going to be heavy) so, yes, am finding this a useful method for keeping things interesting! And, yes, I guess we do the best to wrestle the institutions we have to our (more progressive!) will!
Tom Nicholas
Yeah, I'm enjoying rotating between a few things! Even when multiple books are good! And I'm glad you're looking forward to the end-of-year special. I hope it manages to continue the time-honoured tradition of videos which start off with something kinda silly but end up sort of having something to say about the state of the internet?
Amro
I agree, reading multiple books is the way forward. Sometimes I’m just not in the mood to finish off a heavy book and sometimes I do … so I have a few going at the same time. Of course it does mean that some sit on my bedside table looking sad for far too long. I thought you looked wedding-ish. I thought maybe it was the new video. “The institute of marriage as a form of patriarchal capitalist oppression” etc. jolly good! How lucky your friend was to have you as their best man. (I’ve never even been asked - of course I’d refuse - but …).
Zoe Alden
I highly recommend reading multiple books at once! I'm currently working on a book on Gramsci's politics, a political history of the IRA, the 6th edition of Bonilla-Silva's "Racism without Racists," another on the philosophy of science & the modern world, plus one or two more that I'm undoubtedly forgetting. I'm very excited for your video on the microphone phenomena! I really enjoyed your video on Monopoly last year, & I think this is a really nice way to close out the year. That is *a lot* of weddings, wow. Hope last weekend was thoroughly enjoyable for y'all!
