It’s All Going Up in Vape! | The Friday Update

Welcome 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.

What have I been up to this week?

This week, work on our upcoming trilogy of videos has really felt like it’s picked up steam.

For those of you who aren’t either regular readers of these updates (or viewers of my Twitch streams), we’re currently putting together a three part mini-series which aims to explain three prominent trends within contemporary global capitalism through the lens of disposable vapes.

Disposable e-cigarettes have completely taken over the vaping market over the past couple of years. And, I think their rise has a lot to tell us about other industries too.

We’re currently planning on calling the series Vape-o-nomics.

It was never really intended as a follow-on to last year’s Griftonomics. But Georgia and I were having a conversation about it in the office the other day and there are some similarities.

Despite quite different jumping-off-points, both use a topic which initially seems quite trivial as a way to open an audiences eyes to much larger trends which initially might seem a little boring, but nevertheless have great consequences for our lives.

Episode One of the trilogy is now completely written with most of the voice-over audio recorded. Georgia is currently hard at work cutting down archive footage and developing some fancy animations to help illustrate some of the points I make.

Whilst she works on that, I’ve been steaming ahead with writing Episode Two (which I think is currently my favourite in the trilogy).

I keep mentioning that I’m very aware that this is a pretty weird topic for a single video; let alone a mini-series. But, hopefully folks will find it intriguing enough to give it a chance!

(Below are a couple of the books which are inspiring one of the episodes!)

And outside of work?

My evenings more recently have been fairly busy with the start of my Twitch streams.

As hinted at above, I’ve been doing a bi-weekly stream over on Twitch since November. The platform approached me back in the summer and offered to give me some support in getting started.

And I’ve been really enjoying it!

It’s a great opportunity to talk about topics which I’m interested in or I think are important but which I don’t have time to make entire videos for the “main” YouTube channel about.

I’ve avoided posting about it too much on here because twice-weekly updates that I’m about to go live felt like they might get a bit annoying. But, if you’d like to be notified when I go live, you can follow the channel at https://twitch.tv/tom_nicholas

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

A couple of days ago, I began watching the Dropout original series Total Forgiveness.

Dropout is the new name for College Humour and, alongside a YouTube channel, the Dropout team also run a small Nebula-like indie streaming service (although not as good obviously, haha).

Georgia’s been talking about Total Forgiveness a lot lately. And, some footage of it cropped up in the last video we released.

The pitch is that it’s a gameshow featuring two members of the Dropout crew (who are also really good friends) setting each other increasingly difficult/scary/humiliating challenges. Their goal is to raise enough money to pay-off their incredibly-high student loans. For each challenge they complete, they each receive a chunk of money (with the amounts of money going up each episode).

It’s a really great example of using a silly premise in order to engage with a quite serious topic. While the series doesn’t exactly go into lots of detail about the student loan crisis in the US, they do consistently talk about the deep psychological of being submerged in so much debt. Whenever the bring on someone to help them with a challenge (such as a hairdresser to dye one of the participant’s hair a horrible colour), they’ll talk a bit about that person’s experience with loan debt too.

Perhaps the most challenging theme, however, comes in the tension that the two hosts feel between wanting to set the other difficult challenges whilst being aware of how big the financial impact on the other will be if they can’t complete the challenge. It begins to be a real strain on their relationship.

I’ve still got some episodes to go but I’m fascinated in where it goes. And have been thinking a lot about what further potential there might be for using reality TV as a way to explore really “big”, “important” topics in a way which highlight the considerable humanity of those topics in such an affecting way.

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!!