400,000 subs (and a mustache) | The Friday(ish) Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday(ish) 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?

It was a slightly shorter week for me last week (hence this update being published on Monday rather than Friday). It was my partner’s birthday (and a milestone one at that), so I took Thursday and Friday off to celebrate and treat her! But, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been making progress with the next video!

This time around, we’re trying a slightly different way of working. In order to make the most efficient use of our excellent new editor Georgia’s time, I’m going to be filming the first couple of sections of the video this week and next so that Georgia can start editing those while I write the second half of the video. This approach isn’t perfect—I’m quite aware that I might suddenly wish I’d written something in an earlier section a little bit differently when I’m writing a later section! However, luckily I have a really good plan and outline for this video already, so I think it’s going to go quite well.

This means that the first half of last week was spent making some final tweaks to the script for the section I’m going to be filming soon. And then I set about ordering some fantastic bits of costume—including the brilliant moustache pictured above!

In other news, this morning I woke up to 400,000 subscribers on the YouTube channel! What an awesome milestone! Thanks everyone!

And outside of work?

It was really nice to have a bit of time away from writing over the past few days. I didn’t take much time at all off for Christmas and New Year this year, so this felt like a slightly belated Winter holidays! As I mentioned above, it was my partner’s birthday and so we went on a little trip to a town called Newquay in Cornwall, which is about an hour’s drive away. It’s a very seasonal town, built for the summer, so it was very quiet, but it was absolutely lovely to have a change of scenery for a few days and to unwind a little!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

I mentioned in my last Friday Update that I’ve recently been toying with the idea of working on some kind of project about the history of capitalism from its inception to the present day. I still don’t know entirely what form this project should or could take: a series of videos, a book, a live theatre piece, a bi-monthly curated box of snacks… Nevertheless, this idea has stuck with me and so has been shaping what I’ve been reading over the past week.

In my downtime (because even in my downtime, I find myself trying to research something, haha!), I’ve been returning to some books I’ve previously read and taking more thorough notes on them. There’s a great chapter in Ha-Joon Chang’s Economics: A User’s Guide that I’ve been pulling a lot from, as well as dipping back into Jason Hickel’s The Divide. Again, I’ve no idea what this project is buts I’ve been reading, I’ve found myself identifying loads and loads of potential ideas for future videos drawing out some interesting episodes from the history of our present economic system!

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday(ish) 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!!