Nearly There! | The Friday(ish) 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.

I hope those of you who celebrate have had/are having a great Easter, Passover and/or Ramadan! And, to everyone else, I hope you had a great week!

What have I been up to this week?

I was really hoping that this week’s edition of the Friday Update was going to begin with me telling you that I had completed the script for the next video and was moments away from filming it. And that is very nearly the case.

Those of you that read last week’s edition of this little blog will have read that I had, at the last minute, decided to interweave some discussion of the present moral panic among American conservatives about “Critical Race Theory” into my exploration of how right-wing think tanks shape the news. After doing a lot of research and writing many hundreds of words on the topic, however, I increasingly found that the script I was writing ended up feeling like two videos that had somehow crashed together. The set-up and first couple of sections felt really clear and then it felt like another random topic came out of no-where and derailed things.

As such, I made the decision about halfway through this week that I’m going to mostly leave out the stuff about “Critical Race Theory” from this video and am going to hold-on to that research for a potential future follow-up video. It probably won’t be the very next video as there’s a “topical” topic that I’m keen to cover whilst its vaguely relevant. But it may be that I return to it for the video after if it seems like something there might be a viewership.

Making decisions like this is always really tough as it does feel a little like I’ve just wasted the past week of my life and kept everyone waiting longer than necessary for my next video. I hope you’ll forgive me for that—I promise it’ll make for a much more coherent video! And, if/when I do make that Critical Race Theory video, I guess I’ve got most of the research under my belt already!

And outside of work?

This has been a slightly different week as I moved a bunch of my work days around to be working over the weekend so that I could spend some time with my partner’s younger brothers who live in France but have popped over to stay during their Easter school holidays. With the pandemic, it’s been a long time since we’ve been able to see them and so it’s been really lovely to hang out and catch-up! They’re very into their video games and so I spent most of the time losing at Super Smash Bros. Although, them playing so much switch did inspire me to get back to playing Disco Elysium!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

Earlier this week, I finally got a chance to watch Annihilation. I’d heard a lot about the film in various YouTube videos and essays and the like so was really looking forward to seeing it. For those that haven’t seen it, it’s a sci-fi/horror film that focuses on an unexplained meteor strike that leads to an area in rural America becoming super-weird with all kinds of reality-bending anomalies that I can’t quite work out what words to use to describe!

I’m not sure it changed my world quite as much as I thought it might. However, I have since seen that the book its based upon is the first in a trilogy and I would definitely be interested to find out where they go next. So, I guess I might have to check out the books when get a chance!

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Fridayish 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!!