Posted by sarahZedig on Sep 03, 2026
Yes, after more than a decade of unrelated side-projects masquerading as the real deal, I’m finally ready to reveal the show my channel was secretly named for all along. It took tremendous effort to maintain the ruse of being “a video essayist” for as many years as I did, and I won’t lie and say I never had my doubts. But today, as I at last cross the finish line of my ludicrous deception, I can say with all sincerity that it was worth every second of psychological turmoil. And I’m confident that once you’ve given your eyes a real meaty fistful of my crowning entertainment contraption, I’ll be the first social media influencer you actually thank for gaslighting you!
Okay, so obviously I’m joking. Or am I? I am. The new LTAS has only been in development for a few months. I tried to come up with a different name for a long time, but the punchline of “new thing is old thing” tickled me too much to resist. But it’s true that this is my new show, and I’m gonna be doing a lot of it! In fact, if you like the first episode, there are already TWO MORE that you can watch RIGHT NOW if you’re a paid supporter. This three-episode block is what I’ve been calling the “pilot,” basically a proof of concept for myself and other people. It went so much better than I expected it to, and I’m so excited to finally share the results with you.
I have a lot to say about this project, but the most important thing is that you watch the video. The whole thing pretty much sells itself, I think. Leave a comment and share it with friends or in discord servers if the mood strikes you. If, after all that, you still want to know more... well, here’s more.
Let’s Talk About “Let’s Talk About Stuff”
In my previous update post, I wrote at some length about why in early 2026 I decided to formally give up video essays and shift focus to something more sustainable. My focus was mostly fixed on the personal side of things-- my relationship to being a video essayist, and all the ways in which I’d allowed it to fester and grow toxic. Today, in this post, I’d like to circle back around to a less emotional side of things and discuss some of the basic practical realities that soured me on the job. But before we go into that, a bit of housekeeping.
New LTAS episodes will be released to the public every Thursday. Future episodes will be made available early to supporters as soon as they’re finished. In keeping with the parlance established by the “pilot” episodes, “season 1” will be somewhere in the range of 5-7 episodes and cover films of my choosing. “Season 2” will then feature a random selection of movies from a large pool of candidates I plan to assemble over the course of “season 1.” The exact method I’ll use to make these random selections is still TBD. I don’t have any plans to let supporters vote on what movie I cover next, but I will make a submission form of some kind for suggested additions to the selection pool. Once I’ve got both seasons wrapped, “season 3” and beyond will likely utilize a hybrid randomized/self-selection process based on whatever lessons I’ve learned by then.
I lay out this ambitious roadmap despite having only filmed three episodes at time of writing in order to cut off any erstwhile presumption on your part that LTAS is a thoughtless or half-assed project compared to what I was doing before. Despite my easygoing presentation style and the unresearched, off-the-cuff nature of my analysis, I have actually put a lot of thought into the shape and form of this new venture. In fact, I might have put more thought into this than any other overarching video project I’ve ever attempted.
I. A House in Search of a Home.
My last big update, and plenty of others before it, spent nonzero wordcount criticizing my chronic inability to follow through on any of the Big Plans I’ve announced for this channel in the past. Those plans (to disastrously oversimplify) largely failed because they were designed for a creator with a vastly different work ethic and attention span than what I actually possessed. I concocted those plans thinking they were the solution to the very problem they ultimately became victims of, not realizing that the dysfunction I wanted to address went a lot deeper than the fiddly peculiars of any given blueprint.
What sucks most of all is that I knew this was the case. I knew there was something I’d ignored, some uncomfortable reality tugging at the edges of my resolve, and I kept doubling down anyway. The result was years of accumulating guilt and shame as I chased my past self in circles to ever-lower viewership, convinced that I could set the clock back to the height of my meager popularity through sheer force of will alone. Needless to say, it didn’t work.
LTAS is different. It emerged out of a process of genuine soul-searching after I decided to formally give up on video essays, which allowed me to be brutally honest about this whole arrangement for maybe the first time since I started. For as much of myself as I always put into them, most of my approach to video essays was dictated by what the creators I admired were doing. Direction, humor, tone, structure; I was thoughtfully borrowing components from many types of video essay (and I think I did a pretty okay job), but it occurs to me now that I never really figured out my style in that process. Maybe I never even tried. I was more enamored with the hypothetical possibilities of the video essay form than I was with how I could make that form work for me.
Imagine trying to build the perfect forever house for you and your spouse and your three kids and pets and the extended polycule and any visiting friends or family, before you’ve even had your first kiss. It’s like, buddy, I know this seems important right now but you’ve got a lot of living left to do before that particular problem even comes close to your top twenty most pressing priorities. I was good at coming up with video essays that I personally wanted to see exist; I was a lot less good at coming up with video essays that I actually wanted to make, or at least had any realistic capacity to produce. If I’m to continue working as an internet video creator (and I do genuinely want to do that), I can’t afford to stay stuck on that self-imposed merry-go-round forever.
II. Tasks and Labors.
I came up with the idea for this series sometime in May or June 2026, a little while after I decided to quit video essays and shift gears into something a bit more lo-fi. There were a few criteria in mind-- 25-30 minute runtime, minimally complex editing, a fixed set with a fixed formula and a hard set of rules to keep me on task, and ideally a weekly or biweekly release schedule. I’ve circled around this general media-shape many times over the years, and indeed I have an old notebook with my original outline for “Let’s Talk About Stuff” (the channel) from before I’d even made any proper essays. Back then I was still imagining these as scripted videos, direct address type things the likes of which we’ve all seen a million of, with options for discussing comics, games, and music as well as movies. Obviously with this show I’m only talking about movies, but “Let’s Talk About Stuff” just sounds better and less generic than “Let’s Talk About Movies” or whatever.
The reason LTAS has sustainable energy behind it compared to prior projects is the purpose it serves for me. This is not, in the strict artistic sense, “What I want to do.” LTAS isn’t a dream project, a precious baby, an ambitious longterm whatever whatever. From the beginning, I wanted this series to occupy a dispassionate and... let’s say formally unambitious place in my heart. What LTAS is is practice. It’s designed from the ground up to be a series I could reasonably keep doing for the rest of my life, and more importantly one that I can see myself wanting to keep doing a year from now, five years, ten, twenty, irrespective of platform or any other factors.
That’s not a promise, obviously. A lot can happen in this silly old life. But that was very much my thinking when coming up with the rules for this show. Sustainable. Repeatable. Useful for me, entertaining for you, and fundamentally allergic to scope creep. I care about the quality of these videos, of course, but only insofar as they meet and do not exceed the rudimentary standards I’ve set for myself. Ruthlessly low-effort, but never tipping over into outright laziness.
Here’s the thing. “YouTube” (that is to say, the act of creating and releasing videos on a free and publicly-accessible video hosting platform) is my job. It’s where I’ve found the biggest audience willing to support my work, and it’s the skillset to which I’ve devoted a sizeable majority of my adult life learning. I like making videos. But what I love, what I want to do, is make art. Movies, books, photography... even video essays. What drew me to The Video Essay in the first place was its unique ability to fuse art-making and art-criticism, a taboo in academic film studies that I always bristled against as a student. I still believe that the form has tremendous expressive potential that we’ve barely scratched the surface of, and I wanted to be someone digging deeper. It’s unfair to ask of a film critic that they also be a competent filmmaker in order to find employment, but I felt (and still feel) that I live comfortably enough in the middle ground to do both.
If only that was enough. Having the ability to do both doesn’t make either discipline easier. Often the opposite. Script-writing is an intellectually taxing process. Doing research, making arguments, making jokes, editing, rewriting, reading aloud, editing again. You can get a serviceable script at the second draft. I didn’t want serviceable. I wanted my videos to be sharp as a razor and clear-eyed enough to hold up a decade from now. A good script can take months, and that labor can bake your brain something fierce. Then there’s the filming, you make a set, light it, mic it, pull out the homemade teleprompter, test it, run it, run it again, and that’s your whole day. If you have multiple locations, costumes, more elaborate bits, maybe it’s your whole week. You can get good enough results with a lot less work than that. I didn’t want good enough. I wanted to push myself, try new things, learn new things, always and forever Improve. Then there’s the editing, pick the best takes, find the right clips, color correct, trim hanging frames (a pet peeve of mine in other people’s videos), equalize dialogue, source images, keyframe animations for jokes, level the music, render and upload, re-edit/render/upload to appease Content ID as many times as it takes to slip under the radar, make the thumbnail, release it, promote it... and then feel guilty for needing a couple days to recover before getting started on the next one.
There’s a reason that “writer” “actor” “director” “gaffer” “sound mixer” “editor” “producer” and “promoter” are all different jobs in traditional unionized film production. Inside each of those quotes is a discipline you could spend the next ten years of your life mastering to the exclusion of all else and still only be slightly above average. On YouTube, it’s the height of privileged success-enabled extravagence to have even one spare head to hang one of those hats on.
III. Video Essay Creep
Carlos Maza recently released a video called “Video Essay Creep,” about why video essays (and the gaps between them) just keep getting longer. I think he’s right on the money in digging deeper than the obvious economic and social incentives we tend to lean on when talking about this stuff, and I recommend you give it a watch as a supplement to this post. But I want to take his conclusions about why video essayists are prone to scope creep even further. I think part of the “problem” here, if you can call it that, is a generational one. Millennials and elder Gen Z came up in a world full of documentaries and talk shows and variety shows and so so so much else besides, magazines highlighting art in every medium, mass-cultural conversations, decently well-funded institutions. I don’t want to make it out to be a paradise, it’s always been brutally and unnecessarily difficult to make a living as an artist who doesn’t just want to make products. But it was better than it is today. A pipeline existed. There were structures and institutions for funding & distributing the arts. I think Video Essay Creep is a natural result of having grown up in that longform-media-rich environment. None of us started on YouTube wanting to do low effort stuff forever. Intentionally or not, it was a training ground for bigger better things. As we aged through our 20s and experienced the market/the future repeatedly fall out from under us, YouTube increasingly felt like the only viable vehicle to keep heading in whatever direction implied by the professional edutainment environment of the 90s and early 2000s.
YouTube never made that transition with us. It is actively hostile to work with artistic aspirations. There is no pipeline anymore because YouTube (and the other tech companies) killed it. I think all this time we’ve been trying to manifest one into existence by good vibes alone. Sure, the odds are stacked against me; but what if I made a video so good, so entertaining, so insightful, that it somehow counterbalanced all those odds and blew the doors our prior assumptions about the platform? Impossible. It’s too big, too decentralized, too captured. Even if you made something as good as, say, Carl Sagan’s PBS-produced Cosmos, in what world could it possibly have the same mass-cultural impact Cosmos had? There’s no syndication. No re-runs. No newspapers or verticals or well-read blogs dedicated to shining a light on these things. It’s whatever reach you’ve established with your own social network, and it’s whatever amount of attention the algorithm decides you’re worth. That’s it. You do all the advertising. No one watches old videos. You don’t get input on what YouTube wants from you. It’s wrist slaps or silence or inexplicable and likely unreproduceable success. We can’t unionize. We can’t srike. We can’t boycot. No one’s hiring us to make what we’re already making but Bigger and Better, with a team and an office and a network of cross-media connections for high profile distribution. We kind of had that, very briefly, in the 2010s but unfortunately what happens when you pay articulate and well-educated young people to write about the 21st century is that they end up saying things that are true, and that’s very inconvenient for the professional liars who sign their paychecks. So down the venture capital toilet that entire career path went, and now everyone has a substack instead. Cool.
There is no solution to this problem that doesn’t involve mandatory employment recognition and heavy regulation at worst, and outright public ownership of all digital infrastructure with a well-funded and generous arts grant system at best. You can’t beat them at their own game, so I’m done playing. LTAS allows me to maintain a presence on YouTube that I can be proud of, while also freeing me from the perverse metrical prison YouTube wants to trap you in. If YouTube died tomorrow, I could move LTAS to Patreon or Vimeo or even PeerTube and not lose a wink of sleep. There is no future on YouTube as long as YouTube continues to exist, so I’m done pinning my future to its lapel. I’d like for LTAS to do well, I could certainly use the money, but I’ve always been wary of ad revenue as a reliable source of income anyway and would much rather lean on crowdfunding instead (though that model has its own problems, and will never hold a candle to good old fashioned government art grants).
LTAS is my “job” now, in the sense that it’s the thing I intend to clock in and clock out on with professional regularity. The simplicity of its production pipeline will allow me to build up a hefty backlog, thus freeing me up to guiltlessly think about YouTube not at all and focus instead on whatever other project happens to be calling my name at the time. I want to be able to work on Godfeels (and my other books) without feeling like it’s happening on stolen time. I want to be able to immerse myself in unique projects for weeks at a time, never fearing the rude awakening that comes when you realize you’ve been in a fugue for half a month and let all your responsibilities slide. More than anything, though, I want to give myself the space and time to (eventually) find a way back to video essays that doesn’t leave me feeling so awful about myself.
IV. You’re Never Better Than What You’re Equal To.
There’ve been many nights over the last three or so years where I’ve looked long and hard at the creative forces pulling at me with no small amount of despair. Godfeels, and subsequently my rekindled desire to write original fiction, has been a consistent source of creative inspiration and a nexus for building community... that makes no money. Film work is a blast and something I really want to spend more time doing again, but I can’t and probably don’t want to do it full time anymore... which really limits my opportunities to make money. And then there’s video essays, something I love making and also hate making, an albatross of obligation and genuine investment overshadowing every single thing I do, or don’t do, with my time. I could easily see how doing all these things the way I wanted to was impossible. Something had to go. Deep down, I wanted it to be video essays... but it couldn’t be video essays, that’s whay pays the bills, so I stopped the train of thought dead in its tracks and just kept on trucking as I had been, fingers crossed that by some miracle everything would just work itself out.
I can’t really tell you how much better I feel now that I’ve accepted what I’ve been trying to tell myself for years. I set a goal with LTAS, outlined it on paper, shot three episodes as a “pilot” to test the theory and streamline the workflow... and it worked. From conception to the moment I’m writing this post, LTAS has gone exactly according to plan. I hit a minor speedbump in episode 2 when I ran afoul of copyright, but that turned out to be a miraculously easy fix that’s as simple as ctrl+c alt+v to implement in any future videos. Audio leveling took more work than expected, but I’m fixing that with the regular series by running a second mic straight to the TV. All the little imperfections and mistakes that in other projects would have left me demoralized are, here, the entire point. I called this a “pilot” precisely because I knew I couldn’t figure out how to make this show in a lab. Give up on the idea of starting the show in its finished form. These episodes don’t exist to be perfect, they exist to exist. You’ll notice differences in lighting, image quality, framing etc. This is me testing things and seeing what works vs what doesn’t. If a lesson is learned, I’ll apply it to the next one. Simple as that.
It’s so fucking obvious now that I’m on the other side. I loved writing essays in college, except for the part where I had to rigorously research and cite them first. Sorry, I’m part of the problem! I like talking and thinking and reading about media, but I just don’t think I’m built to be someone like Tim Rogers or Kevin Perjurer. The only times I’ve ever been able to consistently produce work over a long stretch of time was when I had projects like this-- Trans Questioning at its peak, my streaming era in 2019-20, and before that a Let’s Play show that released over 600 thirty minute episodes in the span of about 14 months, which I have never talked about publicly and that no longer exists anywhere you or I can see it. Freeform extemporaneous commentary that’s a mix of funny and thoughtful is a niche I just happen to find very comfortable. My mistake was the illusion of importance, of monolithic centrality, believing that these projects had to aspire to be more than just “another podcast” “another stream” “another let’s play show.” What I’ve learned is that you are always going to be just another whatever-it-is. The medium is the message, friends. There’s better, there’s worse, there’s different, there’s more expensive, more ambitious, more stylized, but at the end of the day your stuff always shares the same feed as every other thing that isn’t what yours is. To the platform, it’s all the same content. And you can never be better than what you are equal to.
V. Inspirations.
My inspirations here are probably pretty obvious, but whatever, let’s get into it anyway. The biggest loudest one is Red Letter Media, who’ve been doing Best of the Worst for so long it’s hard to remember a time before them. If you’ve never watched, every episode of BOTW (not that one) sees its hosts pick or be randomly assaulted by selections from their vast collection of audience-sourced VHS and DVD garbage. It follows a simple repeatable structure: the hosts select and read descriptions; we get brief flashes of their group watchthrough; then there’s a roundtable where they discuss each selection at length, cutting to relevant moments from the screening when appropriate. The big difference, of course, is that they largely watch crap and are there to (lovingly) make fun of bad movies.
Derisive sarcasm is the mode of most shows with a live-watch component, whether it’s MST3K, Riff Tracks, or Evasive making a bunch of trans women watch The Hot Chick. And that’s chill! Who doesn’t love sitting on a couch with friends to loudly hound a horrible motion picture every once in a while? There’s a practical advantage to this mode from a video-production standpoint as well: comedy does numbers. Internet video has always been driven by nerds who are angry and need to make it everyone else’s problem. It’s funny, cathartic, easy to watch (when it’s done well), and easy to do as a day job. The repeatability of BOTW’s formula was at the front of my mind for sure.
But I don’t want to be just another snide internet commentator. With LTAS, I wanted to explore the constructive possibilities of the live-watch format. The question was, how do you do that without losing the irreverant sense of humor that makes this kind of show watchable? The last thing I want to make is “What if there was a Best of the Worst you could air on the Wholesome Games Direct?” Luckily, this wasn’t nearly the challenge I thought it’d be. I say in the first episode that I have a habit of pausing movies to analyze the [coughs pretentiously] mise-en-scene of the picture and tease out meanings from my observations. In truth, I do this a lot less often than I think about doing it, because it’s annoying to pause all the time when you’re just hanging out with friends even IF what you pause to talk about is interesting. As I brainstormed ideas in the early stages of making this show, it occurred to me that unleashing my inner monologue could be entertaining in itself. Some of my favorite video essay moments are when I stopped to do really close scene analysis, and I can remember a lot of comments sharing my favoritism. It’s something I’m good at that people seem to find entertaining, and I enjoy doing it a lot. So I figured, what if that was the whole show?
Everything fell into place after that. I could immediately tell that this idea fit the contours of my artistic predilections like tailored glove. It has pieces of RLM, Super Best Friends, ViHart, and the “season” structure itself is directly inspired by Action Button Reviews, yet those pieces are totally incidental and not really something I thought about consciously, any more than a carpenter needs to meditate on what size of nail to use in the moment. There are plenty of shows like LTAS, but I’m confident that LTAS is a show only I can make. It’s the first project that feels truly mine, that has the flexibility to grow as I grow and change when I need it to change. It’s an outlet for my experiences as a film worker and film student that treats many different kinds of movie as equally deserving of popular entertainment status, and will hopefully expose viewers to media they may otherwise have never heard of. I like the idea of watching a Czech silent drama for this show and it being as good a time for you as if I’d watched an 80s direct to video action flick. We’ll see if I can pull it off, but that’s the dream. And it’s one I can see myself happily pursuing for a long time.
But the real inspiration here is my partner Zoe. A few years back she endeavored to write at least 500 words a day, and after keeping up the habit for a while the quality of her writing (which was already very good) shot through the roof. When the daily writing stopped, she shifted gears to figure drawing gestures and anatomy studies. Even without being perfectly consistent, the fruits of those labors remain obvious to any outside observor. She’s helped me to understand the meaning of “practice”, not as a rote after-school obligation but as an attitude one brings to their work. I’ve wondered for a long time what that would look like for me, but what’s the video equivalent of “500 words a day” or “twenty minutes of gestures”? I didn’t want to become a vlogger, but I also knew anything that might serve this purpose would need to be unscripted (which for reasons I’ve listed elsewhere made the whole concept a no-go until recently).
LTAS is my attempt to manifest the attitude of An Art Practice. I’ve described it elsewhere as “the videological equivalent of a morning Yoga routine.” I know putting a three digit episode counter in the thumbnail is a pretty fucking ostentatious choice, but that’s the challenge I’ve set for myself. And I hope by now it’s clear to you why I’m confident in meeting that challenge.
VI. Conclusions.
And I think that just about covers it! Forgive me if I repeated myself in a few places, this post came together piecemeal after weeks of false starts and I just don’t have it in me to roll up my sleeves on it any higher than they already are. So I’ll just close out with a few words about the future.
Now that I’ve made peace with not being a video essayist, I want to do something with my vault of unfinished scripts. Maybe supporter-only livestreams where I read them out and talk about why they never crossed the finish line? I’m mulling it. At some point I want to revamp my crowdfunding pages to give a more accurate description of what I’m doing here, so I’ll leave figuring out bonus content until then. I’m also planning on releasing non-LTAS, non-video-essay videos on the main channel as whim commands, for instance if I happened to spend so much time writing a good Letterboxd review of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma that not reading it out on video would feel like a waste. This is something I’ve thought about doing many times in the past and always talked myself out of once I considered all the editing I’d have to do to bring it up to parity with what’s expected of a video essay. Now that I’m not a video essayist, I don’t give a shit how it looks! It could be a blurry closeup of me reading straight from my phone for all I care. Maybe (probably) I’ll put (slightly) more effort into it than that (if I do it at all), but I don’t have to, and that’s pretty freeing in and of itself.
I orginally intended to read out supporter names in the first episode, but right before I started recording the outro Zoe gave me an excellent suggestion. What if I read supporter names only in the finales of each season (or ep3 of the pilot in this case), and used that as a selling point? “Support me within this period if YOU want your name read aloud this season!” How does that sound to y’all? I must admit, my desire for a clean 25-30 minute per-episode runtime really cast a long shadow over my name-read obligation. I thought about splitting them up evenly between episodes, and maybe I’ll still do that, but that adds nonzero complexity to what I wanted to be a very plug-and-play outro template. For now, relegating credits and name-reads to the finale episodes feels like a good compromise.
Okay, I’m ending the post now because I’ve been trying to finish it for three hours and my brain is fried. Thanks as always for your support, and I can’t wait to hear what you think about the new Let’s Talk About Stuff!