Matthew Cole

someone put jay kay dancing in this bag i'm too lazy

i rewatched this recently after not seeing it for like, probably about eight years or so. In terms of "video essays that have aged incredibly well" i think this one deserves to be pretty high up.

You don't need to know about Phil Fish or have opinions on Phil Fish, it's not about Phil Fish. it's about what Phil Fish represented, and how the exact sort of discourse firestorm about Phil Fish was identified at the time as a frightening pattern that would be a bad thing to replicate in the future.

and then the future happened and we replicated it over, and over, and over, and over

this particular video essay completely changed the direction i wanted to take my own work. so much of what i admire about ian danskin as an essayist is his ability to circumvent the sensational vitriol of many early gaming/culture youtubers, and focus less on the thing we think we're talking about in favor of the thing we're actually talking about. it's a skill that until fairly recently was not particularly common in video essayists, and i think the rhetorical usefulness of his approach is proved by how well even a video as old as this one has aged.

Just discovered Safari has a great bug that can pop an image out in front of the cohost banner