Hi everyone!
Another month has whizzed by — it’s been a busy one in my offline life. One fun thing I did this month was go to Croatia for the first time. My mum had to go to Zagreb for a few nights for work and I accompanied her — I didn’t do too much planning or research in advance but I loved it! I thought it was such an interesting and beautiful city, I’d love to go back to the country in the future.
Some bad news on the YouTube side — as some of you might have seen, my GouSotsu video has been blocked globally due to a copyright claim. I’m in the process of fighting this (I think it’s actually currently visible as a result), it’s a new(ish) situation for me so I had to do quite a bit of research to decide what action to take.
The long and short of it: what companies want to avoid is having work completely reprinted so that people can consume it for free illegally. Video essays, it can broadly be said, are an exception to this — they aren’t a replacement for the original work and use the content in a “transformative” way. Even so, videos can still be automatically or manually flagged to YouTube when they contain copyrighted content, which can result in any number of restrictions such as demonetisation (where revenue goes to the copyright holder instead of the video publisher) and restricted visibility (sometimes only in certain territories, sometimes globally).
I have had all of these things happen to videos — I don’t tend to fight back despite having good chances as that process looks like this: you initially dispute the claim and the company review it, they might agree to release the claim and remove restrictions (perhaps if it was an automatic flag) or reinstate it. You can then appeal, but this moves the matter into legal territory — you submit your reasons and information and can ultimately have to fight the case in court. The company look at your appeal and decide again whether to release the claim. If not, at this stage, they can request the video be removed completely and your channel be given a copyright strike. You can then submit a counter-notification — this is where the copyright holder has to submit a lawsuit if they still want the video down.
There are various risks here: losing the video (and all views and comments), the copyright strike (these do expire, but if you end up with three at once, your channel gets terminated), and, of course, being taken to court!
At this point, I’ve appealed and Molebeat (the copyright holders, these sometimes act on behalf of the companies we may know) have responded with a takedown request. They’ve given me seven days to respond, and I think this is why the video has gone live again. Once the time elapses, I’ll submit a counter-notification. It’s a risk and not one that’s been worth taking in the past, but based on all my research about Molebeat specifically (who are well-known in the anime analysis YouTube scene for this kind of action), the cases tend to fall apart at the counter-notification stage because no single video is worth the lawsuit (especially a lawsuit that probably doesn’t have legs to stand on). I’ll know the outcome one way or another next month.
There’s not much else YouTube news — I did want to look at putting in time to work on the video weekly but between everything going on it just didn’t pan out. It’s shaping up to be a really busy few months but I’ll keep trying! In the worst case, this will hopefully be more feasible later in the year.
Otherwise, I saw and read a few things this month:
I saw Project Hail Mary spontaneously with some friends without knowing much about it, though I had heard good things. I was hoping for mindless entertainment which it essentially was though I found it fairly disappointing, especially for the setting. I didn’t feel invested in the main character or the plot and it felt like the film would lightly touch on interesting topics only to move on (characters coming to terms with certain death, complete isolation and its impact on mental health). I also found the improbability or just impossibility/lack of explanation of mechanics frustrating (especially the communication between the main character and the alien lol). I admit I was endeared to the alien character but that was about it. And too long!!! I think I was expecting something more serious in tone and the direction felt like a waste, but I obviously wasn’t the audience.
Fortunately I had a better experience seeing 3670 — a film about a North Korean defector exploring the gay scene in Seoul. A touch too melodramatic at points and I found some of the characters’ decisions hard to parse but also some really touching and powerful performances, very deft interweaving of different social elements (the main character’s life as a defector, then as a gay man, the split in his identity and communities). Heartened that films like this are being made, a delight, so funny!!! I’ll remember how this one made me feel. Definitely recommended.
Finally, I read Mieko Kawakami’s new book, Sisters in Yellow. I discovered Mieko Kawakami a few years ago and have since read all the novels she has published in English and fallen completely in love. There’s something hypnotic about her writing style and always a firm foundation of social commentary that’s subtle but well-woven into the stories rather than preachy.
I picked Sisters in Yellow up pretty much as soon as it was published (in Libreria, an excellent London bookshop). It’s a long book (somewhere around 500 pages if I remember), but I enjoyed every second and never felt it dragged. Overall, I really liked it — I didn’t read any reviews until I finished and was really surprised to find this didn’t seem to be popular opinion. I find all Kawakami’s books very digestible (if sometimes heavy) and thought this was one of her better works. The novel deals with themes of relationships between women, familial and pseudofamilial, class and the criminal underworld. It feels the natural endpoint to what Kawakami has been building towards in her other novels and presents an incredibly realised picture of 1990s Tokyo and especially its main character, Hana. If I were to have any criticism, much of the book is spent with a sense of building tension and the accompanying denouement is fairly short — but even this is really just me saying I feel like I could read about Kawakami’s characters forever. It really feels like their lives continue on off the page — a big complement. I would love to hear others’ opinions on this one (and honestly write more about it, if I had the time).
Videos-wise, I just have one: this analysis of Korean singer-songwriter IU’s discography through the lens of use of colour. IU has been one of my favourite artists for a long time and I actually have plans to hopefully one day talk about her on my channel. This is a great analysis.
That’s all for now! See you next month!