Howdy Pardnerrs,
Hope you're having a good New Year's. And if you're not...well, here's a video which will hopefully make it even worse.
I travelled to the USA to keep working in-person with Kat on the plagiarism distribution project, since we wanted to minimize the chance I made a massive mistake while left to my own devices and emailed all the money into a big hole. While I was there, we realised there were American Oreo products we missed during the Oreo video, so we took it upon us to bring another crime into the world.
But more importantly, I'm happy to announce that as of a week or so ago, we're distributing the Plagiarism video's ad revenue to the many people who were plagiarised by a certain YouTuber. In fact, there's another ten people I am supposed to send money to immediately after posting this, so I should make this quick.
This has been the most complicated and difficult thing we've ever done. Combing through dozens and dozens of deleted YouYube videos, trying to track down authors and figure out how to even contact half of them, trying to prove we're not scammers...seriously, making videos was easy in comparison. Without Kat's help and expertise I'm sure I would have messed it up. I'm so thankful to have such a good collaborator, and friend, helping me with this, because I really don't know how I could have done it otherwise. Kat has been a presence in my videos for the past five years, but this year she saved my life, and I'm only barely kidding when I put it like that. Thank you so much, Kat, for everything. Please remember to invoice me more often.
And thank you. Thanks to your support, I was able to spend a long time making a stupid internet video, and then spend even longer giving its ad revenue away, and not feel like I was throwing away the success, or fear abandonment from my audience for taking the time. I got to do the right thing, and I got to do it right, and I can't express in words how much that means. I cried a little bit writing this, and I'm not afraid to admit it.
The next video, Adobe Must Die: The Rise of Open Source (better name pending), will hopefully be done enough soon that you'll be seeing pieces of it in the near future, but the final stages of the plagiarism project took longer than I expected, so sorry about that.
This year has been extremely productive for me. That sounds like a lie! I haven't released a public video to the channel this year! And yet the stuff I've worked on has been some of the most exciting stuff I've ever done, and I've developed so many skills as part of making the upcoming videos that I feel like a completely different person from who I was 365 days ago. There may well come a day when you say to yourself "Oh, that's what he was doing all this time. I thought he was lying. That's egg on my face."
Here's to the egg,
Harry.