TL;DR – weekly A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms videos in Jan and Feb. Then the Planet of the Apes video. Then Dune videos. House of the Dragon S3 mid-year.
Thanks for your patience in 2025! We worked on some Dune videos, and released the Frank Herbert video, which I'm proud of. But then I got sidetracked with a big crazy video about Planet of the Apes. "The real Planet of the Apes" is written and ready for production. But first, we're making videos about the new Game of Thrones show, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (KSK).
We got early access to the whole first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms! I’m not allowed to say what I think of it yet... So here are four unrelated emojis: 😁😮😆🥚. Early access is a game-changer for us, because it means we can make our videos in advance. It won't be such a mad rush to finish a video each week, and the videos will come out sooner than usual.
There’ll be six KSK Explained videos, analysing each episode. There’ll also be an Alt Shift X livestream after each episode airs, at about 10:45pm Eastern Time Sundays. Additionally, Alt Schwift X and Glidus are recording six episodes of “Dunk Time” – long conversations about each episode of KSK. For Patreon supporters, these “Dunk Time” chats will come out right after each episode airs.
In our videos, there’ll be ads for exclusive videos on Nebula. As Patreon supporters, you also get all our exclusive videos. You’ll get the full-length early episodes of Dunk Time. And you already have access to HOTD Dragon Time, The Fake Jon Snow, and other Patron-only videos here. For livestream-tier Patrons, we’ve done some cool streams lately about Ivanhoe and Attack on Titan. (And you can listen to all this stuff on podcast apps!).
The Planet of the Apes video was meant to be a quick fun diversion from the Dune videos. But Planet of the Apes turned out to be far deeper and more fascinating than I knew, and the video became a big research project. "The real Planet of the Apes" is an hour-long analysis of the 1968 Planet of the Apes movie, and the 1963 French novel, and the historical context of both. It covers some heavy topics, including colonialism, war and race, and I tried hard to handle these topics well. I must've rewritten this script a dozen times. But I'm finally happy with the script, and we'll release the video once the bulk of the KSK videos are done – probably Feb or March. This Apes video is one of our most ambitious videos ever, and I'm excited to share it soon!
We have four Dune videos in-progress:
The Real Dune Part Two, comparing the 2024 Dune movie to the book
Faces of Dune, about the characters’ physical appearance in the books vs adaptations
Fighters of Dune, about the best warriors in Dune
Philosophy of Dune, about the themes and meaning of Dune
The Faces and Fighters videos are 99% done. But I don’t want to finish them until all these Dune videos are finished. They’re interconnected. The next step is to complete another close read-through of the Dune books. I'll triple-check my notes, triple-check all the details… Then I can finish the videos. (The Philosophy of Dune video could easily spiral into a multi-hour thesis project – so I’ll try to be restrained with that one). The most important goal is to finish the Dune Part Two video before the third Dune movie comes out in December. These Dune videos have been a long time coming. But I’m working hard to do justice to the story.
House of the Dragon Season 3 will air in summer. I expect we’ll do our usual weekly videos + livestreams about each episode. We’ve also started a video about the biggest differences between HOTD and the books – I’d like to finish that video before Season 3 airs. HBO recently announced that House of the Dragon is renewed for Season 4 in 2028, and KSK is renewed for Season 2 in 2027 – so there’ll be Westeros shows every year for the next three years! Meanwhile, Netflix is buying HBO. And The Winds of Winter is nowhere to be seen. So the future of ASOIAF is uncertain. But I still love these books, and I’m not done with Westeros yet.
We’ve got lots of other videos in-progress. Destination: Void, ASOIAF legends, children of the forest. I’d like to do videos about Sandkings and Tuf Voyaging. The real Daenerys, the real Stannis. Pluribus and Severance are great. And someday I want to make a video about Venus…
But right now we have way too many unfinished, in-progress videos. They've been in production hell for too long. So in 2026 I'll finish the Apes video, and finish the Dune videos, and then I can move on to new projects.
Thanks for your support!
Happy holidays, happy new year, and thanks for your support!
ASX
Links: Patron-only videos, Patron-only livestreams, Patron-only podcast feed, YouTube, Nebula, ASX Podcast, ZZZ Podcast, Bluesky, Twitter, Insta, Patron Discord. (Connect Discord to Patreon).