Georeactor Blog

Since February, I posted only one podcast/video in April, and then haven't posted again for over a month.

The 'Alice Guo' series reached a natural stopping point when the case moved to the courts and the Senate found other flashpoints (former president Rodrigo Duterte is at the ICC, and his daughter's impeachment starts this week). I think there are interesting things that an American audience could learn about these stories too, but YouTube indicates that my videos are promoted to a Filipino + diaspora audience. I think of an elderly person watching every video about a political topic and getting more mad about it, and though I think the content of my videos is sound, it's less about informing and more reinforcing a political rabbit hole.
I have notes and could maybe do an update on Guo's escape to Malaysia, or a more in-depth thing about Wang Xing being trafficked to Myanmar, but there are fewer definitive answers or primary sources.

The 'Supreme Court pro se' series was conceptually interesting. Some cases are a three minute summary, others extend out to fifteen minutes with contemporaneous and modern clips. I included Gideon (on the right to a public defender) and Faretta (on the right to pro se defense) even though these were argued by lawyers at the Court. I could have recorded on-location for two other videos.
I did think it was interesting how often these people are curious characters, avoid offramps, and almost always try to return to SCOTUS. Many cases fall into obscurity, and the others get a byline or basic narrative which gets repeated everywhere. It was valuable to unearth an article describing Faretta's crime, and Theard's previous connection to SCOTUS.
Even though history videos are theoretically evergreen, these haven't gotten any views in the past month. There are a few cases remaining. I don't feel a need to cover the Milledgeville murder case, which has articles and a podcast about it. The obvious missing episode is the final pro se case, a rather dry one involving the SEC, which means I should spice up the video with later attempts at a pro se defense (most famously, Larry Flynt).

After the Cytogenetics essay didn't go anywhere on Hacker News - always a question of luck/tone/timing - I recorded audio for a 15-minute episode. The mapmeld channel is already OSM + Alice + legal, so I was planning to put this on a new 'pop science' channel? I don't like my current opening or closing or energy level on this yet, which would make it a bad intro to a new channel.

I have a few reference points which are making me consider what I want to do.

• Someone in my network went to a ministry program and has interviews and posts about spirituality, this isn't what I'm trying to do
• A work friend started posting narrated travel videos of streetscapes and views. This makes me want to do something more with my Instagram.
• "Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities" recently made video essays on topics I also have read about: locusts, mole people under NYC, Nation of Islam's founder, the Taiping Rebellion, Easter Island writing, and Wikipedia. Other than format, makes me wonder if I should do something about other reads.

Topics I could see doing videos on:

• 'local manufacturing' in the US, India, Indonesia, etc.
• pruning real but irrelevant sources from Wikipedia
• aliens of Arxiv
• fallout from the Elizabeth Holmes / Theranos trial
• the North Korea developer thing
• survey of my links about AI + mental health, or new urbanism
• books: prions, Soviet nuclear program, the decolonization reads, the history reads
• maps
• everyone who hears about Bitcoin or TikTok news through me, thinks I should talk about those, even though there are better sources

Requires more effort:

• interviews
• segregation walls - this is tricky because you can look up the intersection in Memphis v. Greene and debate it, but I don't want to make a "debunking" video
• white chocolate
• Flushing Chinatown food tour with family
• riding all of the passenger train lines in Sumatra, Indonesia