We released the XOXO 2018 talks over the last few weeks, and like every year, they’re all worth checking out. Everyone brought something special and unique, and getting to work with all these remarkably talented people and putting them on one stage together continues to be a dream.
This year, Demi Adejuyigbe was the first person I reached out to and the first to sign on for the conference. I love his work so much, and he’s exactly the kind of extremely-online multidisciplinary talent I’m drawn to.
Demi had an idea for a presentation and wanted to try it at XOXO, but it wasn’t a great fit for the conference, which tends to focus on more personal, vulnerable talks about living and working online. He didn’t tell me much about it, except it had to do with jazz.
So we added him at the last minute to our Film & Animation lineup, an evening event normally focused on screenings and Q&As from online video creators. We’ve never released a video from our Film & Animation event, but it was so good, we decided to make an exception.
Please enjoy Demi Adejuyigbe’s Guide to Makin’ and Livin’ Jazz.
Two days later, he opened the final day of the festival with a talk that was so good, so captivating, and so funny, he earned two standing ovations. If you haven’t seen it, take a few minutes to watch it.
Demi is a gem of the internet, and I highly recommend following his work if you don’t already.
Last year, my wife Ami designed and released her first game, a conversational card game called You Think You Know Me, raising nearly $30k from over 600 backers on Kickstarter. I wrote about it when it was still funding on Kickstarter last year, but didn’t follow up with everything since.
The game released on schedule in March this year, and went on to sell out her initial 2,000 unit print run completely by the summer. Her second print run (7,500 games!) just arrived, making its way to all her retailers, and you can once again buy the game directly from her website.
The Peach Pack
Earlier this month, Ami launched a project for The Peach Pack, a deck of 106 new cards themed around sex and sexuality, designed to be played either as a standalone game or as an expansion to the original game.
The project ends tomorrow at 6pm PT/9pm ET — and still has a ways to go. It’s currently at 40% funded, and will take a serious push to get the word out.
It’s $15 for the Peach Pack alone, or you can get both games at a discount. The video below explains more, or you can read more on the project page.
Why I Love It
When Ami started writing the Peach Pack cards, she was intent on making the new game gender-neutral, sex-positive, and queer-friendly.
You’d think that would be a no-brainer in 2018, but I was surprised at how many adult-themed games we looked at make assumptions about gender, sex, and sexual orientation. They assume players are straight and cisgender, and those assumptions rule out so many people.
For me, it was just as interesting to see what kinds of cards weren’t in the deck, as which ones were. There aren’t any cards with references to anatomy or positions that aren’t universal, and never falls into heteronormative tropes.
So, what does that leave? So much! The cards are all about what we love and lust over: what we find sexy, what we prefer, what we dream about, and our past experiences.
Like the original game, many of the questions are playful, designed to provoke conversation and laughter. Would you rather have sex in space or underwater? If you could sleep with any mythological creature, which would it be?
It’s a fun and thoughtful game, and I really hope it gets made. Check it out, spread the word, and consider backing it!
On January 15, YouTube will delete every video annotation.
Last year, YouTube announced they were phasing out the Annotations Editor in May 2017, preventing any new annotations from being made. But according to the announcement, legacy annotations would still be available. “Existing annotations will continue to show when using a desktop computer.”
That changed yesterday, when YouTube quietly added an update to their Help section. “We will stop showing existing annotations to viewers starting January 15, 2019. All existing annotations will be removed.”
The reasons why the annotations feature was removed are clear:
Annotations were never supported on mobile devices, and would have been awkward to implement on small screens.
It was difficult to support across devices, including TVs and other third-party hardware.
Most annotations were obnoxious, like popup banners and spammy notes hiding the video.
But YouTube annotations were supported for nearly a decade, and a significant number of creators used them to great effect — games, interactive art, education, footnotes, and corrections — and removing them fundamentally and irrevocably breaks a core part of YouTube history.
Here’s just a small piece of what we’ll lose in two months when annotations are gone. Watch them while you can.
Note: All the videos below must be viewed on a desktop browser with annotations enabled. (UPDATE: See the update at the end of the post to see how to view the original restored annotations.)
Interactive Adventures
From the moment that YouTube announced Annotations in June 2008, they were already proposing its use for the creation of games and interactive stories. The blog post links to this simple Shell Game video from May 14, 2008 as an example, quite likely the first YouTube game ever made.
Annotations were particularly well-suited for choice-based Choose Your Own Adventures, stringing together a collection of videos that let viewers decide the story.
The first I remember was Tube Adventures, a simple Spanish choose-your-own-adventure video. Terminator Interactive Game, a simple FPS by a 12-year-old boy, showing just how accessible these games were to create.
By 2014, filmmakers were using annotations to make interactive films with bigger production values and more attention to storytelling and screenwriting, winning nominations and awards for their innovation.
Love & Engineering let you use annotations to switch between characters and story world at any time, with four filmmakers, two characters, and one persistent chat conversation.
Sirens tells the story of a young man asked by his fugitive brother to retrieve a mysterious bag.
La Linea Interactive is a tribute to cartoonist Osvaldo Cavandoli’s animated series, using a series of buttons to determine the story.
One of the most beloved, and widely viewed, examples is an animated Guy Collins’ Kaizo Trap, which subtly used annotations to hide multiple endings, including a secret maze. (Spoilers here.)
Games
Complex programming wasn’t an option, but many other genres of gaming — including adventure, shooters, and trivia — were all possible using simple hotspot/linking schemes, and particularly popular with brands for advertising. Here are some highlights.
Though they’re best known for the enormously popular React channels, The Fine Brothers made a series of 8-bit style interactive games based on Twilight, Mad Men, Freaks & Geeks, and Saved By The Bell, among others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CumqNwQsChM
Starting days after the 2008 election, Barack Paper Scissors eventually sprawled into 15 levels with over 1,000 videos and 3,000 annotations.
Bboy Joker is like a memory game meets stop-motion dance battle.
Blend Your Own Adventure. Remember BlendTec? Pick any two items, and Corey Vidal will blend them up, and drink the results.
Here’s an odd one: someone recreated a non-interactive Tetris playthrough with tiny annotation blocks. Turning off annotations just shows a blank video.
Musical Experiments
Possibly my favorite annotated YouTube video of all time, Neil Cicierega’s Haircut is an interactive adventure song you won’t want to miss.
The band Moones recorded five music videos at various states of drunkenness from 20-80 beers, letting you use annotations to jump between their increasingly sloppy performances.
Make Me Play a Song lets you choose piano keys to string together a song played on guitar.
Constantly strumming guitar chords, The YouTube Electric Guitar turns the players into an instrument. With changes to the embed, the chord annotations are now covered by the interface. Try the Theater Mode for best results.
Some people used annotations for lo-fi art. Here’s one with over 100 annotations to draw Sonic the Hedgehog. (Here’s a timelapse of how it was made.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsPoyMzsVOU
Adam Ben Ezra created YouTube Radio, an interactive radio letting you switch between genres of short songs and jingles he created.
Collaborative Annotations
What if YouTube comments were directly on top of the video instead of underneath it? If this sounds like the worst idea of all time, you’re not far off.
Likely inspired by the popularity of Nico Nico Douga in Japan, YouTube announced Collaborative Annotations only eight months after launching Annotations, allowing video creators to invite others to add collaborations, or just post it publicly and wreak havoc.
The results were about as chaotic and toxic as you’d expect. The 4chan and YouTube poop communities loved it, as you’d expect. Here are sometypicalexamples. (CW: Racism/sexist slurs.)
But it wasn’t all bad.
This video claims to be the first collaborative art project, burying the underlying video in annotations created by anyone.
TVTropes documents the history of The Annotated Series, a channel devoted itself to heckling videogame-related animated series, uploading episodes with open annotations for the community to contribute. Several of their accounts were shut down for copyright strikes, but many are preserved with annotations baked into the videos for posterity, and others available on their new channel.
In “Let’s Jab” videos, contributors are encouraged to add their annotations to Let’s Play videos.
Nonetheless, the ability to creative annotations collaboratively was shut down a year later.
Context and Metadata
In the launch announcement, YouTube pointed to this skydiving video as an example of how annotations could be used to deepen videos, easily giving additional commentary without editing the video itself.
Videogame historian Frank Cifaldi used annotations to give detailed notes about the Japanese-only NES game Mr. Gimmick in a four-part longplay.
Annotations could be used for providing a handy table of contents to many other videos, or simply skipping around in the same video.
In this creative example, a guitarist uses annotations to show guitar tablature overlaid on top of his performance. (Another example with different formatting.)
By far, the most-viewed annotations ever have to be the ending of nearly every Movieclips video, which lets you select other scenes from the same movie, clips from movies by the same cast and crew, and related clips by genre, mood, or setting. With over 30,000 videos and 18B views, every annotation link in their pre-2017 videos will break in January.
Composer Austin Wintory used annotations to provide running commentary for the complete Journey soundtrack.
Here, a filmmaker uses annotations for director’s commentary. Not interested in the commentary? Turn off the annotations.
Annotations can be used for providing additional context on historical footage, as in this footage of the 1975 German Grand Prix.
Corrections and Footnotes
As viewership shifted to mobile, creators stopped using annotations for critical features or creative experimentation because there was no guarantee a viewer could enable them. But there was still one place creators used annotations: for providing corrections after a video’s release.
Because YouTube doesn’t provide a way to replace a video, making meaningful edits is impossible. So many creators continue to use annotations to correct mistakes or add additional context inline, at the appropriate part of the video.
Unfortunately, all of those footnotes, errata, and additional context will be permanently lost.
Saving Annotations
If you’re a YouTube creator who actively used annotations, there’s not much you can do. The youtube-dl utility offers a “–write-annotations” option to save annotations to XML, but I don’t think any other site supports it.
If there’s a video you loved that used annotations heavily, I encourage recording yourself playing through it just for posterity and uploading it to YouTube. It won’t be the same, but it’s better than nothing.
Did I miss your favorite use of YouTube Annotations? Leave a comment or hit me up on Twitter.
Update
May 8, 2023: A browser add-on called Annotations Restored searches for the missing annotations on a YouTube video and displays them if found, claiming to work on 48 million videos with lost annotation. By default, it only works when viewing the video on YouTube.com, not on the embeds above, so click through to try it. It worked on every video I tested!
This is a deeply disturbing time in American history. The basic rights and protections of the country’s most vulnerable are under attack, distrust in every institution — education, science, journalism, and of course, government — is at an all-time high, and every day’s headlines brings new horrors. Our system of checks and balances is broken, seemingly powerless to slow it down, let alone stop it.
So, why are we bothering to bring XOXO back when the world is falling apart?
A Shifting Focus
For the first five years of XOXO, the focus of the festival evolved quickly. When we started, we talked about the emerging trend of artists and creators using new platforms to make a living independently online.
Very quickly, it became clear that the most interesting stories weren’t about success, but everything that went wrong. It was less about the work they were doing, more about the emotional experience of living and working online. Being an indie online is really hard, even for those we view as successful.
For its last three years, XOXO featured many speakers covering dark and difficult territory like financial insecurity, online harassment, impostor syndrome, mental health, and discrimination. We heard stories of loss, failure, and fighting just to stay alive.
All of these stories were reminders to everyone in the community that they weren’t alone, a powerful message in dark times.
And then the 2016 election happened — two months after the last XOXO.
Now, our community is facing a host of new challenges and stresses. Along with everything they’re already going through, artists now feel like all their problems are trivial relative to larger world issues.
Being an independent artist in 2018 is a continual cycle of using your platform to balance your own activism and causes with the logistical day-to-day requirements to promote your work and be heard through the turmoil, while trying to protect your own mental health and make enough money to survive. Independent artists don’t have the luxury of stepping away from the internet — it’s a fundamental part of doing their job.
Online Culture and Activism
This year, we’re featuring people and projects who are showing us the way forward — artists balancing activism with their creative work, fighting for what they believe in while making wonderful and amazing things.
The majority of this year’s lineup came from suggestions from the community, and it shows. We solicited speaker and performer recommendations from our #suggestions channel in Slack, and the community responded with hundreds of people and projects they love.
This year’s conference lineup is full of our favorite artists and creators, but all of them use their respective platforms to fight for what they believe in.
For example:
Cameron Esposito pioneered inclusive television production with Take My Wife, her brilliant series with real-life partner, Rhea Butcher. Cameron’s new standup special, Rape Jokes, confronts issues of consent and sexual assault from a survivor’s perspective, raising more than $40,000 for RAINN, the largest U.S. organization fighting sexual violence.
Ijeoma Oluo is editor at large of The Establishment, and the author of So You Want to Talk About Race, her powerful new book that shifts the burden of explaining difficult conversations around systemic inequality from people of color onto white audiences.
Hari Kondabolu is an enormously talented standup comic and podcast host whose documentary, The Trouble with Apu, made headlines and raised awareness of how the the popular Simpsons character impacted South Asian-Americans like him for decades.
Beth Newell and Natalie Pappalardo are the creators of Reductress, the first and only satirical women’s magazine, brilliantly skewering condescending and outdated popular tropes in women’s media with cutting humor, including a newly-greenlit show for Comedy Central.
Matt Furie is the illustrator behind Pepe the Frog, a joyful character he was horrified to see co-opted by white nationalists and the alt-right as a mascot during the 2016 election. He’s actively fought to reclaim Pepe ever since, including a high-profile lawsuit to get Infowars to stop profiting from his creation, and it’s working.
Claire L. Evans is one-half of YACHT and most recently the author of Broad Band, her book telling the untold stories of visionary women in technology who helped create the internet as we know it.
Each speaker is challenging social inequality in their own way, some as part of their work and some with the audiences they’ve built online.
We’re going to talk about all of this and how it affects us as people and artists and businesses like we’ve talked about challenging topics in the past.
The Power of Community
For many in the community, the days since the election have been increasingly isolating and difficult to handle. XOXO went away at a time when they most needed to support each other.
Our community continued year-round in Slack, but there’s no replacement for seeing each other in person, making new friends, and bonding over shared experiences.
We need to get through this together, to support each other through dark times and fight for what we believe in.
There’s power in community, coming together to be real and raw and vulnerable and face this all down together.
Supporting Independent Art
No matter how dire things get, we believe in the inherent value of independent art. These creators, many working on their own, need our support to survive, especially in this current climate.
All our festival events will continue to feature the projects and creators our community believes in. We’re sharing the work of these game designers, filmmakers, animators, musicians, cartoonists, podcasters, writers, illustrators, and coders with you because we all want them to succeed, they deserve our support, and we want them to keep making the world weird and good.
We risk losing so much if we don’t also prioritize supporting independent artists. Their work often contains activism and criticism, can be a catharsis, or can spark curiosity or bring joy. Independently-produced art gives voice to those outside traditional publishing structures and gatekeepers, voices who might otherwise be shut out of the cultural conversation.
That’s never been more important.
So, that’s why we’re back and what we’re doing differently, and we hope to bring you along for the ride. See you in September.
Nearly ten years ago, I was talking to Caterina Fake about an idea I had: a way for independent artists and creators to fund their work directly from their fans with an ongoing subscription model.
She told me about someone she’d recently met who was working on an idea with similar goals, and made an introduction to Perry Chen, the creator and founding CEO of Kickstarter.
Here’s what Caterina wrote, in the intro email from June 2008 that changed my life:
“I was just chatting with Andy Baio, and he said he was messing around, learning Python and stuff, since leaving Yahoo (after his company, Upcoming.org, was acquired by Yahoo), and I said, are you thinking of any startups, and he said he was working on a way that musicians, artists, comic book artists, etc. could get funded through their fanbase using a subscription model — and yo. I thought of you.”
I was in love with the subscription model as a way of building a stable income for indies, who largely spend their creative lives in a state of constant financial instability.
But Perry’s vision for an all-or-nothing funding platform was so well-developed, with such a profound potential to reshape how creative projects are made, that I happily set aside my nascent ideas and hopped on board the Kickstarter rocket.
I was lucky to help build Kickstarter in its formative early days as its first CTO, and an advisor since before launch, and it completely reshaped the course of my personal and professional life. I’ve made countless friends through Kickstarter and the projects I’ve funded there.
Drip
Last November, Kickstarter announced Drip, a new tool for creators to fund their work through recurring payments.
Kickstarter refuses to act like any other startup. They take a very long view of the future, explicitly saying they plan to stay independent forever, vowing never to sell or IPO. Kickstarter raised a relatively small amount of funding in their first year, and then never went back to the VC well, unlike so many others. In 2015, Kickstarter became a Public Benefit Corporation, with the mandate to pursue public good and positive social change in their charter, rather than solely maximizing shareholder value.
With the subscription model, the tradeoff with financial stability is vendor lock-in. You’re stuck with whatever platform you started with, and the decision to switch platforms inevitably means losing a huge chunk of your subscription base.
So if the platform you launched on decides to sell, IPO, or start pivoting in various horrible ways to maximize shareholder value, you’re out of luck.
Instead, Drip is focused on creator independence, working towards true portability — the ability to securely transfer your content, subscriber, and payment information to other subscription platforms if you decide to leave.
And it’s integrated with Kickstarter, allowing the 13.7 million people who’ve backed a Kickstarter project to use their existing account and stored payment information to easily support Drip creators.
But the most exciting and interesting uses of Drip are yet to come, and I want to be there to help shape what it becomes.
Kickstarter Fellows
Today, I’m happy to announce that I’m back at Kickstarter for a limited time under their jauntily-named Fellows program.
Here’s how Perry describes it in the announcement on the Kickstarter blog:
The Kickstarter Fellows idea is still taking shape, but it’s kinda like a visiting scholars program at a university — we identify really talented people whose work we admire and invite them in to collaborate with our team for a focused period of time.
Like with Kickstarter, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to help get Drip off the ground in its formative early days. And purely for selfish reasons, I’m thrilled about Drip because I want to help all the creators I love make more weird, wonderful things, while funding my own niche ongoing projects.
You can sign up to be notified when Drip opens wide on the homepage. Or drop me a line if we know each other and you think you’d be a good fit, and I’ll see what I can do.
