Trivia / Folding Ideas

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• Bury Your Art: A few of Dan's earliest videos are missing, especially from its very first "season" in 2011, and not just because they were originally uploaded to the now-defunct Blip.tv. While Dan reuploaded many of his Blip-era videos to Youtube in 2015, he mentions in his season playlist intros that he chose not to conserve some of them on the simple basis that he just doesn't like them.
• Corpsing: During "The Problem With NFTs", Big Joel, the voice actor reading out a pitch to have NFTits support breast cancer research is audibly stifling his laughter.
• Doing It for the Art: Dan assiduously avoids corporate sponsorships on his channel — forgoing large amounts of money — so he can maintain editorial independence.
• Enforced Method Acting: In the Contrepeneurs video, Dan actually commits to writing an entire 25,000 word non-fiction book in 25 days, including all of the research that doing so entails, purely to experience what it's like to be a ghostwriter who get used for the grifts the video is about and to put into perspective how awful these conditions are.
• Hostility on the Set: Despite having been on it for less than a year, Dan doesn't look back on his time on Channel Awesome fondly, sharing the sentiment of many other former personnel that it was poorly managed. The most noteworthy incident to him was how he left — after writing a controversial expose about 8chan for Medium, a smear campaign was formed against him that reached Mike Michaud, who fired him on the spot without hearing him out, then proceeded to pester and antagonize Lindsay Ellis because she was acquainted with him (incidentally contributing to her public departure not long afterwards).
• Newbie Boom:
  • Dan attributes going from around twenty to fifty thousand views a video to hitting at least a hundred thousand per video to the surprise viral success of his Suicide Squad video, which so far has over two million views.
  • "Line Goes Up" brought a new level of attention to Dan's work, with that video gaining more than 7 million views and leading to him being featured on other channels and podcasts.
• Real Song Theme Tune: "Raptures" by Spirit Spine was used in some form as the general theme song for videos until around 2019.
• Schedule Slip: According to the description of "An Exhaustive History of Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings", the video was primarily made as an excuse to do the rotoscoped animation of the final minute. Dan didn't intend for it or the actual video essay to be as big as they ended up being — the video was meant to be done in a few weeks in June, but ended up taking the summer and only came out in August, with the animated segment being "80% of the entire post-production time", approximately 90 hours.
• Meaningful Release Date: This Is Financial Advice released on 30th September, the same day Bed Bath & Beyond's shares were extinguished.

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