We Chose Violence, Redefined

Thoughts on Fleshing out Our New Channel’s Purpose

The art of crafting digital experiences is something that has always fascinated me. To truly succeed requires attentional to detail that extends far beyond what is normally required for other creative products. Every choice made during the production process has to be intentional, whether it be around typography, color pallet, grading, music inclusion, transitions, cinematography, etc. Every component, every detail has to coalesce. Create mood. Take the viewer somewhere. Otherwise, it all falls apart. Its an exercise in branding taken to the highest extreme.

I’ve tried my hand at it a couple of times, mostly in the gaming space. This initially took shape in over-produced explainer videos for Fallout 76, eventually evolving to livestream production. Both types of work were satisfying in their own right, hitting different parts of my brain in ways that no other kind of creative work had been capable of doing before, but streaming in particular seemed to really be scratching an itch.

Producing each show felt like planning out an experience for viewers that tuned in, whether it was through selecting and mixing music for each preshow countdown, editing together b-roll and channel branding for the produced preroll, building graphic assets for on-screen elements, or deciding which fonts to use for the different overlay elements. It was several small pieces working together in unison. It also have me an excuse to take a deep dive into the technical side of production. The work was truly addictive.

But at the end of the day, it still felt like something was missing. The best way to sum it up would be that it seemed to be lacking purpose. I loved the games I covered, and the small audience that I eventually built was wholesome and supportive as fuck, but at the end of the day, none of what I was doing had any lasting value. None of it was enriching. Nothing from the countless hours of play time was going to change anyone’s life.

Which brings us to last Monday, less than 24 hours before a new episode of R&C Watch TV was due to go live. Neither Cathy or I were really feeling it anymore, and we’d put off recording for as long as we could without risking a missed deadline. So finally, after trying to find something new to talk about in regards to what would be the fifth episode covering Frasure, Cathy suggested that we kill the channel. Neither of us were really getting anything out of producing content for it anymore, and it wasn’t worth the stress or energy.

I’ve been wanting to start another channel for a while. Something that was more free-form and allowed us to cover topics that interested us, without having to tie it back in to anything else. So I suggested that we try pivoting the channel to that instead. Cathy was open to the idea, so we shot an hour-long conversation about pornography, and I spent the evening frantically finding a new name, building branding, and putting it all together before the midnight deadline.

And so in a few hectic hours, we pivoted from R&C Watch TV to We Chose Violence. It was a step in the right direction. But towards what, we weren’t sure. Because at the time, we still didn’t entirely know what we wanted to do with the new channel. But after having a week to give it more thought, that direction has started to become a lot more clear.

Cathy has lived an insanely interesting life, much of which she’s wrote about on her newsletter, Sex and the State. She’s explored several important topics that most people are curious about, but few people are actually comfortable having conversations around. Drugs, sex work, psychedelics, loneliness, pornography mental illness, housing…all fascinating topics that deserve honest and fair discourse, but generally are only covered by people with all the wrong motives.

I want to use We Chose Violence to take the vast amount of knowledge, research, and lived experience that Cathy has around those things and share it through multimedia experiences, ones produced to the standards that each topic deserves. I want to use the channel to educate and leave viewers with a solid understanding, and to serve as a counter-weight against the messaging of insincere actors talking about the same things. Ultimately, I want to choose violence.

But to do that, we need time. Like, a lot of time. And so with that in mind, we’re abandoning the weekly format to allow for the substantial number of additional hours it will take to properly research, script, interview for, and produce each video. These will be fully-produced and unlike anything else we’ve released so far.

We’re in the early stages of work on our first long-form episode now, and will share more once we get closer to release. Thank you for all the support you’ve given us throughout all of our different projects, and we’ll be back soon!