Baldur Bjarnason

Todo notes as a storm approaches

– Baldur Bjarnason

I’m sitting here, trying to gather my thoughts as I wait for a storm to hit Iceland.

The political chaos in the US has been more distracting than I expected, and I had dialled my expectations all the way to “eleventyfuckingdisastrous” already.

But, in between the work that needs to be done and the distractions of living in a dystopian future, there is the work that should be done, and this is my attempt to put some order to it.

The work I should do, over the next while, to prepare for whatever it is that’s happening. #

Not strictly in order.

  1. Check to see if it’s possible to switch all of my product/publishing business over to Euro if the dollar starts to fluctuate wildly. Done, at least in terms of checking if it’s possible. It looks like this would be doable at a short notice on Lemon Squeezy, although all of the payments and processing will still be in dollars so that means that I’d still be affected by currency swings that happen during the two weeks from when the buyer pays until LS pays me.
  2. Finish setting up a fallback EU-based ecommerce service with all of my existing books, so I can quickly switch if something happens to EU-US trade relations that could impact my use of a US-based vendor. I’ve already got PayHip (London-based) with Paypal set up, which means it’s partially done. Paypal in the EU is a bank regulated by EU institutions so there’s a decent chance it would still be accessible if shit happens. And PayHip is based in the UK and not the EU.
  3. I need to figure out a completely EU-based approach, at least insofar as is possible. Ultimately Visa and Mastercard are still American, but they’re also highly regulated in the EU. This bit could be hard as it’d likely require me to handle VAT myself.
  4. Finish the script for my first video. I don’t want to overthink this much further and want to push something out so I can assess how well it works. The hard part is I keep changing my mind on what to cover because… gestures wildly at the world as everything burns.
  5. Finish signing up for bunny.net for video hosting. I think I’ll start off using it manually instead of attempting to build automatic integration into Eleventy. First see if it’s right, then automate it.
  6. Find a non-US alternative to Netlify. Bunny.net’s CDN, which I linked to above, actually looks like a promising alternative.
  7. Switch from my baldur.bjarnason@gmail.com email to bb@baldurbjarnason.com everywhere I can. This isn’t just because of US politics but also because of Google’s ever increasing dysfunction. I recently discovered that most emails originating from .is domains aren’t reaching my Gmail and who knows how many other emails aren’t reaching me. More and more Google services seem outright broken so migrating away from them isn’t just a precaution, but a reaction to dysfunctions that are affecting my life and business.
  8. I’d like to register a .is domain as a fallback to my regular domains, but haven’t decided on what approach to take.
  9. I’ve already shifted to mostly using codeberg for open projects over GitHub. (GitLab is US-based and I genuinely don’t trust them any more than I trust GitHub.) But I’d like to figure out a better solution for private projects such as my websites.
  10. I have a bunch of code I wrote over the past couple of years for failed proposals and dead-end grant applications. I need to have a second look at them and extract useful modules out of them. Mostly for myself to use in future projects.
  11. Get as much of my email communications over to Signal.
  12. Find time to see the Best Book Design from all over the World show, because we need good shit like that even when things are dire.

I also need to figure out whether or not to write about the Thai and Asian BL/GL media industry, which has turned into a bit of a research obsession of mine. They’re not only churning out a bunch of projects, some of which are interesting if very quirky and weird, but the underlying business models and distribution methods are worth looking into as well. These companies seem to have been diversifying their income stream while media in the West has been doing the opposite. And I’d have to cover some of the dark sides to the industry as well, which are the risks facing some of the talent that’s working in front of the camera.

An interesting component to all of this the role of China. On the one hand you have the Taiwanese company, Gagaoolala, which runs a global streamer for LGBTQ media, but is increasingly responsible for distributing Asian LGBTQ media to channels and streamers worldwide.

Instead of competing directly with major global platforms, he believes that “if you offer good service you can succeed as well in niche markets.” Accordingly, he changed course to form alliances with small OTT (over-the-top media) platforms all around Asia. On the one hand, this allows him to gain local operations experience along with collecting data from partner platforms, allowing him to analyze data and learn about audience preferences and viewing habits to base marketing and advertising outlay on.

He also helped alliance partners with sales, such as selling copyrights to Thailand content to Spain. To date he has helped sell copyright licensing to over 30 platforms around the world.

How GagaOOLala became the world’s biggest LGBTQ streaming platform

This also explains why in I my research I keep running into Spanish-language interviews and coverage of Thai series.

And on the other hand, streamers based in mainland China such as iQiyi and WeTV are some of the biggest funders of Thai BL and GL series, both in terms of original productions and licensing, which don’t seem to be falling afoul of the Chinese government’s proscriptions against LGBTQ media. (Though who knows how long that will last. The Chinese fanbase for these series is huge.)

This has left us in the odd situation where streamers based in mainland China have a greater selection of LGBTQ-themed media – queer leads, queer supporting casts, with stories that genuinely end well for everybody involved – than the US-based streamers combined. If you want an LGBTQ series with queer leads – not “here’s a bunch of straight characters, oh and by the way a token queer couple as well” – and a non-cliffhanger happy ending, your selection of Western-produced series basically dwindles down to a handful. Add to that the ongoing push to remove LGBTQ media from the US mainstream and the tendency of US-based streamers to remove series entirely from the services as tax write-offs and it’s starting to look like the centre of queer media production has shifted to Asia.

Writing this up makes no sense in terms of business strategy (my business strategy, that is, the business strategies of these Thai production companies are quite interesting), so it’s very far down on my list of priorities.