Folding Ideas (Dan Olson)+

Belle and the Meaning of Place

Clickbait Title: Kochi Sometimes Plays Itself Originally a bonus video for patrons March, 2026 An earlier draft of the script directly referenced a Patrick Willems' video about the geography of New York as experienced via film, the way characters move about, and how landmarks are portrayed. However when I went to pull that video I couldn't find it, and after some investigation it turned out the video didn't exist, I was remembering a conversation that Patrick and I had had over lunch when I was in Brooklyn recording Line Goes Up. Vancouver Never Plays Itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v

Beast Games 2 Strong/Smart: an Exhaustive Review

Clickbait Title: garbage ass show for babies This is the companion video for Why Was I Invited to Beast Studios, so go watch that one here: https://youtu.be/0dwagg5wYY4 Also Big Joel has a different take on why it's bad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEvDZn95E3s Written by Nathan Landel Edited by Jessica Babineaux Produced by Dan Olson Executive Assistanting by Crystal Donovan

I graphed every MrBeast video

Excerpt from 'Why was I invited to Beast Studios?" https://youtu.be/0dwagg5wYY4

Why was I invited to Beast Studios?

Clickbait Title: A Video Essay of Spectacular Inefficiency Companion video: Beast Games 2 Strong/Smart: an Exhaustive Review - https://www.patreon.com/posts/beast-games-2-155824194 We made the decision to relentlessly A/B test the title and thumbnail as a kind of meta-performance of Beast-ness, so if you keep getting tricked into thinking this is a new video, we're sorry. The number one thing that a lot of people are going to want me to talk about is the Doug situation, to which I will say: it's fine. Doug and I are adults, we chatted amicably on the trip, there was no Epic Standoff, and he

Ruminations on that DHS Penguin Tweet

Clickbait Title: I'm so tired. Written and performed by Dan Olson

This Is How You Get JARHEAD Sequels

Clickbait Title: Annihilation 2: Absolution (2027) Ending Explained I started work on this a year ago. The original script ended with a joke about touching grass, where I needed to go out into the snow and dig a little hole to find some grass to touch, and I even shot it as part of my "get hyped about the project" process. But then the Silkposting and CoD: Ghosts panels were approved for PAX East, so I had to pivot to working on those, and then I promised the final Ghosts video to PAX West as a live premiere, so Jarhead got kicked even further down the road, and then I got invited to a tour o

Call of Duty: Ghosts – Power, Paranoia, and Orbital Tungsten Rods

Clickbait Title: Call of Duty: Ghosts is the worst game I've ever played This video has been a long time coming, I originally played Ghosts around the launch of Advanced Warfare as part of a Twitch series called CoD Fishing where we explored the roots and evolution of the cinematic shooter genre. Even at the time I found Ghosts to be repulsive in a way that would take me an extra decade and several failed attempts at writing it down to really put together. The real challenge is to keep everything in scope, which is hard in two directions. First of all, it's still just a video game, and one wi

Mantracks: a True Story of Fake Fossils

Clickbait Title: Footprints in Stone III - The Reckoning Back in 2013 a couple random dudes decided to make a pseudo-sequel to Footprints in Stone called Forbidden History: Footprints in Stone II, which is essentially just an extended interview with Carl Baugh and his protegee Aaron Judkins. I was really tempted to call this video Footprints in Stone III, but restrained myself and consigned that in-joke to the clickbait title. Special thanks to Glen Kuban and his invaluable documentation of mantracks http://paleo.cc/paluxy.htm Produced by Dan Olson Written by Nathan Landel and Dan Olson Ani

I Don't Know James Rolfe

PHOTO-SENSITIVITY WARNING: occasional subtle flickering between 19:00 and 24:36 If ever there were a video I've made that required a companion essay or some kind of artist statement to go along with it I suppose it would be this one. It's a strange project that I've been working on for the better part of six months now, a process of trying to disentangle myself from myself. It's about a lot of different things, it's about James Rolfe but also not about him because we have so many versions of him and we can only react to those imperfect projections. He's been doing this for basically 20 years

About That Idris Elba Gold Documentary

Clickbait Title: Can this magical metal make you immortal? Godkings hate this one weird trick! This was a lot of fun to work on because I got to spend a lot of time learning THE TRUTH ABOUT GOLD and by that I mean actually interesting facts about how humans use gold. The mythology of gold actually makes a lot of sense through the lens of its physical properties, the fact that ancient humans could make things out of it and those things would outlive generations. It's just rare enough that societal elites can monopolize it, but common enough you can gather enough to actually make stuff with it.

The Darkmoon Fiasco

Clickbait Title: grown man gets owned by a line of people Taliesin & Evitel invited me to be on a panel and talk about video games while I was in Anaheim, and you can watch that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng71xI3BGjg Blizzcon 2023 was an interesting experience. I personally had a lot of fun, but maybe not for the reasons or in the ways that the organizers intended. Written and performed by Dan Olson Crowdfunding: https://www.patreon.com/foldablehuman Twitter: https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman

This is Financial Advice

Clickbait Title: if the price is zero then you can buy all the shares I tell you what, when you try and tell this story you either sum it up in ten minutes with the broadest strokes or you settle in for a rabbit hole made entirely out of onions and ogres. Conspiracy theorists flock together and constantly try and rope each other into the orbit of their personal hobby horse conspiracy, so once you break the surface suddenly you're digging through endless side stories, each with their own cast of characters, trying to figure out if some tertiary claim is true, was maybe true in the past but is

The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse

Clickbait Title: I spent three months living in the metaverse and now I'm starving The metaverse salespeople have a weird fixation with Animal Crossing, in specific. The number of times we saw New Horizons specifically cited as an example of the metaverse was bizarre, like it was their first time experiencing a multiplayer game that wasn't CoD and it melted their brains. Written by Dan Olson and Nathan Landel Produced and performed by Dan Olson Nathan Twitter: https://twitter.com/choice_au Dan Twitter: https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman Crowdfunding: https://www.patreon.com/foldablehuman

Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft

You enter a bright new digital world, exited to explore and hyped just to enjoy the vibe. Ten months later you're yelling at someone for standing in fire. What changed? Produced by Dan Olson Written by Nathan Landel and Dan Olson Choice's channel - https://www.youtube.com/c/Choice_au Bibliography A Reports/Books/Articles Ask, Kristine, ‘The Value of Calculations: The Coproduction of Theorycraft and Player Practices’ (2016) 36(3) Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 190. Boellstroff, Tom, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University

Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins

Clickbait Title: I'm here to teach you about an unmissable business opportunity! Thank you to Savy over at Savy Writes Books for helping out with this video - https://www.youtube.com/c/SAVYLEISER Emma Thorne - The Mikkelsen Twins' "Publishing Life" Scam? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klu8U5P35a4 I spared everyone the part of the story where I got COVID and spent months recovering. A Skeptic's Guide to Hypnosis is available for you to read for free, the hitch is that it's been distributed to Patreon subscribers who have permission to hand out as many copies as they want. Written and pe