I wanted to share this one here because its partially relevant to the discussion. For those that didn't know, Second Thought made his own 'streaming for larping commies' service along his friends that think 10/7 was based, Means.tv, which is emptier and has even less reasons to exist. For those that forgot, this grifter got the ball rolling for Nebula and it would be funny if as the Nebula tugboat gets compromised her, Yugopnik and Hakim decide to throw everyone under the bus and by proxy certify themselves as the skeptics with fed money.
I know Breadtubers are frequently accused of being glowies; but Second Thought genuinely does strike me as glowie-adjacent. Even though he's retarded by virtue of being a Soviet-style commie that sides with Islamists - his actual viewpoints are a little too, uh,
polished? Like, he's possibly just an actor following a script, and doesn't actually believe the bs he's spewing.
& Second Thought ditched Nebula the moment they started to shill
were paid off by for Qatar (I suspect ST quit, Wiskus just claimed ST got fired for an "antisemitic incident" - no proof or explanation of what said incident was. It certainly wasn't hating Jews, hating Israel, or supporting Hamas - since that's the majority of Nebula creator's views as well) That would make sense if ST was a fed. Why risk losing a glowie internet video essay psy-op job (nice work if you can get it) or jailtime for being an unregistered foreign agent?
I'm not a-logging when I theorize that Nebula will potentially be up sh!t's creek in the near future/get in trouble with the Trump-run Justice Dept. (presumably for the exact same charges that took down Tenet media). Trump (as well as his allies) have repeatedly claimed they're out for blood when it comes to Qatari-influence in the United States, especially their involvement in fueling the pro-Hamas rhetoric that led to university riots. Trump might strip Qatar of NATO-ally status, so I highly doubt they'd look kindly to Qatar funded video essays about how amazing and superspecial the nation of Qatar is.
Somewhat related, Trump still desperately wants the Saudi/Israeli deal to go through (& especially the Saudis, since they'd make out like bandits in any hypothetical deal still on the table) - so his justice department also isn't going to like the droves of Qatar-funded anti-Israel essays on Nebula. & in the Lindsay Ellis thread, I discussed a recent podcast Lindsay was on, where she remarked how in her recently released YA scifi romance book, she
really wanted to include a scene where she killed off every single member of the Saudi royal family in a plane crash (since there's over 13,000 of them, I guess she meant multiple plane crashes?). Hm, what interesting an interesting sentence spoken by someone with potential Qatari financial ties. (For more context, Qatar & the KSA generally fucking hate each other. Qatar wishes to supplant Saudi Arabia as the West-influencing superpower of the Middle East).
In other Nebula-related news, SoyFace CEO has resorted to begging for creator applications on Bluesky. But he's an asshole about it/doesn't promise all that much in return for joining Nebula, so I doubt Nebula has many interested in joining their pathetic creator stable:
He also made a weirdly phrased comment a few days ago, trying to explain why he no longer announces Nebula's total subscriber amount (presumably because it's lower than the 640,000 that subscribed to Nebula when they were bundled to CuriosityStream):
Yeah, they definitely lost a lot of subscribers (and possibly creators too, if he needs to beg for applications).