So it happened again. I just didn’t write a specific article about it, but we’ll get to that in a second. First, I do want to congratulate some Emmy winners. Not that I agree with all of them, or that I would’ve voted for all of them, but good shows won Emmys, and that’s enough for me. Except in the Limited Series category, because I really hated DTF St. Louis. I was Rotten on that show, and it doesn’t have a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score anyway, so I don’t feel too bad about my review. I just don’t get the show. I don’t get why critics like it. It was a rough watch for me, and then it won the Emmy for Best Limited Series, which genuinely shocked me considering I never would’ve nominated it in the first place. The only other win I was profoundly against, or at least would’ve swapped, was Matthew Rhys for Widow’s Bay. I really thought Jason Segel had finally done enough on Shrinking to earn an Emmy. I think we forgot about Shrinking because its season aired earlier, while Widow’s Bay was so recent, so hot, and so of the moment that it swept the Emmys. Swap those release dates and put Shrinking right before Emmy voting, and I think Jason Segel wins. It’s hard for me to compare those performances and still say it wasn’t Jason’s time. I would never take anything away from Stephen Root, though. That’s his first Emmy. He’s been working forever, and he absolutely deserved that. One hundred percent.

I didn’t actually watch the ceremony, just looked up some recaps afterward, but I saw Macaulay Culkin’s tribute to Catherine O’Hara, and I thought it was heartbreaking. They could’ve gone with the Schitt’s Creek family, but instead they went with Home Alone, knowing that to so many people she was exactly what Macaulay said she was. With that out of the way, last week I made a post about how I got rejected from YouTube’s monetization program even though I qualified for it. I appealed, and I got rejected again. This time, I had the presence of mind to screenshot their incredibly narrow and vague feedback. There’s a screen on the Earn tab telling me I didn’t make it and that I can reapply in 30 days if I fix the problems listed in the first step. So I clicked on the first step looking for feedback, and it basically just says they found a violation of the monetization policy. It doesn’t tell me how, what, where, when or why. It doesn’t tell me what I could actually change over the next 30 days to change their minds. The rest of the instructions are essentially: fix the thing we won’t identify, then come back in 30 days. Nothing promised, of course, because why would there be?

Their feedback is terrible. It’s practically nonexistent. I screenshotted it and sent it to them on social media, asking whether they actually consider this meaningful feedback, because it isn’t. It’s the kind of feedback you give when you don’t want to say the real reason you rejected somebody. And I fully believe I was rejected because I’m blind. It reminds me of what disabled people face when applying for jobs where they have to show up in person, disclose that they have a disability and perhaps need reasonable accommodations, and then compete against other candidates. An employer doesn’t have to enumerate every reason why somebody else was selected. They can just say that person interviewed better. Who can prove otherwise? If somebody wants to reject a disabled person, there are plenty of ways to make the rejection about something else. We see versions of that constantly from studios and streaming services that don’t provide audio description or accessibility because legally they don’t have to.

I complain a lot about Neon as a film company because they sidestep audio description on a lot of their international titles. They can basically tell the blind audience to fuck off because there’s no law requiring them to put audio description on those films. They can say they’re a small distributor without the money or resources, despite winning Best Picture Academy Awards and releasing films into wide theatrical release every single year. Somehow they’re still too poor for audio description. Meanwhile, I’ve seen independent films without distributors that managed to provide it. That’s another argument for another day, but it’s also why everything we do constantly feels like swimming upstream. I’m shouting into the wind every single time, and it’s fucking exhausting. Being rejected broadly by YouTube for a second time without being told specifically what they didn’t like about me is incredibly soul crushing because it feels like I’m being judged for who I am and the content I create.

From what I can tell, I’m not violating anything on their list. My content is simple. I shoot on my iPhone because it tells me that my head is in frame, and then I upload from my iPhone. Even when I was sighted, I was never interested in video editing. I never wanted to direct, so I never learned that side of filmmaking. Kudos to everybody who has, but I conceptually don’t understand it. My videos don’t have editing, and I’m not convinced they need it. There’s nothing in YouTube’s policy saying that your videos must be aesthetically pleasing or covered in bells and whistles. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that this is exactly what I’m being judged for in an era when YouTubers are getting film deals and their movies are making hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. If YouTube keeps giving me vague answers, they can keep rejecting me much more easily than if they tell me what the specific problem is and give me an opportunity to fix it. If they think my metrics are fake, take them away. If they think I created 2,000 accounts and subscribed to myself, prove it and remove them. My statistics haven’t changed. I have the same views, viewing hours and subscribers. No videos were taken down. I don’t have copyright claims against me. I checked a bunch of the videos YouTube theoretically might’ve reviewed, including recent and highly viewed videos, and everything says it’s earning normally. Nothing is flagged. So I genuinely don’t know.

But you did get a little Small Screen Diary today because I watched some television before YouTube wrecked my life for a second time. I watched Lanterns, Season 1, Episode 5 on HBO Max, which has excellent audio description from International Digital Center, written by Dakota Green and narrated by Ren Leach. This is a fantastic episode that feels like a season finale, except there are three episodes left, which makes me even more intrigued because this is absolutely the mic-drop moment where I would’ve ended a season. I don’t want to spoil anything because a lot happens, but if you’re a little behind on Lanterns, please catch up quickly. You do not want this episode ruined for you.

Aside from that, everything else feels like late-stage catching up. I watched another episode of Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, which has taken me forever to get through because it’s the final season and I know there’s no future afterward. It released almost a year ago and I still haven’t finished it. I’m now at the point where it seems like they just killed off Ben, so we’ll see what happens. This series has always had excellent audio description from Descriptive Video Works, narrated by Paul Hoffman, and I love the description for this series. It’s one of the best-described animated kids shows out there. Keep up the good work, please, no matter what happens with me.

I also wanted to prepare for the That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime movie because the movie has audio description, so I figured I should have at least some basis in the series. I’ve watched the first two episodes even though they don’t have audio description on Crunchyroll. I may watch a few more because they went by pretty quickly, and honestly, the series is structured in such a weird way that it feels like it’s constantly giving you exposition. At least at the beginning, I didn’t feel like I was missing too much except for obvious things like what the slime actually looks like and this other thing he’s talking to that he eventually swallows. There are absolutely visual aspects I’m missing, but there’s so much dialogue about the transformation into being a slime and so much heavy exposition explaining this crazy-ass world that those first two episodes were wildly helpful. Other anime might be absolutely insane to approach this way, but this one doesn’t feel like an insurmountable task. I now feel like I have at least some grounding in this world if I jump into the movie.

I also noticed that Slow Horses and MobLand are returning, so apparently I’m doing homework. With Slow Horses, I’m technically on a rewatch. A long time ago, I watched the first two seasons and stopped. Then I tried watching it again with my mom, and she gave up after two episodes, leaving my rewatch stranded at Season 1, Episode 3. So I watched that episode again, and the first season is slowly coming back to me. We’ll see. Supposedly this thing is amazing. When I stopped watching during Season 2, I didn’t know anybody who was watching Slow Horses. Now suddenly everybody watches Slow Horses, and I don’t understand what happened. Whatever. Fine. I’ll catch up. With MobLand on Paramount+, I went all the way back to Episode 1 because I only watched the first two episodes originally before deciding I didn’t like it. I think it’s Episode 2 where Tom Hardy is talking to a decapitated head, and that was basically where I went, “Nope. Never mind. This is dumb. I can’t do this anymore.” But the first episode actually isn’t bad. It sets up the series well, there’s a good cast, and I feel like I could give this show a second chance. I gave The Pitt a second chance and now I’m hooked. Sometimes it really is about the right moment, the right time and where your head is at. Sometimes you don’t understand the vibe of a show, quit too early, and then discover later that it gets better. I also like the audio description on MobLand. It’s properly violent for what the show is.

Then the YouTube email arrived in the afternoon instead of the morning, so instead of soul crushing me at the beginning of my day, it waited until later. After that, I basically gave up because suddenly watching things feels like: What am I doing? What is this for? Why am I doing this? Does it matter? Who cares what I have to say? That’s what happens when you mix your hobby with your work. Suddenly the thing you would normally rely on for comfort is attached to the exact thing making you sad and depressed. It’s a circle of shit to be in.

If I had to pick the best audio description track today, it’s Lanterns by far. The episode itself was exceptional, and I can’t really explain why without spoiling the hell out of it. Seriously, don’t let somebody spoil this episode for you. Get in there immediately. The loser would be Crunchyroll for not putting audio description on That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, although I’m fully complicit because I watched it anyway to prepare for the movie, which oddly does have audio description. Isn’t that really fucking weird? We’ll put audio description on the movie in case blind people somehow watched the television series without audio description and are now engaged enough to want the movie? Kudos to Crunchyroll for describing the movie, but shouldn’t we go back and describe the TV series too? I’ve never understood partial audio description. What is the point of adding audio description halfway through a TV series? Who are these blind people starting at Season 5? Where are they? What is happening? Are we supposed to miss four seasons of storytelling and then scream, “Oh my God, thank you! Season 5 has audio description!” while having no fucking clue what’s happening?

There are shows like this everywhere. I was interested in the new Snowfall spinoff and then remembered I never watched Snowfall because at least its first season didn’t have audio description, so I could never start it properly from the beginning. Now there’s a spinoff with audio description, and I guess at some point I’ll find out whether I can follow it without seeing the original. These are the questions we need to keep asking, but the bigger question is whether anybody is listening. Is there actually a way to change a system that is set up for us to fail? Companies would often rather spend that money somewhere else. Companies like Neon have money. Look at what gets spent on Oscar campaigns. Accessibility simply isn’t where they choose to spend it. When Disney decides to cut costs by replacing human audio description narrators with a synthetic voice, that’s a choice. It isn’t an accident. It’s a choice. We can complain, yell on social media, hashtag whatever we want, but without laws requiring these companies to provide audio description or establishing a standard for what that accessibility should be, they can largely do whatever they want. We’re stuck accepting whatever shit they give us and hoping it’s good. Every once in a while, though, we get something described with the same brilliance as Lanterns, or at least at the level of MobLand, Slow Horses and Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, which all have really great audio description as well. Anyway, that’s the diary for today. I don’t know. I’ve got nothing, guys. This is it for the day.