This morning I deleted the original Youtube channel which started this “brand” name. I go over a few points about why I did.

Obviously, Doug Talks Weird is right here. If you are reading this, then you are reading it. That’s…a tautology. I guess.

There was another…

If you don’t know, and I doubt many people could know, there was once a Youtube channel where I posted videos [not many in the long run, as it turned out] and each video combined talking about a specific story/novel/movie with a broad Weird-fiction/philosophy topic.

It mirrored some of the IRL stuff I was doing with horror criticism. I had a class with the Osher Lifetime Learning Institute about horror cinema across the 20th century. I gave regular talks at the library about horror-related topics. I was chatting with authors and such.

Then, well, it just kind of stopped…

I woke up this morning — 30 August 2026 — and I had a moment where I went, “Oh, I haven’t checked on Doug Talks Weird [the Youtube Version] in some time…” — and then I just kind of sat there and wondered what should I do about that.

My very first thought, after a small panic that somehow the whole thing could have been hacked in my absence, was that I should make a post explaining why it’s been years since I’ve done anything with it and how I might return one day and talk about some things I’d like to do with it.

I gave that some thought and then I walked downstairs and deleted the whole thing: Youtube channel, email address, old blogger blog.

Piece of Advice #1: If you have an old blog/vlog and you feel compelled to post a “Where I’ve been // I will one day return” type post: probably delete it. If not, set a 2x/year reminder to update passwords but mostly just let it go.

The reality was that I was never going to really post anything ever again in the style of those original posts and even if I did they would fit very oddly in anything new I was going to make. Which meant that the old content was a liability. Not that I really said anything I would regret — I have been a content creator online since 1997 or so, I have said some dumb shit — but just having a piece of media/content that I was not willing to keep secure and up to date is a problem.

Piece of Advice #2: If you have old blogs, emails, or any other account you don’t want to deal with more than once every other year (or at all): delete it. Outright. Right now.

The content is not gone.1 I uploaded it into a “OG Doug Talks Weird Google Drive Folder” and feel free to watch it there, including the channel update posts. The videos are not great, but I do think they are good. They were more like 2010-era Youtube videos posted in 2015, if that makes sense. I had some interesting ideas those 11-/12-years ago. If I can figure out a way to host it more directly, I will and will try updating that link.

At the time, I only got four real videos out, plus a couple of bonuses, and I had at least four videos in the pipeline:

  1. Using the movie Jugface to talk about fictional religions/cults as a literary device and whether the depictions are useful in a real world sense (while also examining stuff like Cthulhu worship inside Lovecraft’s fiction).
  2. Michael McDowell’s “Ms. Mack” as an example of queer fiction and isolation in rural communities contrasted to how more obviously queer films — like Cthulhu or, to a more exploitative degree, Sleepaway Camp — are often treated as objects of ridicule or condemnation.
  3. How tokusatsu often connects pretty strongly to weird fiction with ancient civilizations, galactic-scaled monsters, and sleeping entities that wake back up.
  4. Going back to the second one and talking about how despite horror’s outsider status as a genre it can lead towards oddly regressive messaging — ranging from outright homophobic, sexist, and racist storylines to weirdly self-antithetical conclusions (pro-science writers writing about how knowledge is dangerous, parents writing about the terrors of children, the whole suburban-male Kingian horror trend).

#2 one got turned into a lecture I gave about Queer Horror a couple of years back. One that I thought about turning into a series of videos for the vlog but never did.

#4 showed up in a few reviews and posts here or there, but possibly the most outright version of it was my talk about the oddly anti-science nature of Lovecraft’s works.

I worry that #3 there is just…too obvious.

There was also a general notion to start developing to go with my Inverted Hero’s Journey that I call the Universal Model of Horror — very briefly: you have an Inside, an Outside, and a Between…horror as a genre is mapping out certain patterns of movement between those three — and also generally horror as an ur-genre.

The lines between horror and myth and horror and folktale being thin and the way that horror and comedy are the two genres about showing teeth.

Though there was a lot of stuff I could improve, I was doing the “White Boy Deep Dive Podcast” format at a moment where that trend was building. I could have 100% made it work.

I just…didn’t. Any of that. Somethings I reused. Some I never used. I never got around to the part where I posted reviews without the faff. Or the part where I just chatted about favorite horror books. Or shared what I was currently reading. Or did readings.

Why?

Well…

Part 1. I Blinked.

The realest answer is that I blinked. Nothing else I say after this matters because it was all surmountable and I could have built that empire. I simply blinked and the blink turned into keeping my eyes shut for a long time.

Piece of Advice #3: If you want to climb a mountain, you can’t hang out at the bottom or keep going back home to try on new hiking boots.

I had a moment where it was starting to get views and starting to get comments and people were starting to share it and I started thinking about all the ways I should change it or how it wasn’t lining up with what I wanted and I paused for a few weeks. Then that became a few months. Then 2016 happened and I was promoted to full time and other stuff went down. Then my daughter was born. Then…you get the idea.

Once I had stopped for that few weeks without a clear path forward, it got wider and wider in the gap. 2019 or so I was thinking about making jokesy “is this thing on!?” posts and relaunching and nah. Did not happen. The me that made those original posts was a precursor to me that was at that later time and the me now writing this.

I hung out at the base of the mountain and then I eventually went home and kept dreaming about a mountain that I no longer wanted to climb.

Part 2. The Set-Up Was All Wrong.

By this I mean the physical set-up. The first video was shot on a five-year-old laptop camera and it shows. By the third one I had a handcam and a tripod but I still didn’t really have any dedicated spots to shoot or proper lighting.

Now, that doesn’t exactly matter, if I was doing it again I would just livestream it and make it feel fairly personal and amateur. It did mean that I had to spend a lot of time trying to touch up the lighting and filtering out noise pollution and all that kind of jazz because I wasn’t going for the laid-back friendly discussion. I was thinking “important lecture.”

I would spend maybe a couple of hours reading the source and then researching related topics. Then ditto for writing up some script and thinking things through. Then an hour for filming with me going back and reshooting entire sections and sometimes entire videos because I didn’t have an adequate set-up to do more on-the-fly type things. THEN, I would spend 1-2 hours (or more) trying to edit to something enjoyable.

I loved talking about horror. I hated editing out neighbors honking outside my window.

I needed to sit down and just make myself a space and a time and get the equipment to make it work. I just wasn’t ever willing to put in the effort. That’s on me.

Part 3. The Format Was Somewhat Wrong.

If you would have asked me this morning, I would have told you that the average length of a video on the channel was between 20-30 minutes. Turns out that it was 11-, 18-, and 15-minutes for the main three. Sure, some of my over-estimation is due to the length it took to edit such relatively short works, but part of it is because I knew from the start that I wasn’t hitting my own ballparks.

I wanted it to be thoughtful but concise. 3-5 minutes with a few dips into the 8-minute territory.

Nowadays? I’d just sit in front of a computer and talk for half an hour with some notes, physical books and media, and a lot of ums.

Back then I had a vision of something with a fair bit of graphics, clear indicators of stuff like spoiler level and content warnings, and a much more educational, colorful flow. I wasn’t quite able to deliver on that and each video I made it the “old” format was making me feel like I would never have a chance to course correct.

Part 4. Ownership of Content.

Finally, it kind of sucks how much we have to give away of ourselves just to be seen. We are raised to be content creators and then told to pay someone else for the joy of being mocked by strangers.

Piece of Advice #4: You can be mocked by strangers for free.

In the context of Youtube it was already an era where talking about horror and trying to share clips, quotes, and soundbites was a liability. That has gotten much, much worse. I had no interest in monetizing my channel but I think by now it wouldn’t have mattered.

We are now in an era were bassists are getting demonetized for playing silence.

Do I Regret It?

I don’t regret putting the videos up. I don’t really regret letting it lapse, at least not from this point in time looking back. I think it could have been something bigger than me and it sucks to see that opportunity missed, but I don’t think it was the opportunity for me.

I’m a blogger. Have been keeping up some form of a blog for nearly three decades now (minus, you know, a pretty sizeable gap from 2016-2026…let’s call it two decades with a nap). I think if I had turned into a blog from the get-go, it might still be up. Some of those other posts would have still be there.

Instead, I spent a few years posting some of my best work to Goodreads. Which is another account I need to delete.

Re-Using the Content

I think I might take some of the content from it and rehash it out here with more experience and care. I will also see if I still have my notes about Queer Horror and some of the other stuff I gave as in person lectures and start consolidating it all here.

Along with the better reviews and discussions I had on Goodreads.

Bonus Fact about the Image

If you had asked me this morning, I would have told you the image the top of the page was something I had just whole cloth taken from somewhere else and slapped some text on it. Turns out that was wrong. I took “Victorian House” by Gerald_G [OpenClipArt, I’m not linking directly because that site is rife with overbearing adverts but it is easy enough to search if you care]…this one…

Then I gray-scaled it, increased the line depth, added the whole “spooky demon in a window” thing. Built a background and night sky for it. I think I was going to have different skies and other details over different slides but I don’t baled on that.

I’m impressed. Nowadays I would 100% have just snagged an image from Unsplash. 😉

  1. Technically, there were some comments that it was not easy to back up and a few files and emails that were lost. C’est la vie. ↩︎