NB: watch the video, because it includes all these words and is less boring.

My name is Matthew Harris. I am known as Applemask for reasons best not worried about (because they don't exist).

Here are three things I like.

Ephemera.
Socialism.
Doctor Who.

The third thing kind of already has its own people, but I can still dick around with the other two!

Here is how I do this.

Ephemera: I post videos on YouTube, generally involving old commercials, old bits of television continuity, and in particular old public information films, all from the UK. I do this because I'm a sad bastard, and also because it's explicitly the opposite of what these things were made for. None of them were supposed be remembered longer than a fortnight at a time, if that - but they were made anyway.

I subscribe to the broad definition of art as explained by Scott McCloud: art is basically anything we do that's incidental to our basic necessities (survival and reproduction). Commercials are art. Not exactly high art - in fact, possibly the lowest form of art - and largely by default. But still, works of art. They could have had a man in a suit sitting behind a desk saying "buy Murray Mints because they taste nice". That wouldn't have been art. But instead they did a series of little animated cartoons. That was art. And, I'd argue, of greater worth than some conceptual piece about which even the artist doesn't know anything and which took very little effort on their part. Time and care were poured into those things. They may not be a force for good in the world, but people worked on them in the knowledge that they were little more than cultural water vapour. The photographer Roger Mayne said that "the fascination of photography is as a trace of an event that has actually happened". The fascination of ephemera is similar - a trace of an event so trivial it might as well not have happened, but did anyway. The Japanese call it "mono no aware" - the pathos of things.

Fortunately, the videos I will make aren't going to be solemn-faced Newsnight Review exercises in deconstruction. They're going to be silly comedy things where an animated avatar of me pokes fun at things, because that's much more interesting. The main show is called The Hard Sell and will come out monthly (circumstances permitting). It is animated in Moviestorm and is basically the Nostalgia Critic for commercials (yes, I know that he actually did commercials). The first few episodes came out at the end of 2013 and can be seen at vimeo.com/bobthefish.

Other video wossnames I do include Christmas Wrapping, the annual review of Christmas TV branding which started out as a historical overview and spawned a 45-minute documentary on the subject. And then there are several other fantastic ideas for things I might do if this Patreon works out...I'll give details to patrons.

Socialism: I make an online web-based digital Internet magazine on the Web. It is called 2SUNS. The basic idea behind 2SUNS is that we're doomed. It is a defiantly-left wing and extraordinarily foul-mouthed piece that falls directly between Time Magazine and Private Eye and the lies there, slowly bleeding to death. I'm just going to c&p straight from the website, actually:

Are you afraid that the world is fucked? That the bad guys won a long time ago and just never declared it? That sanity has been slowly rendered worthless? That the collapse of civilisation is not a worst-case scenario but a crushing inevitablity to which you have resigned yourself?
Well, the bad news is, you're right. If human civilisation as we live it today still exists by the end of the century, it will very probably be by luck. The good news is, we're here to keep you company in the downward spiral. 2SUNS - the magazine named for a song about Armageddon. 2SUNS - the newsmagazine that laughs into the face of the abyss and hears the abyss laughing back. Newsweek with a noose around its neck, The Daily Show on downers, the product of the one-night stand between Private Eye and VIZ. The Situationist International propped against a bar, nursing a scotch and cracking jokes to no-one in particular. Every couple of months, download a FREE PDF copy of the newest, funniest, most incisive, most depressing newsmagazine on Earth: 2SUNS. Because when the only sane responses to the state of the world are laughter and suicide, why not read the magazine that dares to try the former for a fleeting second?

That about covers it. 2SUNS comes out every other month, or roughly quarterly. We're always looking for other contributors, too.