🎙️ David Friedman, filmmaker and writer

Watches TV, movies, Nebula, and YouTube; listens to podcasts, plays games

To start out, can you tell us a little about yourself and where people can follow your work?

Sure! I’m David Friedman, a filmmaker and writer based in the Washington, D.C. area. The best way for people to follow my work currently is through my newsletter at ironicsans.ghost.io. It comes out every other week and is free. I use it to explore many of my nerdy interests outside of filmmaking and try to shed light on some of the surprising and hidden corners of culture.

I know you said you only dabble in video games, but I want to start there…

What has your relationship with gaming looked like (including puzzle games) and how did that inform or inspire you to create Gisnep?

I grew up in the 80s, playing the first wave of video games at the arcade at the mall. We soon got a home computer—an Apple clone that had the best computer manual I’ve ever seen still to this day—and spent probably too much time playing games on it, fighting with my siblings over who gets to use it. And I played video games across the first several generations of home systems, but as I’ve gotten older, I have less time for video games overall. I do still go through waves where I catch up on the latest games, though.

I also played a lot of board games and word games growing up. Among other things, we played Boggle and Scrabble, and I also loved Games magazine, which had a lot of word and logic puzzles. When Wordle came out, and so many daily word puzzles followed, trying to capture its success, I thought it would be fun to make one of my own. But I had no ideas for a fun daily word game.

One night, just before falling asleep, I registered the domain gisnep.com on a whim with no idea what I’d do with it. I just thought it was funny that it was available, since it’s a common mis-reading of the Disney logo. So I grabbed it.

A few days later, I had an idea for something I could use the domain for: I remembered that one of the puzzle types I used to love doing in Games magazine was called quotefall or dropquote puzzles, and thought that would make for a great daily game.

I am not a coder, but AI allowed me to make something that felt polished enough to share: a dropquote-style game with some added twists and a bit more personality than the existing dropquote games out there.

More than 400 puzzles later, Gisnep is still running and a lot of people still enjoy it!

I also recently released a totally different type of game. I was inspired by the word “Doomscroll” which always makes me wonder if you could make a Doom-inspired game where the only thing you do to play is scroll. A few AI vibe-coding sessions later, and voila: Doomscroll: The Game! More than 50,000 people played it the first week!

I think you are the first person who’s mentioned Nebula so I’m curious how YouTube and Nebula influence your writing (and videos) for Ironic Sans?

I was a blogger in the early 2000s back when that was a thing people did, and I posted a bunch of short experimental videos to YouTube when it was still pretty new. One of my oldest videos that’s still up is a low-quality clip of landing gear, with almost 480,000 views. So, like many people, I’ve been watching and sharing on YouTube for almost 20 years. I subscribe to a lot of channels, and I usually only look at my subscription feed, unlike most people who let the algorithm suggest what they watch via the Home page.

Most of my work that’s on YouTube is stuff that I have created professionally for others. A couple of favorites include a documentary about a street puppeteer and the little old lady he befriends in the park, and another about a telephone repairman who quits his job to follow his dream of designing women’s shoes.

Over the years, the landscape on YouTube has changed. The type of content people consume has changed, and the way they consume content has changed. People watch it now more on TV than they do on other devices, and they watch long videos, often personality-driven.

Unfortunately, a ton of content on YouTube now is AI generated slop. I know some great YouTubers who do narrated educational videos, and people have begun assuming the narration is AI-generated because everyone is so skeptical now.

Nebula is a remedy for that. It’s a creator-owned and creator-driven platform with many of the best people you can find on YouTube, but on Nebula it’s all guaranteed to be human-made, and it’s free of ads and sponsor reads. And they have exclusive content, too, including a few things I’m very excited about.

I was invited to join Nebula a few years ago, and you can find my personal videos there, but I’m so busy with work for other people that I rarely have time to post my own stuff these days—although I do have a few pieces in edit for Nebula if I can just find the time to finish them!

People interested in checking out Nebula can use this link for 50% off. It’s so good.

What’s the last movie you saw in a theater?

The Fantastic Four: First Steps. It was fine. It was the best Fantastic Four movie so far, anyway.

As your movie watching has transitioned more to your TV set, what does your relationship with your phone look like while watching (or reading) things?

I generally don’t do dual screens except during unskippable commercials when I’ll always pick up my phone to pass the time. But when I’m watching something for enjoyment, it’s typically with intention and focus.

Once my kids go to bed, my wife and I usually have less than an hour to watch something together before we need to get to sleep, so we watch things we’re both interested in on the living room TV. For things I’m interested in that she isn’t, I often watch on my phone, and often piecemeal when I can fit it in (say, on the subway or in bed). It’s very far from ideal. But it’s also often surprising to me how much my brain stitches a show or movie together when watched in pieces, like it just picks up where it left off.

I’d rather watch everything on a big screen, though. I think VR headsets are pretty cool for watching things on a virtual big screen, actually. It’s a shame they’re not comfortable enough to wear for a whole movie.

When it comes to TV and Movies, are you still a cable subscriber in our world of streaming services?

We cut the cable cord 15 years ago, and bought an antenna and a TiVo to record over-the-air programming. To this day, that’s still how we watch things on network TV. (Sometimes I can’t believe that TiVo hard drive still works after all this time)

But we actually watch network TV less and less as we mostly watch streaming services these days. We subscribe to an embarrassing number of streaming services and don’t usually juggle them. The one thing we juggle is Sling, which we subscribe to just for a couple months during NBA playoffs season.

Can you give us a sampling of your tastes?

I could give pretty long lists, but I’ll try to make them short and representative.

Recent-ish TV faves would include Task, Bad Sisters, Pantheon, Reservation Dogs, Shogun

Recent-ish movies: the two-part documentary Pee-Wee As Himself, Flow, Dune, Poor Things, May December

All-time TV faves would include The Wire, Better Call Saul, Moonlighting, the Honeymooners, and the first season of Lost

All-time movies: Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters, Dog Day Afternoon, T2, Groundhog Day, Edward Scissorhands, Koyaanisqatsi

How do podcasts fit into your life? Are you listening for entertainment, education, current events, or something else?

I am subscribed to so many podcasts that I don’t even remember what half of them are. I like to think I listen for entertainment as an escape from the news, but the truth is the news-related ones update much more often, so they populate my feed more, so that’s what I end up listening to more. I often start my day listening to the previous night’s late-night comedy monologues while I make my kids’ lunches.

Where do you discover new things to listen/read/watch?

I’m not sure. Maybe casual recommendations on social media from people I know or trust? Oh, and when I see a “best new podcasts/shows/movies” list anywhere, I’ll often look to see if there’s something interesting I didn’t know about.

Any last words about your media consumption or the state of entertainment?

As a person who makes video for a living, AI in media worries me. As a person who loves technology, AI in media excites me. It’s the biggest thing to keep an eye on. It’s the worst it ever will be right now, and I can only imagine what it will look like and how it will be used in just a couple years.

And you didn’t ask anything about books. Don’t forget that books are media, too! Next time…