Save the Brigitte Empire Channel

TL;DR: I'm a YouTube video essayist and satirist writing videos about trans topics, British politics, science, and social justice from a left wing perspective. Think Philomena Cunk but a comrade and on a much lower budget. I've run this channel (and all my jobs for the last decade) from a PC that I got almost a decade ago. This PC is now only intermittently able to charge, and its performance in the last year has been pretty dogshit all around. Since video editing is very intensive and I try and put out one video every 1-2 weeks, without a PC with the right stats, the channel is going to suffer. Videos will likely take longer and be lower quality, so I need a new PC, because I'm not going to let that happen. The problem is, I'm still a baby channel, and my income is far below minimum wage. So I'm asking anyone who has cracked even a small smile at my channel to consider dropping a couple quid towards getting me a PC with which I can continue to improve and rag on the british media, conservatives, and imperialism all over the world, in the only way I know how. In return for your help, once we get this PC set up I will start doing weekly streams, uploaded to a second channel, so you all get more content for your generosity. Thank you and enjoy this picture of the PC holding on using a USB-C port and a piece of tissue paper. Thanks!

Now for the long story. Can you tell I like to write essays?

Back in 2016 I started a PhD in what you could loosely describe as vertebrate anatomy, but what I usually call palaeontology, just because it's easier to explain. For my work I needed to process huge CT scans of animals from salamanders to elephants to form a database of 3D models of front and hind feet of vertebrates of all types, to do the long but rewarding work of trying to use modern animal anatomy to understand how dinosaur feet worked. My supervisor, honestly, was a bit of an arse, and refused to let me work on my macbook air that I'd been doing all my work on for the previous decade, but to be fair, the programs we were using were often not compatible with mac os and required a lot of processing power. So, using the exactly 1000 pounds of inheritance money I had from all of my grandparents passing away, I bought the pictured Dell XPS 15. For the first time in my life I had a computer that could run more than just microsoft word, and with it, I researched and wrote a PhD, published several scientific papers, worked for multiple organisations in between academic jobs, worked as a lab assistant, and when I came to the crushing realisation that academia was making me want to top myself, I used it to start a little youtube channel called Brigitte Empire, which is, to date, the most fulfilling thing I've done in my life, and is, luckily for me, doing pretty well considering the short time I've been doing it and how I was pretty much learning video production on the job.

I stuck a video below here so you get an idea of the kind of work I've been doing. My original pitch to myself was one I'd been thinking about for a while, I'd been playing with the idea of doing drag as a charicature of a British columnist, the typical bigoted, rich, out of touch, white conservative woman, who maybe once had dreams of changing the world but sold her soul to write sneering hit pieces on people like me for the Murdoch press. I also was a huge fan of Charlie Brooker growing up and despite the fact that we did get more Philomena Cunk later on, it was never enough for me, I needed more, and so I thought, fuck it, I'll do it myself. Of course, like all big projects, it ended up being quite a different thing to how I initially pictured it working, but people seemed to like watching it, and I loved doing it, and I've been unable to stop since.

By the time I started doing this channel my poor PC had already suffered through a PhD and a global pandemic. During the first lockdown, its charger port completely broke, and all attempts to fix it failed. Since then I've had to charge it through its USB-C port, something it really does not like, and as you can imagine, since then its performance has plummeted, on top of this, as it aged, its performance got worse for all the other reasons PC performance does. Now, that USB-C port is also dying. Right now I can get it working by propping up the charger at the right angle, but I've been here before, I'm aware that's only a temporary solution, and again, I've tried everything. Between that, the fact that it's so loud when I make videos that the audio quality dropped on them for months until I could figure out how to compensate through editing, and that I want to start streaming to give my viewers and patrons especially more bang for their buck, while my computer struggles to run even 20 year old games at this point, and randomly stops accepting its charger and runs out of battery at least once when I try, I need a new PC. This bad bitch has served me well for almost a decade, but no one builds these machines to last anymore, and I need to move onto something on which I can keep my current schedule, improve my skills beyond the limits of trying to make a flashy video on a PC that crashes when I try and add even simple transitions, and add regular stream to my output, which is the basic thing people expect from most of the youtubers they follow these days. My other options are, uh, less good.

So, I'm asking anyone who's ever enjoyed something I've made to put a quid or five into this Gofundme, so I can continue the channel at the pace and quality I've slowly attained, and get even better. I know money's tight right now, so don't feel like you need to if you can't afford it. Your health and sanity are far more important than keeping me in business, but if you do have something to spare, I'd really appreciate it.

From all of us all The Daily Telegrift,

Thank you,

Catherine Strickson AKA Brigitte Empire