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Yuuuup. That's me. You're probably wondering how I got into this situation. Well, I need to take you back. Back, like, a few hours since my last post. The world moves so fast...
Hey, all, and welcome to the first ever guerrilla issue of Kimbahly YouTube Newsletter. This is being written the night of July 1st (technically, early July 2nd). I wish I'd come on better news; unfortunately, that's not how things are playing out. To be upfront with you—long story short, the Otachan video has essentially collapsed in on me. The video is now being substantially altered to reflect new developments in the story. To summarize, a user known as OtachanPlease or HemtaiBussy69 (someone I've had something of a personal history with, though I doubt they'd recognize me now) has come out with a Google document that serves to, among other things, expose nearly a decade of alleged scams run by Yusef Iqbal of OtakuVS. The document accuses Iqbal of intentionally scamming his Patrons on Patreon by promising overly-ambitious products, only to run off with the money and come up with an excuse. Inside evidence from OtachanPlease seems to indicate that this has been going on for years—at the earliest, since 2019. At this time, I am not making any definitive claims on Iqbal's guilt, nor his innocence; additionally, I am not validating the claims of the document by bringing it up—at this time, more research on my end is desperately needed. This is how I will be spending the next few days of my life, unfortunately. You can find the document here and be the judge for yourself. Additionally, if anything is to happen to this document, I've archived the current version by saving it to my PC as a PDF; feel free to ask me for that file at any time.
So... what does this mean for the video? Well, thankfully, the threads I'd need to pull on to bring this issue up are already present within the script, which means I'm not totally starting from square one, and I'm incredibly thankful that this news plays perfectly into my thesis—though more research is needed, I'd like to thank OtachanPlease for supplying these sources. I've currently gotten OtachanPlease lined up for an interview taking place sometime next week; we'll see how that goes. Previously, the script had been running on what information was publicly available—it is now obvious to me that such surface-level research will not suffice. The last thing I want to do is tell an incomplete story, and it now seems that I'm unable to trust OtakuVS at their word; frankly, I've got some work to do. This will likely change the video's contents dramatically—in particular, a segment following the halfway point (subtitled "Otapocalypse") will see drastic updates. I'm currently unable to speak on how this will impact the video's release date I floated around just hours ago, but it seems that this is delaying the project's completion substantially (again).
Though this has been something of a frightening experience (as I said, I've never had a video of mine collapse in on me like this before), I think I'm going to come out of it with a better project overall. As I said, this situation plays basically directly into my overall thesis, and for that, I'm most grateful; this could have easily been a situation in which I had to overhaul my entire argument, or even scrap the video entirely if I couldn't come up with anything. Once again, I'd like to thank OtachanPlease for their near immediate willingness to help me out here. Until that interview, the script is basically being put on hold—in the meantime, I'll be researching. For now, though, I want to go to bed; this has been something of an endless night. Be sure to check in on my Bluesky every now and then for more live updates. Even if I've lost some sleep over this (and will probably lose more attempting to rectify it), I'm glad it happened. See you soon. (Also, about SQZ—sorry! Kinda got wrapped up in this. It may or may not come out; I'm, um, a little busy, if you couldn't tell. See ya!)
-Kim