The State of Things - The Sickly October 2023 Edition (Patreon)

Howdy folks! I am currently writing this notice in my PJs, on my couch, as I deal with Covid. It’s wild after three years to finally get it but so it goes I suppose. I forgot that when you pledge to make a Berserk video that everything will start to catastraphize and inevitably delay it.

It’s been a while! And that sucks! I was really hoping to get more videos out this year, but this has been a particularly difficult year for a lot of reasons, reasons which you may be familiar with if you follow my other socials. I’ve essentially been ill a large portion of the year, including a month long sinus infection and now Covid. It’s been brutal and hard to work on things. And I owe you all an explanation and apology and update. So with that in mind, I want to tell you some stuff I’ve been working on and thinking about.

Future Videos

I want to go ahead and set my future video plans in stone. As some of you may already know, my next video is going to be a review of Berserk: Memorial Edition, which was meant to celebrate the two year anniversary of the original Berserk video before The Everything happened. Regardless, I want it to be a companion piece to that original video, sort of an addendum to it. I’m really excited to get a chance to talk about my favorite series again and finally get it off my plate. Ideally, I’d love to get this done and out by the end of the month, Covid be willing, because goddamn it has taken way too long.

Afterwards, my next video will be on successful but failed Kickstarters from various YouTubers. I’ve talked a bit about crowdfunding campaigns on the channel already and it’s a subject I always find fascinating. For this, I want to focus on crowdfunding campaigns from online creators that made their goal but for whatever reason failed to actually produce what they promised. This is something I’ve been researching and working on for months now and I’m excited to hopefully get to make it.

Next, though maybe not immediately next, I want to make a video on the steelbook community and the culture of Blu-Ray collecting. Some of you may remember a Twitter thread I made back in January 2022 regarding difficulties with the steelbook community and how it has evolved. I want to take that thread and expand it into a full piece on boutique Blu-ray releases and the evolution of the physical media space. This feels increasingly relevant with the news of more and more stores stopping sales of physical media entirely, and I hope I can make it into a video others care about too.

Those are the immediate plans I have, though obviously there’s other ideas still kicking around in here and other things I still want to get to. For example, that Kingdom Hearts vid is still long overdue. But I just wanted to commit to these for now and see how y’all feel about them.

Collaborations

For what it’s worth, my time away hasn’t been spent solely on my own stuff. I’ve also been doing work for other channels too. Beyond my usual go-to stuff with Sarah Z (by the way, there should be a new Sarah Z video by the end of the month) I’ve been working with two other friends of mine on their own videos for their own channels. The subject matter of both means I can’t really go in-depth about either of them, lest I ruin the impact, but I’m very excited to see them posted and will be sure to share them once they’re out in the world. It’s been interesting, working as a form of consultant for others. It’s a fun gig.

Patreon

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I want to spruce this place up and make it feel a bit more… alive? Worthwhile? I fully acknowledge I’ve been bad at getting the Patreon exclusive content. With how hard it’s been to get work done on main channel videos, it’s felt next to impossible to get to the bonus content. That sucks and I hate it. Y’all deserve better. And I’ve been trying to think of what I can do to provide better.

Right now, the main Patreon exclusive incentive has been exclusive videos with subjects voted on by patrons. Clearly those haven’t been happening. I want to get back in the habit of doing these, but I need to figure out a way to incorporate it into my workflow in a way where it doesn’t feel like trying to dribble two basketballs at once between side content and primary content.

One thing I was considering that I’ve seen others do on their own patreons is more exclusive interactive content. Things like monthly Patreon exclusive Q&A and hang out streams, or even stuff like book clubs or watchalongs. Would this be something that interests any of you? Would you be interesting in doing things like voting for books or stories to read together, or shows to do watch parties of? Like if I were to host something like, I dunno, weekly Beast Wars discussions, where each week we talk about an episode of Beast Wars together, or read a chapter of a book or issue of a comic run and discuss over a weekly basis or so. Things that would be fun for me as well as hopefully for all of you as well. Let me know if anything of this interests you, or if there’s anything else you want to see from the Patreon. I want to make you all feel like you’re getting your money’s worth supporting me, especially in these long unexpected and unexplained gaps between videos.

On the subject of exclusive content, I will be continuing to do the Berserk chapter reactions and reviews, which are also now hosted on Nebula as well. I don’t know how many people watch them, but I do know I have fun doing them and it’s nice to document my feelings on the current direction of my favorite series. Hopefully once I recover from Covid I can finally record videos for the last two chapters, which both had the audacity to drop while I was in Canada and away from my computer.

Final Words

Anyway, thank you all for your time and patience with all this. 2023 has been a weirdly difficult year for me and I appreciate the support more than I can properly say. I hope I can recover and produce more stuff for you all. It’s quite literally killing me not to. Thank you all for your patronage and for enjoying what I do on this silly little channel. Let me know your thoughts on things going forward, what you want to see from both the channel and the Patreon. And in the meanwhile, I’m going to go back to laying down on this couch in my PJs until Covid released me from its grips.