SUMMER SEASONAL UPDATE! (Patreon)

Solstice time!   I'd like to wish you all a happy "That time of year when we all contemplate moving to the southern hemisphere to cash in on Winter-July". That also means it's time for another seasonal update for what's new and next for OSP!

At a glance: we've got new videos (naturally), more streams, big channel milestones coming up, Wukong toys and The Woman Cards in production, a saga about the publishing business, some patreon reward updates, and a poll for folktale topic suggestions.

Off the bat, upcoming video topics: Mycenaean Greece's history drops this friday, then we've got Thoth Changing the Calendar, the complete myth of the Trojan War (this is gonna be a good one, holy crap you guys), a Re-Summarized History of the Roman Empire, a HistoryMakers on Virgil, and a Hijinks video about how "The Dark Ages Were Fine, Actually", to name some of the big bois. We'll also have Trope Talks on the Right Hand Man and Conservation of Ninjutsu (as voted on by you all last spring!). We're looking forward to dropping some of these bigger projects like Mycenaean Greece, Re-Summarized Roman Empire, and especially the Trojan War. Good times ahead!

This past season we've had good fun doing a tiny bit of experimentation with livestreams, such as adding Blue to the OSP After Dark lineup of Red and Indigo, plus doing some solo-Red power hour streams. We've been enjoying the more direct conversation between us and our lovely viewers that we get with the "talking" streams, it's a more natural conversation than when there's a game in the way. I do still intend to finish my Assassin's Creed 2 playthrough but it's been rough going in the spare-time department these past few months (getting Covid twice will do that to you), and I've had to keep the focus on videos. I feel like that was definitely the right choice, but I do definitely miss playing the games for you all. Overall, we've been satisfied by how the podcast lets us chat directly with the community, and there are less technical problems, so we've been putting more effort towards that, but we're hoping to raise the frequency of our streams this summer, and hopefully pull off another big group event like the New Year's Eve Pathless stream. I've just been having a kind of hard time with videogames lately, and not streaming them has been good for my ability to actually enjoy them.

You might have noticed that OSP is slowly coming up on Two Million Subscribers. We're not there YET, but we're close, and we have two fun things planned: first, a celebratory OSP Animated video with clips from multiple different livestreams and some podcast bits, as well as a special pin release of Red and Blue as pins! Between the 2-Mill milestone and the looming 10 year anniversary of the channel in December, it's a big year for OSP! So if you want either the special OSP Animated or the Red & Blue pins, go nudge your friends to subscribe to the channel. It's fun, and free!

Tangentially related to Merch, the Sun Wukong Vinyl Toy and the Woman Cards History-Makers Deck are both in production and should be shipping out by the end of the summer.

We've also got news, though not any progress, to share about books. STORY TIME: so we had been approached by a publisher late last year who was interested in making an OSP nonfiction book about history and myths. This is actually not the first time that's happened, as back in spring of 2020 we were approached and swiftly ghosted by two separate publishing companies — we have a suspicion that was more on Covid than us, but — maybe 3rd time's the charm, so we bounced some ideas back and forth for book concepts and swiftly ran into the impassable task of matching a book we wanted to write with a book the publisher believed would sell, and that required batting away some truly soulless concepts like "Lies My History Teacher Taught Me", which – fully ignoring how that book already exists – is a terrible way to teach history. By New Year's we had a halfway workable concept but absolutely no motivation to write even a sample chapter, so we put the whole thing on ice. Follow-up conversations with other members of that team made it clear that the market would only accept a Myth book OR a History book (cowards), and such a project would still take months and months of work time away from the channel, likely resulting in a substantial video drought. So we took a moment to reflect and decided that the nonfiction publishing business is currently not for us, because there's almost nothing we could do in a book that we couldn't already do easier and faster and better in a video. Our conclusion was aided by the experiences of two other YouTube creators we admire — one of whom spent a year working on a pilot for a TV show but the network fell through, and one of whom spent half a year straight working on a book that's just become a New York Times bestseller — but both creators took a substantial break from making videos to pursue that goal, and that's just not something we want to do at all. What all that means for OSP right now is: We were hoping to have a super cool book about myths and history to show you around this time of year, but instead we offer you a story of how we dodged a bullet.

That all said, there are stories we're working on that we're excited to show you. In addition to Red's webcomic Aurora which is hammering through its 17th chapter at the moment, that Venice story I mentioned in January is currently going through its final round of revisions and then I'm aiming to get it out before the end of the year. I was hoping to get it properly announced this summer, but another story project I was working on inadvertently tripled in scope, and ended up running into June when I thought it would be sorted by February. On the plus side, it's cool as hell.

Lastly, while bouncing around ideas for improving our patreon page, we agreed that we want to get your input on more things, so we'll be doing more topic requests like this one a few days ago (available for Five-Man-Band and up). We'll also be posting more preview images of the Trickster-Deity-tier's monthly art piece (also partly because we don't want our Trickster Deities to miss their monthly art piece because they might have missed one notification). We're also making progress on a plan to send out sticker packs every season to certain tiers, so let us know if you'd like to get a physical reward with your tiers in addition to your digital goodies. 

But in the meantime, on the subject of that post asking for topics, Red has collected some of her favorite suggestions in the poll down below. Vote for your favorite(s) below!

Cheers, and happy Summer,

-Blue