New Video: The Wild and Wacky World of Crossword Puzzle Jigsaw Puzzles (Patreon)

Hi everybody, and happy Sunday! I missed last week's video, so now I'm back with a 50 minute deep dive into every puzzle in history that has combined crossword puzzles with jigsaw puzzles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCjEQjQlF20 

I want to give a special shoutout to PuzzleYOU. They've been such a great partner on my channel and this video came about because I wanted to think of a creative way to use their custom puzzle service. I hope at least a few of you get my crossword puzzle printed onto a jigsaw puzzle!

On a more personal note, this video kind of spiraled out of control because I kept finding more and more that I wanted to include. So I think I'll be taking a break from the historical videos for a little while. I want to do some videos now where the focus is on the puzzling itself and not on the research/graphics. I will be doing the follow-up video about Gameophiles, but probably not until mid-June, since the guy who ran the company is taking a little while to get me all of the info he said he'd send over. (Which is totally fine! He has a full life outside of my research project which I just sprang upon him with no warning.)

I also experimented in this video with not having background music during most of the talking segments. I feel like I always lower the background music so much that I don't know if most people even hear it to begin with? Audio levels can sound so different in headphones vs computer speakers vs phone speakers vs TV speakers. But the music was bugging me in this one, and it takes so much time to find music that is interesting but not distracting for the background. So did you guys notice? And did you miss the background music or did you appreciate it not being there? Or am I fully overthinking this?

Next week's video will FINALLY be my second Karen Puzzles Puzzle announcement. After that I have mostly cleared the month of May from sponsorship deadlines, so I think I'm finally going to do the 9000 piece Zodiac puzzle. It's been too long since I did a giant puzzle on the channel. My goal is to get that solved and the videos uploaded before June, because I'm taking the first two weeks of June entirely off from the internet for a (good) secret reason that I'll tell you about once I'm back.

I also wanted to give you all a heads up that starting tomorrow, Patreon is launching free memberships as an option for select channels, including mine. So as long as there are no technical difficulties with the new feature, I'm basically going to start using Patreon as a weekly newsletter as well as a place for exclusive content. The vast majority of the exclusive videos will stay just for paid Patrons, though I will make a couple of them public, just to entice people to sign up. But then, in additional to weekly posts like these, I'll also have weekly posts where I share all of the jigsaw puzzle news of the week, which will be available for free to anyone. I really appreciate all of you who have so generously supported me and my channel, so I just wanted to give you a heads up that a few new people may be coming over to join our puzzle community.

And finally, yesterday, I competed in an online puzzle contest where I paired up with Yvonne! You can watch the Pairs livestream and the Individual livestreams on this channel (I competed in Individual 1, and the final results are read at the end of Individual 2). And I also filmed my own footage which I'll be editing and posting soon to show you the event from my point of view. We didn't do quite as well as we hoped, but we had a few distractions and technical difficulties, which I'll tell you all about in the video.

Thank you for being a Patron and for reading this very long blog post. I'll see you all next week for the official Karen Puzzles Puzzle launch!