Memorandum: 2024 - Health Issues, Physical Rewards & Channel Reboot (Patreon)

Attention Institute Personnel!

On behalf of myself, the Office of the Director, and all the department heads here at the Templin Institute, I would like to extend my congratulations to everyone who survived another year in this reality. Within the next few weeks, we’ll be announcing what the Institute has planned for 2024 but I wanted to first talk about 2023, and some of the challenges we ran into.

And let’s start with the lengthy hiatuses in video production we experienced. As I briefly mentioned in a few videos and streams this last year, I began to suffer from some respiratory issues in December of 2022 which peaked in severity throughout the following spring and summer. This heavily impacted not only my ability to record scripts, but the associated “brain fog” also hindered my writing. It was incredibly frustrating and scary to be unable to work, not because of some outside factor, but due to my own health.

Thankfully it does look like the worst symptoms have cleared up. But as a content creator* I’ve never been too comfortable talking about my personal life. I feel like the focus should be on the Institute itself rather than the crude flesh construct into which my consciousness was inserted. But I recognize that the Institute is only possible due to the support offered by our community, and especially from those of you who have pledged here on Patreon. With your support should come the expectation of clear communication of what’s going on. That’s a balance I’ve found it difficult to strike sometimes, and I apologize if in trying to preserve my personal privacy, the Institute appeared less than transparent.

Problems with my health also exacerbated issues in getting out our physical rewards last year. I’ll have more to say about this soon, but we’ve already made a few big changes.

• Shipping of all rewards has been centralized in Calgary, Alberta. (formerly this was split between Vancouver and Calgary)
• We’ve brought on a new member of the team who will be dedicated solely to shipping rewards.
• And we’re just about to get a new system finalized to deal with lost packages, missing rewards, and other issues. (right now we get flooded with hundreds of emails a week and it’s been too easy for legitimate questions to get caught up in spam filters.)

Finally, perhaps the biggest thing we learned in 2023 is just how much the Templin Institute has changed since 2017. Series like “Building Your Battlegroup” and long-form investigations like “The First Tyrannic War” are some of my favorite episodes we’ve ever produced, but they also require far more work than the typical video. Including them in our production schedule has exposed a bunch of issues in how we edit our videos but also given us a ton of ideas on how we can improve our editing pipeline.

So, if our big project for 2023 was getting the Way of Worldbuilding and our original setting off the launch pad, I’m proud to announce that our goal for 2024 is a major reboot and revamp of the entire Templin Institute. Everything from our Patreon rewards to the look of our videos will be updated and refined, incorporating everything we’ve learned over the last 6 years.

If you’ve been a part of the Templin Institute for long enough, you might remember we did this once before back in 2019 during OPERATION: THUNDERSHARK. Well, get ready for its big brother. In 2024, we kick off OPERATION: LIGHTNINGFISH. 

Again, we’ll have more to say about this in a future State of the Institute, but until then, thank you for your support. 

*I hate this term but I can't think of anything more appropriate.