Update on Videos (Patreon)

Howdy.

I actually can't fathom it's been near 2 months since the last proper post. I'm actually not sure how the pause might work for actually accessing these right now, so to avoid feeling like I'm talking into the void more than usual I'm setting this one to public for now (I think the proper period passed, so now it's back to the Patron circles).

Without getting into details, a combination of things happening right after the "taking a break" post made life pretty psychotic for the past while. I'm actually glad I did take time off from YouTube when I did, since I doubt I would've been able to do any proper editing or anything else I would've been happy with. That alone is one of the biggest changes I've had from doing "real work" since when a lot is going on you can still put your head down and work there, but there's a definite breaking point when it comes to creative stuff. There you can still do it, but it can suffer, so I'm glad that's been avoided. 

I have been trying a lot of games when I had downtime though, and I've gotten a good idea of a line-up. I'm down to the last 200ish emails which I'm hoping I can pick at over the next few weeks, and I'm hoping I'll be fully caught up with those by the end of May. So there might still be some surprises I might work on more immediately in the future, but I've got a general outline to work around now. The worst of the trial period stuff is mainly dealt with, and I've been back at directly working on videos over the past two weeks-ish.  

Currently, there is something cooking in the editor. Though how I had things lined up after that is in flux. 

I was supposed to get my eyes fixed up this week, and thought the video might be ready in the end of April, but my surgeon ended up getting Covid so there was a delay on that to (likely) this coming week. The tldr on that is my eye sight has always been pretty bad, and getting checked out for LASIK/SMILE it turned out there were some other things that need to be taken care of before that and health insurance over here is complicated to say the least. The kind of complicated where if you get checked out for an optional thing, and a pro says you actually need something more imminent done, your separate eye and general health insurance providers will start making you call the other one endlessly to see who has to pay the portion of it and also keeps trying to say the new procedure still counts as under LASIK since that was the initial consultation even though it's obviously not. It's joyous. 

Why this matters at all to talk about here is I have some CRPG videos lined up like Arcanum (hi munky) and Planescape Torment but all the screen reading for those was straining the fuck out of my eyeballs. So I've just put down those games for now until that's done. 

 Some other irl stuff cropped up as well besides Easter sneaking up on me like it does every year, so depending on how recovery and everything else goes I'd think it should be out in May. Though that's assuming the video will only be about the one game, so if that's all you wanted to know about what's happening without game details you can stop here.

So the video is gonna be on Bungie's Marathon. I had tried it every few years but due to various technical issues and some other issues (fuck you Colony Ship for Sale, Cheap) it never really grabbed me, but the latest run with Aleph One finally clicked. It's definitely one of those iceberg games where you can just play through it and have a fun time with a fairly simple story, but if you actually go digging through logs and connecting the dots there's a ton of fascinating stuff going on under the surface. A lot of outlining and cross referencing the logs I find, which means I was actually tricked into more font reading but at least this time it's much larger font and green against black. So this is definitely going to be one of the more story heavy videos which is kind of a surprise to me. That said, there are two more Marathon games, so I'm considering just banging out an entire "Marathon Trilogy" video rather than separate them out to have it complete all at once. Deciding that will be on the usual solution.

When I've got a better grasp on things in early May, I'll put a poll out on what to do. Even if it's decided to cover the trilogy at once, in a Patreon First™ I'll likely put out an early version of the video covering the original Marathon since I can't imagine not having that done by the end of that month short of actually going blind. So the page is back up for the time being and the previous period credits will still be combined. If you're new to the page you can still post for the video questions in the previous post, and if it ends up being a trilogy video I'll likely just have a longer section at the end of the video for them to account for the build up period.

That's all for now! Stay safe out there.