Updates: Mental Health, Q&As, and Upcoming Scripts (Patreon)

Okay, so it's been a rough couple months.

My motivation has been flagging well beyond the levels that are acceptable for maintaining a webseries with contributing patrons and regular viewers. After months of expecting I'll just... do it, sometime, somehow, I've recently come to the conclusion that there is actually something going on with my mental health, and I need to work to address it. It hasn't wrecked my life, really, and that subtlety is one of the reasons I think it took me so long to realize what was happening. But my motivation and energy to do anything beyond my job and relaxing afterward has been sapped, and beyond not being conducive to producing a webseries, that's just not how I want to live my life.

So I'm working on that. I'll share personal updates on here as I go, I suppose.

In the meantime, the webseries can't wait on me to fix all my personal problems, but clearly my approach hasn't been working with whatever's going on for me. So the series is going to go through a few adjustments in order to get content out there.

For one, I'm going to focus on actually playing more games. Inspiration and motivation for the series has always gone hand-in-hand with me playing games that get me excited and thinking enough to put my thoughts out there, so I'm going to be restructuring some elements of my life around getting more time to actually play more video games. Because I haven't been lately, and that's not great.

Second, I'm going to focus more on shorter videos for a little bit, while I slowly prepare for some more literary analysis episodes. Like I said before, motivation and inspiration go hand in hand, so I'm going to try and make some episodes about some stuff I'm personally and currently interested in before getting back to the in-depth examinations of specific games. This should help get me back into the swing of things.

In addition, reviews are going to be largely replaced by review roundups. I'll make videos including my thoughts on a variety of games I'm playing, old and new, finished or unfinished, all in one. This should allow me to play more games than I'd have time for if I'm making a full, separate review video for each game I play, while also encouraging me to try more things and allowing me to cover more games on the channel.

All of this is essentially built around my own motivation, so I understand if it's not quite what you want to see from the series. I dislike the idea of shaping the channel around my own shortcomings, but clearly I am not managing to bring myself up to the level I want the channel to be at, so this is a temporary compromise. I assure you, this is not a long-term solution. The short-term solution is to adjust the series a bit to work better with my mental health struggles while I seek more information and understanding of them, and hopefully lead to a more active Games as Lit. 101 in the process. Once I get more of a handle on myself, I hope to bring the series back up to the standards you all deserve.

In the meantime, I've already begun work on this. As a special gesture given the circumstances, I'm uploading two scripts I've drafted--one about character-based worldbuilding in Trails of Cold Steel and another about Code Vein's identity as "anime Dark Souls"--and I'm going to make them available to all patrons, not just $10+ pledges. You can read through them and even leave comments on the document, to give feedback before the episodes are committed to film and put on Youtube.

I'll also be posting to ask more questions for patrons who get to contribute to the Q&As, because I completely missed that last month and that's... not okay, to put it mildly.  So I'll take your questions and get another Q&A up, sooner than last time.

There will also be uploaded audio from the Game Club meetings; I'll post highlights on Youtube and full audio on Patreon for all of you to hear.

All of this will be going up soon after the first of the aforementioned two videos gets put up, hopefully sometime mid-November.

I'm sorry for the effects my negligence in managing my own mental health have had on the series, and on all of you generous patrons. I'll keep updating here as I figure things out, and in the meantime, I hope you'll bear with me a little bit longer while I work all this out.

Thank you all.