Snow Day Updates! (Patreon)

Hey Again, Travis here with an end-of-week update... We got our first snow of the season :) Krampus and the holidays are not too far behind!

Release Schedule UpdateFor the first time since moving to Germany (is it really over 3 years now?), we're planning a family visit to the US! Kaitlin hasn't been back since we moved here, so we're planning to take that time off from formal releases to focus on enjoying our time with family. Our holiday break will start after the 18th of December and last until the 6th of January (a release window for 1.5 episodes). The first public release of 2025 will be January 14th - and our schedule for 2025 has been updated:

The White Vault: Goshawk: November 26th, December 10th

(Holiday Break)

The White Vault: Goshawk (contd.): January 14th, January 28th, February 11th, February 25th, March 11th

Don't Mind Sealskin Rock: March 25th, April 8st, April 22nd, May 6th, May 20th, June 10th, June 17th, July 1st, July 15th, July 29th, August 12th

Dark Dice: August 26th, September 9th, September 23rd

The White Vault: Goshawk (final season): October 7th (2025)

You can always check our release schedule at Patreon.com/foolandscholar/about

For transparency, as the people reading this are the supporters we're accountable to, we generally work weekends and if this is taken into account, we have (mathematically) not taken 'time off' in 2024. However, we did visit Japan in May, and even Vienna briefly at the start of November. We love creating. We're passionate about the stories we're bringing to life. We're grateful for our career of entertaining you. We look forward to seeing family, taking time to recharge, and starting 2025 with the second half of Goshawk - Season 2!

After a few small design revisions, patch production is fully underway! We've already started prepping the envelopes and will likely have the first patches mailed out before the holidays!

A work in progress photo of the Þrúðrys prototype - available to take home at the Guardian Tier! (Svetha for scale... though she's admittedly more shy.)

SustainabilityFor the first time in two years, our Patreon is sustaining itself - which is to say that our total number of active patrons is stable. The COVID podcast boom helped many creators grow on Patreon, ourselves included. However, that influx of support began to crash in 2022 and many creators have seen a drastic and consistent decline in support month over month ever since. Our step toward sustainability this month has not been through growth but through fewer cancellations. We've had the fewest number of canceled pledges ever in the last 30 days - and this has made a world of difference to our mental health, and our outlook. Thank you for sticking with us! We hope to entertain you in the years to come.

Finnur, contemplating the perfect sound for a future story...

Similarly, with this confirmation that our finances are stabilizing, we're working toward stabilizing our work/life balance by hiring a full time employee - Finnur Nielsen after his graduation in January. Finnur interned with us through an amazing (paid) program at the University College South Denmark's Sonic College earlier this year. He's been mixing & mastering the new season of Goshawk, and you can find him it the credits of virtually everything we've released this year. Having Finnur working alongside us full time was incredibly fun, and we look forward to more adventures in 2025 and beyond!

We are hoping to finish Goshawk (S2), Sealskin Rock, and Dark Dice (Season 2) before the summer - with the intent to release the final season of The White Vault: Goshawk here on Patreon before October (given how crazy life is, no promises). We're excited to have true early releases, and to move into producing the stories Kaitlin has written more recently.

[Photo from our anniversary adventure earlier this month]

RSS Migration Complete!Finally, our RSS migration was effectively completed in 48 hours! A huge thanks to the Patreon dev team for helping us upload descriptions for all core episodes of The White Vault & Dark Dice! We've verified that the new RSS works on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts, etc, and is ready for you to set up if you haven't done so already. :D

Official instructions on how to set up your Premium RSS: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041347732-How-to-use-your-audio-RSS

The only remaining changes we've yet to make are effectively "formatting" for a handful of episodes.

Remaining Action Items:

Assign all bonus episode posts (educational, non-story specific) to Season 20 - and set an episode order via episode # tags.

Split Educational episodes into Eps 101+, and bonus stories in to Eps 501+

Fix episode descriptions and remove hyperlinks from Dark Dice, & White Vault, and Season 20 Content

Preview Text for Non-patrons across all White Vault & Dark Dice episodes needs to be present and uniform

Remove all sponsorships in VAST Horizon (audio)

Episode titles: "White Vault" may be missing from some non-core season episode titles.

Liberty: Season 1: TftT and CR 1.02-205 are not on the feed at all. The supercuts are cool, but...

----

If you've made this far, we hope that this update was informative and useful.I'll get back to editing.

All the best,-Travis (and Kaitlin) (and Eezo)