Trip Delay Until June 23rd (Patreon)

Hello everyone! I had intended to leave this May on the Lincoln Highway trip, but I've been forced to push it back by a couple unpleasant circumstances.

1) I got Covid. I'm glad, at least, that it happened before I left and not during or, least of all, before. It's been mild enough for me but there needs to be a few weeks in between this and leaving on a winding journey through multiple states and isolated communities.

2) Gas shot up to $5 a gallon. I had set aside saving enough for gas around $3, but the way the price of gas has kept going up against the fact that 12-18 MPG is all I can reasonably expect from the Thunderbird has significantly increased the cost of the whole thing. I've taken this extra time to do a lot of deep repairs (water pump, timing chain, power steering pump, radiator and lines, etc.) with help from my friend Mitty, who has far outpaced me in the program and has been working as a professional mechanic for several months now. 

3) I need to finish the Bloodborne/Sekiro/Elden Ring video. In trying to figure what was the lesser evil, delaying the trip or delaying the video, I was leaning towards finishing the video and delaying the trip even before I got Covid and it forced my hand. The video will be out this May, towards the end, and I think that's important to happen before I leave on a trip where I can't finish any other projects. I'm deeply concerned, as I'm sure are many of you, about lack of output so far in 2022. The Dark Souls video represents five hours of content about three games, which is *okay* output, but with this next video done in May that'll put it up to eight or nine hours of content about six games across five months, which is much better return on Patron investment. It's never out of my mind how much responsibility it is to be paid the way I am, and giving value for what people pay me is a huge goal.

I know that this trip has been pushed already, but the problem is that it's a larger undertaking than I've ever attempted at a more complicated time than I've ever tried to accomplish something like this. That feels like it makes it more urgent, to get a very deep and unusual picture of the country at such an extremely unusual time. In the reddit thread about the recent Dark Souls video I did, there was a guy arguing that the travel content I do is a scam because "it takes no effort to point the camera out the window of a trip he was already going to take", and I want to try and explain that this is not the case. 

This next series of travel videos has taken years of planning, and planning exclusively for the production of video content. I am not vacationing for no purpose and then trying to get my patrons to foot the bill. This has been a deliberate, slow, extremely meticulous process even getting to the point where I know where I'm going and why I'm going there. So to better describe the projects:

-The Lincoln Highway video will be a historically-minded travelogue about the very first transcontinental motor route, retracing the original 1913-1918 configuration as closely as possible across interstates, highways, biways, surface streets, alleyways, and dirt roads. It is a matter of thousands of miles and thousands of turns. I have had to completely transcribe the directions myself to create an offline copy. It's going to be ~4 hours of total video, going west to east, present to past, and trying to incorporate both everything I researched and everything I don't know yet I'm going to find. This trip, this project, has been my obsession for several years running. It's neither a scam nor a lark, it is the absolute culmination of the skills I've developed for planning these sorts of trips and I would not have delayed it if I could possibly help it.

-East Coast Landscapes of Fallout. The west coast video is by far my most popular travelogue, and as a Fallout fan first and foremost it's hugely important to me to do the other half of this project. This project, more than the Lincoln Highway one, is why I have to put away so much money to afford the projects. I can't camp every night in Boston or Washington D.C., there are more traditional trip expenses than I've had to deal with previously where I just drove my hotel everywhere. However, I think it will be worth it-- I've also done over a hundred hours of pure research for this project, so while much of Fallout 3, 4, and 76 has no bearing on what the actual places look like I've found dozens of alternate, comparative locations that do resemble what's in the games. This is going to be more work navigationally and a larger amount of driving by a huge margin than the last Landscapes of Fallout project. 

I understand that to many, the Dark Souls video also represented a decline in quality-- that it was overly repetitive, bloated, and tonally unpleasant. I have had many people write to me to tell me they're unsubscribing from my channel or won't be watching again based on the downward trend they felt the video indicated. It is not my intention to artificially bloat my videos. They've been getting longer, yes, but only on account of trying to be more ambitious with them-- to cover more games, like with Resident Evil, or to cover in detail games I found very multifaceted, which was my intention with Dark Souls. The next video I'm making more of an effort to trim and edit the script, although it's still going to be similarly long just because of my interest in the games. I am trying my best to listen to and respond to trends of thought regarding my output, and it was a very strong trend for people to feel the Dark Souls video was a major disappointment and a harbinger of greater disappointments to come. I am working diligently to try and insure this won't happen, and keep the quality at a level commensurate with everyone's level of support. 

As a final note, I'm also making steady progress on my horror novel project. I don't want to put a date on anything, but it's shaping up into an actual book-- around 80k words so far. It is a one-off horror/sci-fi project with no sequels or lingering hooks, based on both my affinity for and criticisms of Haunted House novels of the '60s through the '90s, like Richard Matheson's Hell House. Ebook copies will be made available for free to patrons of any amount as a patrons-only post when the book is done, as you've all certainly already paid for it. 

I appreciate everyone's patience with me at this critical time. I am trying to finish more things than I ever have before, and if I can just bring them over the finish line, I think everyone's really going to enjoy them. This isn't at all a plea for extra donations-- I have plenty as is to accomplish all of these goals. What I ran out of was time, and if you'd lend a little more of that, that's all that's needed. Thanks for reading all this and your understanding. As always, refunds are available for any amount at any time.