Hey Saucy Ones,

Scroll down a bit if you're just looking for stuff about your aprons, I've been away for a while so we've got a fair bit of stuff to talk about.

So we're actually at the Midway point of Halloween in July,

which I'm on the fence about if I'm gonna rename. I'm thinking either "SummerWeen" or "Summer of Spookies." Halloween in July just kind of needs to be July and August because as life moves forward I just can't be making the videos in advance at a pace that allows me to have the go out once a week, especially if I'm working on larger, once-a-month videos outside of HiJ. It's going... okay.

Time to rip the band-aid off. I'll be pleasantly surprised if we get anything more than the game night unlocked for the pledge-o-meter. Perhaps it was far too ambitious to have each goal be at every 25 patrons. I'll consider myself lucky if I break even on total patrons between YouTube Memberships, Ko-fi, and here. I'll be honest: I was expecting this. I don't know if you've noticed but the big line going up is now entirely divorced and people in the real world are having a real hard time getting by. Cancelling a Patreon sub is probably the easiest money-saving thing you can do when times get though and I don't fault anyone for doing that because I'm feeling it too right about now.

How this effects the channel(s)

There's a lot of stuff going on with YouTube and even social media as a whole right about now but we can talk about that later at the end of the year. There are actually a couple of silver linings in all of this for now that makes this significantly less of an issue that it would have been any other year. This Halloween in July is the first year that I'll actually get to keep all the yearly pledge money I get after fulfilling aprons. I think I talked about this before but just in case I didn't, during the later half of the pandemic I got pretty deep into depression and I found out the hard way that you can only make videos as good as your mental state. Bills still had to get paid though and since I didn't want my wife to have to worry about working while she was in grad school as that was potentially losing out on A TON of money in order to make a little money things started going onto the credit card that shouldn't have been going onto the credit card. It all ended with the lights and heat staying on but month-to-month I was carrying a five-figure balance on my main card. Thanks to the successes of last year's Halloween in July and the year before that I paid off all my debts around this time last year: no more credit card balances, paid my car off ahead of time, phones paid for, nothing. Better yet now that I don't have that massive balance it is much, much easier to stay out of debt. I've consistently paid of any outstanding balances on all my cards month-to-month and never carrying a balance and I still have month left over to contribute to some savings.

The second is that I've gotten some clarity on what's going on with my main channel. Again, saving the finer details for later but the short answer for now is to focus more on the second channel and develop that into more of a 'paying the bills' channel while making main channel videos less as money makes and more as creative fulfillment. Why? because my last video on the second channel outperformed the last non-HiJ main channel video and it got much better growth and engagement than any of the videos I've done since the Pathologic 3 one. Why does that matter? because a main channel video takes AT LEAST a month: a couple weeks to play the game without forcing myself to rush through things, a week to outline, write, and edit the script, and then another week to record, edit, and finalize everything for the video. You know how much time it took me to make that commentary video on all the AI slop in the Steam Nextfest? 6 hours. 6 hours from hitting record on OBS to finalizing the thumbnails.

Twitch, vertical formats like shorts and Tiktok, and anything other than just making videos wasn't working out. I gave streaming a good year and change and while I enjoy parts of it, it can be very time consuming and if you want to make a living off it you gotta throw your whole life into it. I do not have that luxury nor do I remote want to no-life it to be a streamer, not when I've got my friends, family, and YouTube is doing well enough as it is. The second channel seems like it's what I need to keep things afloat through these rougher times.

Now about those aprons.

So this year I'm going to do thing a little differently. Rather than send them out in waves with the first wave starting in August and then the second wave for August pledges starting in September, I'm going to send them all out in September. This is mainly because I got bit pretty bad last year having to order two batches of everything and having to pay a higher rate than expected for patches and pins. There's also other angles to it like how that'll take up less time overall which will detract from making videos less. There's also one more reason why I'm putting off sending them out right away.

Yup, beard's gotta go. The heat press I use starts to smoke up a little bit with each apron I make and after 100+ aprons that smoke can get really irritating. I've gotta wear a respirator and to wear a respirator I gotta shave. It's fine. beards grow back. I'm gonna see if I can reduce or outright remove the smoke, but I'm prepared to do this if it comes down to it.

"So what about regular vs piss filter aprons?"

I hear you say. Just DM me if you have a preference. I'll make a note by your address in my master sheet and it'll be on it's way. It's really that easy. We'll talk more about apron and patch stuff later on now that I'm back from my rest break and active again, but there's one thing I need you to do for me right now

GO INTO YOUR SETTINGS AND DOUBLE CHECK YOUR MAILING ADDRESS

GO INTO YOUR SETTINGS AND TRIPLE CHECK YOUR MAILING ADDRESS!!!

You do that by for one, being on desktop (for some reason you can't check this stuff on mobile). you do this by clicking the "..." on the bottom right corner of the landing page, then you click over to settings that looks like a weird, messed up little gear. Once you're there there'll be a sidebar with a bunch of stuff on it. you want to click over to "Account" and then scroll down a little. That's where you'll find the spot to update your address.

I'm saying this stuff now as sometimes it'll take up to a stinkin' week! for those changes to reflect on my side.

That's all for now. Expect the look outside video next weekend. Stay saucy!