Progress Report: Week of April 14, 2024 (Patreon)

Hello all! If you're seeing this, you're probably confused! A long time ago, I used to make progress reports that kept people updated on what kind of work I was doing and how much time I spent on it. I know it takes a while for me to pump out videos (but that's hopefully changing soon!), so I figure you all would at least want updates on how things are going and how close the next release is. I stopped doing this, frankly, because I stopped working anywhere near as much as I knew I should have, so I got embarrassed to share my progress with folks on here. We'll talk a little bit about that in this post, but if you just want the tl;dr, just know that things are seemingly back on track for the moment, and even though things are looking a little rocky mental health wise, they'll hopefully stay that way. This is also a really awkward time to start doing progress reports again, since I'm getting married next week and we're going to have a couple of weeks of marriage-related stuff to do that'll keep me away from my video editing setup, but I wanted to get into the habit again! Anyway, here we go:

ADHD STUFF: Hi. My name's Bryant, and I have crippling ADHD. I've broken into tears trying to grade a stack of papers when I was working as a teacher's assistant because my brain was giving me so much resistance. I've missed out on sponsorship opportunities worth thousands of dollars because my brain wouldn't let me answer an email. I graduated with a 3.97 instead of a 4.0 because my brain wouldn't let me turn in the first draft of my final project for my major, even though it was already done. Naturally, being self-employed in a career that offers absolutely no oversight or direction is not the kind of thing that plays well with my specific executive function issues. That's where the seven-month gap between videos comes from. I want to work -- or, I want to want to work -- but working is painful.

Around November of last year, after years of trying different medicines and being in and out of therapy, I finally found a doctor who was willing to prescribe me stimulant medication. And it worked! I released three videos in three months for the first time since I started my channel. I was working confidently and consistently on personal projects. Everything was going great until my heart decided it was tired of being in marching band and it wanted to try out improvisational jazz. I was in and out of the emergency room, diagnosed with atrial fibrilation. That's not a big deal on its own, but it did mean that I wasn't going to be able to take stimulant meds if I didn't want to have a stroke, and believe it or not, I didn't. So I stopped taking the meds, but that also meant that I stopped being happy and productive. After that, I talked with my doctor, we went over some options, and I'm currently taking a less powerful stimulant along with some blood thinners and an anti-arrhythmic. The new medicine doesn't work quite as well as the old one, but it does make the pain (mostly) go away while I'm trying to work. I've only been taking it for a week or so, so there's a chance I'm just placebo-ing myself into productivity, and there's a chance my body will accommodate to it and it'll stop working, and there's a chance that it'll wreck my heart like the old medicine did. But for now, things are working out okay.

NEW VIDEO: It's out! If you're reading this, you can watch it right now on Patreon, and maybe even on Youtube depending on how long it takes me to finish typing. This one was a little rough for me to make. I'm lucky enough in my career to have never had a real scandal or any significant amount of criticism. Posting about GoMG on Twitter and seeing people come at me with absolute hate shook me up a bit and made me very uncertain about posting this video. That said, it's an important one, and I think it turned out very well. I hope you all enjoy it. Work-schedule-wise, I fell into a slump in the middle of March due to a combination of not being medicated and losing motivation to work on the video, but I got the thing done! In fact, once I started working on it again, I got it done surprisingly quickly, as you can see in the spreadsheet attached to this post.

WHAT'S NEXT: Well, that's something I wanted to talk to you all about! I've decided to try pivoting what kind of content I usually produce, moving more into Zero Punctuation-style anime reviews being the norm. These are much easier for me to write and I think will allow me to produce videos much more quickly than focusing exclusively on hardcore analytic content. That content isn't going anywhere. I'll still prioritize it whenever I have a good idea (since I enjoy making that kind of video more), but the overall amount of videos will (hopefully) be increasing. If you don't enjoy videos that are more focused on opinions, fun, and comedy, that's totally okay. Like I said, the literary analysis stuff is always going to be around. Honestly, it might even be coming out faster than it usually does, on average. I just don't think anybody is going to argue that making more content isn't the best move for me as a content creator, and this is the kind of content I can create consistently.

What's exciting about this new experiment is that it's going to give you all a say in what kind of content I make. Since review videos don't require me to have anything new or groundbreaking to say about a series, I can make them about absolutely anything and still produce fun, high-quality content. With that in mind, I'm going to start posting polls where you call can choose which recent, popular series you would like to see me review. These polls will be open to all patrons of all tiers. I did the first one on Discord as a trial run, and they decided on. . . Delicious in Dungeon!  And I started watching Delicious in Dungeon. And I realized Delicious in Dungeon won't be done airing for another two months. So I'm ignoring the poll and doing Solo Leveling instead! Hope you're all looking forward to it. Normally, I would say to look forward to the video in around two weeks' time, but with the wedding and everything happening, it'll probably be delayed to no later than mid-May. You'll know when I post the progress report next week!