A Channel Update!

Hey folks!

Sorry it took me so long to write this up - as I'll explain more below, over the last few weeks I've repeatedly found myself in situations where a "channel update" post felt like it wouldn't be needed. But at this point, as we reach 2 months since my last major content release, I think it's about time I let you all know what's actually going on with me and the channel.

Preamble

So after the arduous task that was the hour-long Space Jam analysis, I took about a month off from video production and streaming entirely, something I'd mentioned planning a few times in my recent work. It was honestly a choice I feel extremely good about making in retrospect - for all of 2020 I've felt like I'm always catching up with myself, chasing after constant engagement to both maintain my online relevance and personal financial security. What I realized, and what triggered my decision to take a vacation, was that I was letting myself fall into a lifestyle that wasn't making me happy and wasn't even strictly necessary - thanks to the support of folks like all of you, it's been a great year for me and the channel and this habitual stress about whether this was the month my channel tanks was totally unneeded. So mid-November to mid-December I was pretty much disconnected - aside from Twitter of course, because I still live in a society. And honestly I'm still sort of untangling a lot of the thoughts that came to me as I took the time to separate my life from my work, something I hadn't meaningfully done since late 2018. My main takeaway was this: I was no longer in a place where content creation was a matter of desperation for me. I'm not churning out videos as quickly as I can because I need to afford groceries this month, I'm an adult with a career and an income, and with this dramatic change should probably come a change to how I look at my projects. So, when I got home around the holidays, manifesting that change was the first thing on my mind.

Making a Change

So it turns out that when you work on videos constantly for over 2 years and then abruptly stop for a month and half, starting up again is way way harder. Your mileage may vary, but that's at least my experience. And that's roughly where I've been in the couple of weeks since I got back, still kind of working out where I want to go with the channel this year and how exactly I want to change my content in a way that makes both me and my viewers happy. Briefly I had the idea of a video focusing on CDProjekt Red and CYBERPUNK 2077, which has now spun off into a playthrough over on my twitch channel with my partner (which I am enjoying quite a lot) - as of right now I'm a little nervous that topic has been discussed to death, but I'm still figuring out if I have an interesting angle on it. I also saw Wonder Woman 1984 and was mere moments from writing Is This The Most Fascist Superhero Movie?, but honestly I'm kind of sick of being known exclusively as "that" guy so I at least would want to approach it in a different kind of way (that movie is def fascist tho). The unfortunate boring answer is I may need a little more time to really figure things out.

What I mainly wanted this post to be was a thank you - a thank you to all of you who gave your support over the last couple of years and even allowed me to be in a position where I could ask myself these kinds of questions. While it's a little scary to watch my analytics crumble and leave my audience starved of content long enough that they might forget me, I consider it a privilege that I even get to take pause here and really think about what I'm doing before I completely spiral. It's not easy or comfortable to talk about making a change but I think this is ultimately the right thing, and I hope you'll all stick around to see what I have for you in the coming months. Until then, I invite you all to please join me on my twitch channel for my semi-regular streams - they're a ton of fun and I really wish I knew my patrons better in general. All the best to all of you, and I hope to talk again soon.