July/August Update: The Iron-to-Fire Ratio

Hey team,

Sorry to have missed July's update, I was holding off because I felt on the verge of having something to announce for the entire month of August, but, now, here I am, with nothing for you but an apology. Sorry!

A Truly Unreasonable Number of Irons

Here is a mostly-complete list of the things I could credibly call "in the works":

The Alt-Right Playbook
The series of shorts beginning with The Slow Breakup and You Can't Get Snakes from Chicken Eggs has ten more full scripts, the next being Negging and Love-bombing, and the final being The South Bank of the Rubicon, which concludes the main text of TARP. (The scripts for these shorts can be read here.)

How to Tell the Truth
The first of several conclusions to The Alt-Right Playbook, which is fully scripted and currently the longest script I've ever written. (The script was posted in three parts here, here, and here. This draft lacks and ending, which I have since written but will probably rewrite.)

Tendencies of Neo-Noir
A deep dive into the neo-noir genre, similar to Bringing Back What's Stolen's deep dive into action films. (I have written 9ish pages of this, most of which were posted here.)

Extremely Overdetermined Adventure Game Tier List
A series of 50 YouTube Shorts re-ranking the 50 most-celebrated adventure games on adventuregamers.com, using a byzantine scoring system of my own design. So far, 16 of the scripts are written. (The Viewer's Manual was posted here.)

A Homily for Steve Rogers
John Wick: With the Animals
something about Breaking Bad
something about the Cornetto Trilogy
Four in-progress scripts that have been, at different times, The Next Non-ARP Video, all of which I shelved due to the writers and actors strikes, since influencers making videos about media owned by struck companies is considered scabbing, except in cases of movie reviews, and the definitions of "influencer," "review," and "owned by" are muddy and I err on the side of caution. At the time they were shelved, the Steve Rogers script was outlined and early in scripting, the John Wick script had a loose outline, I had written 2/3 of the Breaking Bad script and had figured out the ending, and the Cornetto script would've been a complete rewrite of something I've had drafted for several years.

Protagony: Gordon
A thing about Gordon Freeman, silent protagonists, and how video games handle the passage of time differently from books and movies. This is a full rewrite of a much clunkier script I wrote in 2020, not long after releasing Protagony: Joi, now with a new ending that I am much happier with. Script is complete and early editing has taken place; I pivoted to this when the strike stuck a pin in the film and television videos I was working on. I was hoping to get it done in August, but, alas.

Roguelike Ennui
A thing about how passionately I loved Nuclear Throne after playing 100 hours of it and watching that love slowly calcify by the 1500 hour mark, and the way every roguelike I've gotten obsessed with has ended the same way for me. Been in the back of my mind for years, never sure what the script was about, and after just writing and seeing where it took me I realized it was about mental health. Very happy with the words that have come out so far, but also a very depressing subject, and, writing in such an exploratory way, I had no idea how long it would take to find an ending, so I shelved it.

(Samples of Roguelike Ennui, A Homily for Steve Rogers, and the Overdetermined Tier List can be found here.)

point b
Remember that podcast I started back in February??? I have three guests lined up, with plans to discuss an opera based on The Handmaid's Tale, the intersections of adventure games and live theatre and Christianity, and magical girl anime! But I haven't had time to actually sit down and speak with my guests.

this motherfucking freelance gig
A 7-week gig I took on last year that has taken 10 months of my life and counting. It is very close to complete and I'm very happy with how it looks, but I am also painfully aware of how much more money I would have made if I had turned it down and just kept doing my own thing. The amount of money they will pay me upon completion is less than a single ad-read from Nebula at this point, a thing I've tried to pull together the last two months in a row and have yet to manage.

Blessings to Count

Hello new patrons!!! It turns out releasing an ARPB after a long hiatus and then releasing a second TARPB the next day is a really good way to maximize traffic, and, in combination, they have created the biggest traffic spike in my channel's history. You Can't Get Snakes from Chicken Eggs is the single biggest opening of any video on Innuendo Studios. And a number of the people reading this are new backers who came because of those two videos. Hello and welcome! Great to meet you!

Of course, Patreon followed this boost in patronage with the announcement that a third-party payment processor they use totally borked their system and nearly 10% of last month's pledges declined, so despite the influx I actually made less money than the month before!!! It's nothing but sunshine over here!

For everyone new to the Patreon, I so glad you're here, and I hope the above links to in-process work tides you over for a little while. Sorry your first update is so ambivalent, it's been a weird year!

The State of It

In addition to the massive bottleneck of work described above, I have some pretty major things going on in my own life (most of them good, none of them simple) that are also sucking a lot of my time, and we're about to head into the holiday-and-seasonal-depression part of the year. (Stocking up on that Vitamin D and Magnesium.)

Frankly, I'm not entirely sure what I can promise right now. I have been trying to juggle this freelance gig, the tier list series, and something short and sweet for the channel, and it's proved more than I can deliver, but I also don't know what to scale back on. It may continue to be a juggle until something finally gets complete.

All's I can say is, once we clear the blockage, there's a lot on the way.

-I