Production update 2022-05-12

Hello everyone!

First of all, I want to welcome the new supporters, and thank all of you, old and new. I hope you have been enjoying Part 5 of the ABC History series. It was a wild ride to make! From the look of it, it has been well received by everyone.

It's still a bit early to talk numbers, but they look good for now. it's performing as expected in its first 24 hours. Average watch time is at 20:51 (42.0%), on par with Part 4 and slightly behind Parts 2 and 3. It could potentially be skewed down by people leaving early to watch the playlist. It's hard to tell.

Like I said, 24 hours in is still a bit early. I will probably share more stats over on Discord in the coming days. One thing that I can tell is that the release also boosts earlier parts of the series. Below is the graph for Part 4 in the last 48 hours. The other parts look similar as well.

Immediate plans

Now, what am I doing? Well, for a week or two, I'll be busy catching up with life. I spent most of this week in a big spring cleaning. My girlfriend also graduated from university, and she finished working on her final film last week. We reset the apartment back to its normal state, so my desk is back in the office (it was in the bedroom for the past months), and the bed is back in the bedroom. There's a few things left to clean, I took care of updating my finances that were over a month behind, all that stuff.

Sadly, our bathroom is falling apart. A tile from the shower wall fell off, since the grout is way past its life cycle. The wall is soaked to the point where the entire ceramic tile section is loose. I fear that my landlord will need to do some major work in there for a few days, which will inevitably cause a disturbance.

Other than that, I'm visiting my parents for a few days - outside of a couple birthday dinners, I haven't seen them since Christmas.

Future plans

What's next? Two things: my speedrunning presentation at the Big Techday in Munich in July, and Part 6 of the ABC History series.

I'm giving a sort of rehearsal talk to a group of TNG employees (the company that hosts the event) on June 3rd. My presentation is mostly finished as an essay, but I need to make a couple dozen slides to go along with it, and refine all the little details. That should take me a few days to iron out, maybe a week to be sure. After that, it should be smooth sailing until July, when the event comes.

The rest of the time, I'll be starting to outline the script for Part 6. Other than lining up the improvements and the discoveries I'll need to talk about, I haven't started anything just yet. Once I get started on the script, I'll have a better idea of the scale of Part 6, but for now, I'm perhaps optimistically expecting another 40 to 45-minute video. I'm hoping to have a mostly complete script sometime around May 25th, give or take a few days. From there, I should be able to build a production schedule, and hopefully be able to follow it as well.

Other plans

Meanwhile, the trip to Munich also means a two-week vacation in Germany. My girlfriend is very much the planning type, and so our entire trip is gonna be scheduled down to the second (almost). I need to set some time aside to buy the plane tickets, plan the route, the transportation, the lodging, etc.  On top of that, we're also planning a short trip to Québec for the Festival d'été (summer festival), a week before that. July will be comprised of about 18 vacation days.

My brother has been helping out with the music. I hope you can hear the difference in quality in Part 5! He finished remastering the music for that video, and he's now in the process of going through my catalog of music. In the coming weeks, I will be slowly releasing the remastered versions of the music to my music channel (eventually phasing out the old uploads - the improvement is so crystal clear that I see no point in maintaining inferior versions). I also want to get all that music to Soundcloud so it's easier to download. Expect a slow drip of videos on my music channel in the coming months.

I've also been working on development of the Donkey Kong 64 Randomizer. Let's not kid ourselves, I am a beginner programmer, and so my contributions are very limited. I have been working on a few little details that I could tackle, but my big project is designing the colored banana randomizer that is planned for the V2 release sometime in the future. As for now, the V1 release is coming up very soon - in fact, we're meeting tonight and will possibly discuss the release date.

When to expect Part 6?

That's the question on everybody's lips. As you can tell, I'm split between a few different projects, especially the Munich conference. I'd be shocked and amazed if I somehow managed to pump out the entire video before July 7th. So, I'm expecting to be able to release it by mid-August at the earliest. It's likely that before that, you will get to see my talk at the Big Techday on YouTube, probably in early August. Just as an aside, I will not count it as a video for Patreon billing purposes, as I find it a bit far removed from the kind of content you guys signed up for.

That's it for now! There might not be an update for a while. I will post one when I will feel confident in my outline and production schedule for Part 6, which should be in two to three weeks, depending on how long finishing my presentation takes me. As always, thank you everyone for your support. Everyday I am grateful to be able to do this as a living.