November Patreon Update

Hi Patreons!

I hope all of you celebrate it has a wonderful Halloween! I've got a few updates and announcements coming this month!

First and foremost, as always, I want to thank all of you for being on my Patreon page. I say it again and again, but I can't say it enough, THANK YOU to all of you who donate to my channel. The help that it gives both monetarily and motivationally really helps me keep my channel going. I can't tell you how much it means to me.   

So moving on to updates, a few things coming up. 

First, starting in December, I'm going to be re-configuring my Patreon tiers and rewards. I have settled on how exactly I'm going to be restructuring, and I promise to keep you all appraised of that, but I want to share why I am changing it and some of the specifics I'm going to be changing. Foremost, I want to change the tiers so as to help create a greater sense of community on this channel and this Patreon page. 

As I've started to push in my videos, I really want my channel to be a space for open discussion and conversation, and as such, I want to provide more opportunities for that to happen. So, I'm going to be creating a Discord channel that will be available at the lower level tiers, most likely the $2 level. I'm hoping this will be a place where we can all chat, discuss different topics, and have ongoing communication with each other!

I'm also going to be doing monthly livestreams staring in the 2020, which the ability to send in prioritized questions and topics being another Patreon tier, though I haven't decided which yet. 

As a result of this, however, I'm going to be removing the Patreon tier to suggest video topics. I've debated doing this for a number of reasons, the foremost of which is that I've realized that this tier has started to give me a lot of anxiety as a creator. While the suggested topics that I have been given have been FANTASTIC, I also am still figuring out how I want my channel to develop and am still trying to find what works. And as a result, I want to be able to make sure I'm spending my time developing my own direct ideas and voice as a creator. This doesn't mean that I don't want suggestions however! I will be creating a channel in the Discord to be a place for episode topics and discussions, and I encourage people to go there to suggest more! But I also know that, through no one's fault but my own personal brain, I just know that this tier has been giving me more and more anxiety. However, if you have already paid for this tier and wish to redeem me discussing your topic, please reach out as I want to make sure I make good on my promise to fulfill that reward if that's something you want to redeem. I will be sending a message to each of you later this week on that!

I also will be getting rid of the reward for me to review an entire comic run, movie franchise or book series, as that also takes a lot of my time in the long run that I want to devote elsewhere. However, I will be keeping the reward to review single movies, episodes or comics, as that takes less time and I highly enjoy doing them and that takes much less time to do. 

I also plan to make a few other smaller changes here and there, but for the most part, the names in videos and verbal shoutout will remain! I may remove the tier to have your name in only 1 video vs all the videos, just to remove some of the confusion that I've seen when people get worried that their name only appears in one video when they thought it should be in all of them. Plus, it makes me organizing and exporting my videos every month a much less intensive process to ensure that I have everyone properly credited. 

So, on top of all of this, I should say that once the new year comes, I'm planning on becoming much more focused with my channel's voice. For the past year, I've been testing and trying to see what I want to say with my channel, and I'm starting to discover more and more what inspires me. However, I still have some videos in the works and ideas that I want to do before the year ends and I start structuring my channel more targettedly. If you look at my recent videos of "How Polarized Fandoms Radicalize Discourse", "Joker: The Ethics of Making Nuanced Art" and my "Women in Star Trek" video, you'll begin to more where I want this channel to start heading. But more on that next month once I figure it out more.

All in all, I think these changes will be a real positive step for this channel, and will help make this channel and community feel more cohesive and focused. I hope that you all agree, and I'm excited to hear your feedback. I haven't finalized anything yet, so please comment below if you have any ideas, concerns, or comments! Are there any rewards that you might want me to add? I'd love to hear them. 

And as always, live long and prosper!