This Patreon Will Soon Have A Purpose Again!

First of all, I cannot thank you enough.

Patreon has been my main source of income for just over a decade now, and the primary means by which my entire life has been possible in that time. If you are able to see this post when it releases, it means that you have continued to support me even though I publicly retired from making content almost a year ago; even though it's been exactly a year since I last dropped a patron-exclusive podcast; and even though it took me so long to get to my last round of rant requests that no one has even submitted one so far this year. Effectively, for six months you've been paying me just to exist, without seemingly any expectation of return--and whatever reason it may be that you haven't removed your support, I cannot thank you enough for it--even if it was totally be accident or you just forgot.

I have been living paycheck-to-paycheck for two years now, ending many months with a negative bank balance and barely scraping by thanks to the goodwill of several different people who've let me live rent-free in their houses and helped to fund my endeavors while I tried to figure out who I am and what I want to do with my life. I've got a much clearer sense of those things now; and so the last puzzle piece I need to fall into place to get my life back on-track in the way it was when this Patreon was making over $5k a month, is to figure out what kind of content I can make consistently, enjoyably, and for an audience that might possibly give a shit. Nailing that combination of aspects has been brutally difficult for me; but thankfully I haven't been struggling by myself.

My fiancé Bird has been encouraging and supportive throughout the process of trying to find a new creative identity; and the only witness to the many projects I've gotten through various stages of conception before dropping. I won't tell you about all those projects, because they are all very cool ideas that all of us would love to see brought to fruition--but for one reason or another, each became untenable or unsustainable and were abandoned. A decade of experimentation in this business has given me a lot to be wary about in launching any kind of project--and a lot of the last eight months has felt like just figuring out why something won't work over and over again. 

The last time that I had an idea which I considered sustainable for long-term growth, it was the KHANTEHNT show that I did, keeping up with current anime with Best Guy Ever a few years ago. When Bird and I first got together, I was still working on that show, and so Bird and I watched most of the anime together--and in the time since then, he's consistently watched more currently-airing anime and kept up with stuff better than I have, and usually helps me to understand what's actually happening in the shows we watch together (because he's incredibly better at keeping track of what is actually happening than I am). 

Initially, Bird wasn't experienced enough in talking on microphone and doing a show to make an obvious replacement when BGE and I were no longer able to work together; but over the last two years, Bird has regularly co-hosted live-streams with me, and also been a part of various podcasts with the ASE Presents channel and on shows like A Beer & A Six Pack; dissected media in videos on Ygg Studio; and starred in our travel vlogs on the Picnic Adventure channel, as well as the Birdfriends Play Let's Play channel. Basically, he's been media training with me for two years, and is more than capable of holding his own on a podcast with me now.

Bird's natural curiosity over the current season of anime led us to checking out Hell's Paradise (which we enjoyed) and Dead Mount Death Play (which we hated); and the fact we were able to have an involving conversation about those impressions led us quickly to consider watching current shows for the sake of discussing them on a livestream. Seeing this as an opportunity to rethink the approach I had to KHANTEHNT and create another sustainable anime discussion show, I spent the rest of the week conceptualizing what has become the We Watch Anime podcast series.

Each episode of We Watch Anime is recorded live on Saturday night at 10PM; partly because it's a day that we consistently have off from our very-inconsistent offline job, and also because I wanted to recreate the feeling of staying up on Saturday night to talk about anime like I used to do when I watched Adult Swim as a preteen. These livestreams are edited into a cleaned-up and proper podcast, which is then released on Spotify and YouTube. For now, we have been livestreaming to the Ygg Studio channel, because it has an established audience and is monetized--however, because that channel is completely dead in Youtube's algorithm, and is also currently serving as an archive to an entire career's worth of totally unrelated videos, we are also building a bespoke channel called We Watch Anime to host the edited podcast episodes (and eventually to host the livestreams as well, once the channel has earned monetization rights). The structure of the podcast and the visual aesthetic of the channel is heavily inspired by the anime magazines that got me into the medium in the first place!

In the long term, my ambition for this podcast is for it to be convertible into a convention panel that Bird and I can travel around putting on as often as possible. It's going to need to grow considerably before it makes enough money or has enough clout to give us time to travel or convince cons to invite us, but if we can turn the live show into an actual live event that lets us meet and hang out with people all over the country every week, then it will be a dream come true for me.

HOW THE PATRON TIERS WILL CHANGE

We Watch Anime is the only project I have in mind dedicated purely to the audience and providing a consistent product to them that might inspire their support. As the patreon isn't really dedicated to anything else right now, it makes the most sense to orient it around the We Watch Anime project. As such, I will soon alter the whole presentation and structure of the patreon to reflect this. I've run into a lot of problems by overcomplicating my patreon rewards in the past, so this time there will only be two reward tiers with simple, predictable results.

$5 TIER: TWO MONTHLY BONUS EPISODES -- Every month, Patrons on this tier will be given the chance to vote on which two shows we make bonus episodes about that month, and exclusive access to the livestream-recorded podcast. 

$10 TIER: PERSONAL THANKS IN EVERY EPISODE -- Simply put, at the end of every podcast episode, we will read out the names of and thank every person who supports us at this tier.

That is all. These changes will be implemented within the next few days. If you haven't started listening to We Watch Anime yet, there is already nearly twelve hours of edited podcasts on the channel, covering the first five-or-six episodes of ten different shows from the Spring 2023 anime season, as well as the entire first season of Chainsaw Man. Thank you so much again for your support! ANIME FOREVER!