State of the Channel 2023 (oh god it's actually about to be 2023) - Update 12/01/22

Hey ya'll! Hope you're doing well ^^

First off, want to say hello to all our new patrons! Very glad to have you here~

Additionally, thank you to everyone who's left kind words on The Marble Nest, it is appreciated more than I can possible convey. For reasons that are probably obvious by this point, The Marble Nest project was one of the most intimidatingly personal things I've ever attempted to put together, had a lot of anxiety as to whether or not it'd be worth trying to put something that intimate out there, but the response has overwhelmingly positive in every sense. So again, thank you all <33

Now, with that out of the way, onto the future:

So, what comes next?

Well, let's get the bad news out of the way:

A lot of the plans I've talked about in the past have now been put on the backburner.

First and foremost, my plans with Neon Genesis Evangelion. My original plan was to jump straight into my long awaited and planned End of Evangelion video as a set up for finally getting around to talking about the Rebuilds, was gonna be a whole fun trilogy that I was eagerly looking forward to and was hoping to use as a fun project to rejuvenate myself after the harrowing experience of The Marble Nest. 

Then, literally the exact morning that The Marble Nest, For Those Who Will Never Play It went live, my 2 year old video on Episodes 25 & 26 got hit with a copyright strike. First strike I have ever gotten in all my years doing this.

I will be straightforward and say that I think the odds of getting that video back up are tragically slim to none. I've emailed them and yet to hear back, getting the sense I won't hear anything at all. As of right now, the channel has a strike on it that will take 3 months to clear because YouTube's copyright system is dogshit. Trust me when I say that no one is more heartbroken about this than me. I'm very proud of my Patho work, but my Eva video was still my personal favorite work of mine, so to see it get wiped from the internet completely and without warning... yea, it's been demoralizing and utterly destroyed any plans I had to talk about Eva for the foreseeable future.

This does not mean the video itself will be gone forever though. The good news is that I did kind of have a gut feeling that this might happen, so I made a point to hold onto the original project and all it's source files, meaning that I already have plans over the coming weeks to reedit and reupload it in a way that, hopefully, should make it indisputably fair use. With any luck, I'll have that ready for all of ya'll by the end of January. 

For the safety of the channel though, it probably won't officially go live again till the current strike has dropped off from my account in February. Depending on how that upload goes, I may continue with my plans with Eva from there, but for now, I sadly have to put them on hold.

Additionally, Morrowind, For Those Who Will Never Play It is still very much in the cards and I have in fact put a significant amount of work into it already. With that said, I can already tell that it would be an immense project, made all the more difficult by the fact that, like... okay so, like, Pathologic has a lot of jank as we all know (and love). But Morrowind is a game that absolutely HATES having content made with it. 

Even with the unofficial patch, every single time I've tried to record test footage in game, the whole thing has instantly crashed. Even setting that aside, my casual playthrough I've been doing to prepare saves and fact check with has been an ordeal on it's own, with about half of my save just randomly getting corrupted at one point. 

It's been an ordeal. Not one that's so bad that I'm willing to abandon the project entirely, but one that I'm definitely not looking to throw myself into until I've had some time away from that kind of massive mega-project. So there's that. 

With that said, ON TO THE GOOD NEWS:

the tl;dr:

Short term projects I'm working on that will be out very soon:

- MegaMan Legends video

- Goncharov 'Analysis'

Projects that I'm aiming to together over the next few months:

-Eva 25&26 re-edit

-The Shakespeare Riots 'documentary'

-Supergiant Games retrospective

-Celeste design analysis, complete with mod level reviews

-The Bachelor's Route Director's Cut & Pathologic 2 recommendation

Next mega projects:
-THE Shadow Hearts video

-Haruspex's Route

Let's break these down, shall we?

Short term projects I'm working on that will be out very soon:

In the short term, I was looking for some lighter projects to help me decompress from all the exhaustive work that came with The Marble Nest. Originally, I was planning on just doing a video on MegaMan Legends, specifically focusing in on both how it's underappreciated and, in particular, it's unique tone that freely and frequently bounces back and forth between 'cozy Saturday morning cartoon' and 'Resident Evil, but with more existential horror'. I freely admit that it is, in many ways, a pretense to spend a lot of time with a game that I love dearly and hold a lot of nostalgia for. However, it is also game that I've been eager to talk about for a long time now, so this felt like the perfect chance. 

I began work on the MML video basically the same day that TMN went live. As I was beginning to put the wheels into motion for that however, something else happened: The Goncharov meme.

For those of you who don't know, tumblr recently made up an entire Martin Scorsese movie that they have been collectively pretending is a real lost media mafioso movie that was only recently unearthed. It's spawned all kinds of fanart, memes, a frankly absurd amount of fanfiction and, needless to say, has inspired me as well.

I saw an opportunity: A chance to create a video essay analyzing a movie that doesn't exist. This is too good for me to pass up, for several reasons. First off, it would be a good excuse to do my first live-action talking-to-the-camera video, a nice pretense to get some substantial practice in on doing more live action filming, and would be a very fun premise to play around with while I continue to unwind from Everything. I'm also hoping to use this as a chance to work with an outside editor to feel out how that kind of collaborative process might work on larger videos.

So does that mean the Goncharov video will just be an empty calorie, high effort shitpost? Well, no. Don't get me wrong, it will definitely be a bit of a shitpost, but a shitpost with effort and substance. I don't wanna spoil the joke of it all too much, but suffice to say that, while it will ostensibly be about Goncharov, most of the runtime will actually be made up of 3 things:

-An analysis of the bedrock for all modern feminist plays, Henrick Ibsen's A Doll's House

-A discussion on the history of the Hays code in Hollywood and how it affected queer presentation in cinema

-A short essay looking at how fiction need not even exist in order to be deeply influential and meaningful

In other words, I'm hoping to stealthy make it a video essay that's actually 3 shorter video essays hot glued into 1 and slid under the door as a meme video. The script for it is already finished, will be filming for it this week, and after that I'll be relatively hands off with it as I pass the footage off to our editor. Once that's out of the way, I'll be back to working fulltime on the MegaMan Legends video.

With any luck, both of those will be out this month.

Projects that I'm aiming to put together over the next few months:

At the end of The Marble Nest, I briefly floated the idea of putting together some more straight forward theater content, and the response to that has been pretty pronounced. To be clear, I have zero plans to stop talking primarily about games any time soon, but I do think it's become clear at this point that mixing in some videos about theater history is not only something that many people would be interested in, but something that I'd be excited to work on. As such, I can officially say that I'm committing towards putting together a video on The Astor Place Riots, AKA The Shakespeare Riots.

So, what were the Shakespeare Riots? Well, to explain that in it's full scope would be to write out the entire script here, but the shortest summary I can manage:

An American and British actor had a massive falling out over who could perform Shakespeare better that lead to them and their fanbases willfully antagonizing one another for years. It kept growing in scale till it eventually more or less became a class conflict, with the American actor from humble working class routes champion by a proletariat and immigrant fandom around him while the British actor had the backing of the British-American aristocracy that actually owned everything. Baring in mind that this was only a couple of decades after the war of 1812, there was still a LOT of resentment between Americans and British, so I'm sure you all can see how it'd escalate from there. 

Eventually all of this boiled over during a performance in 1849 at the Astor Opera House where a riot broke out before the aristocracy ordered the state militia to fire on civilians, killing somewhere between 22 and 31 people and injuring 120. It was the largest number of civilian casualties by military action in the US since the Revolution. It was a major even at the time that lead directly to start of modern police militarization and is literally one of the reasons cops now have riot gear. In the process of 'winning', the aristocracy further insolated the theater community using expensive dress codes to push the poor out of theaters, so most Shakespeare productions with a budget became inaccessible to the lower class while isolating themselves even further from the general populace. This is why we now consider the bard to be part of fancy shmancy culture despite the fact that he always wrote his works for the broadest audiences possible and also half is writing is dick and ass jokes.

I'm sure you can see why this is a story that I'm eager to explore in more depth. The main struggle with it is that, unlike most my previous works, there won't exactly be a ton of stock footage to pull from, so I'm going to have to get creative when the time comes for the edit. Other than that though, as a history video, it's just a whoooole lotta research and fact checking.

Next, I've begun preparing to work on a project I've been considering for a long time, namely a Supergiant Games retrospective where I'll talk in depth about all 4 of their games. Supergiant has long been my favorite indie developer, they have yet to put out a game that I personally wouldn't give a 10/10, though each for very different reasons which I feel will make them uniquely interesting to talk about. I won't say too much more for now while that's still coming together, but figured you should all know that that'll be coming down the pipeline eventually as well.

In a similar vein, in what maybe the most unsurprising twist for me to date, I have recently fallen completely in love with Celeste. I've been tempted to do a narrative reading on the whole thing, but given that Transparency already made an absolutely incredible video about exactly that, I don't feel that I'd have a whole lot to add to that discussion. 

However, my love for the game has not ended with the credits of the Farewell DLC. Because, for as much as I love the writing and story, the main thing that's kept me revisiting it again and again is A) The immaculate level design which I have learned to appreciate more and more with each replay, and B) mods. So, SO many mods. 

So, full disclosure, but one of my favorite sub-genres of gaming video essays are videos that take a serious look at mods for a specific game in rigorous depth and treats them with the same kind of deliberate consideration that the 'proper' game merits, particularly since I know I'll likely never play those mods myself (if I happen to know of their existence at all). I definitely feel it's one of the most underexplored side of gaming at large and have been eager to do a video where I run through and review/critique a whole bunch of mod levels, but didn't have a game that I was both passionate enough about and had an active enough mod scene to really justify it. Celeste, though, seems the perfect candidate for such a project.

That said, of all the projects here, this is the one that currently has the most ambiguous timeline. Not because of the usual technical content creator reasons, the editing will be simple, the writing will come together fair quickly once I commit to it, and it will only require me to record alone without a whole lot of performance behind it. No, the reason it will take a while is because, in order to make it, I must first complete Fucking This. 

I have gotten very, very good at Celeste. I'm am still a ways away from being able to spit into God's face in the way that I know the Spring 2020 Collab will ask of me. However, if I wasn't confident in my ability to get there, well, you wouldn't be reading these words. Suffice to say though, if you see me streaming an inexplicable amount of Celeste of the coming moneys, know that it is, in part, me preparing myself for this project.

Lastly, there's the Bachelor's Route - Director's Cut & the Pathologic 2 recommendation video.

These projects are basically ready to go any time. For those of you who are new here, The Marble Nest video originally opened with almost 20 pages explaining the appeal and recommending Pathologic 2. If that sounds really cool to you, but also like a horrifyingly large amount of writing for an intro, well, then you can understand why I made the difficult choice to cut it, but also made sure to hold onto the writing itself for later use. This means I currently have around 10k words about Patho2 just waiting to be put to video at anytime I decide.

Additionally, for those you who are new, I've been working on a Director's Cut version of the Bachelor's Route which will be stitching together Act I & II into one giant video while adding a good handful of new dialogue exchanges and fixing all the times I misgender myself in Act I. The legwork for this is done. I contacted all the actors for it while I was putting together The Marble Nest and now have all the line readings in hand. I could have this put together in a matter of just a couple weeks if I committed myself to it.

So, that being the case, why the hell isn't it here?

I'll speak plainly: I joke about it a bit in The Marble Nest video, but I do sincerely mean it when I say that I want to avoid getting pigeon holed as 'that Pathologic channel'. I am, as I have always been, in this for the long game. This channel is currently a major part of my career and, frankly, I've seen what happens to channels that let themselves get too defined by any single subject. They tend not to have the longest shelf lives or best public perceptions.

I love Pathologic dearly, obviously, and I'm immensely proud to have it be a part of what I do here and am immensely eager to continue working with it for as long as I can. There will, however, be an inevitable endpoint. When that time comes, I wanna make sure that everyone, you included, are still excited to see what I have to offer beyond that. As such, I'm doing my best to space these things out as best I can and take a chance to break up the almost 3 year stream of nonstop Pathologic on the channel for the next few months.

So, with that said, my aim is to spend the first half of 2023 putting out a broad variety of content as I work on my next two mega-projects in the background. Then, around the time time the Haruspex's Route is beginning to come together, drop the Director's Cut and the Pathologic 2 recommendation video in rapid succession, both to promote the Haruspex's release when the time comes, and to try and get some of that sweet, sweet Algorithm Juice going for all 3 videos.

Which brings us handily too...

Next mega projects:

Haruspex is coming (please do not take this line out of context). Trust me, that project is coming, and it will come together far faster than The Marble Nest did when I go into it full scale. TMN was, shall we say, a uniquely trouble production, for a lot of reasons that won't be issues for Haruspex. Personal reasons that won't repeat themselves, professional reasons that I've since learned from, and technical reasons cause, as it turns out, Patho2 is a much harder game to make content with than Patho1, the latter of which I now have so much knowledge of that I can basically use it like a paint brush. I am being as sincere as I can be when I say, when I commit to it with everything I have, it'll come together far faster than any of the other videos.

However, even setting the above pigeon-holing concerns aside... like I said ya'll, it's been 3 years. 3 years after a real life plague. 

I need a vacation from the Town on the Grokhon. 

So, what will be the next Super High Effort, Multi-Hour Long Video for an amazing game that no one but me actually has the patience to sit down and play?

Well, for those of you who have been following me for a long time (or read the previous update post), you know that for literal years now, I have been singing the praises of Shadow Hearts: Covenant basically since the start of the channel. I used music from it in my very first video, I took the chance in my 10K Q&A to beg everyone to play Shadow Hearts: Covenant, there was a long period on twitter where my display name was Ruby "Play Shadow Hearts: Covenant" Seals, and my current tumblr bio tells all who see it to, and I quote, "Play Pathologic 2 and Shadow Hearts: Covenant."

It is my favorite game that no one has played, and has been basically all my life. And I have spent years terrified to talk about it, because I did not think I was good enough at what I do to do it justice. 

After these Pathologic videos though, I no longer feel that way. I not only can do this, but am deeply excited to do this.

So, that being the case, then what the hell is it? I talked about this a bit in our last update, but to steal my general synopsis from that post for all those who missed it:

Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a turn-based JRPG released in 2004 set in an alternate reality version of World War 1. It is a game that is both wildly original and well-crafted, as well as being almost entirely unknown in both Japan and the west (much to my dismay). Despite it's obscurity though, this is a title that has been in my Top 10 since I played it as a teenage which I still revisit on an almost annual basis and fall in love with a bit more every time I play. It has my favorite combat system in any JRPG, a fantastically penned script that is brimming with both meaningful themes, rich characterization, genuine humor, and, perhaps most of all, the most buckwild cast and plot that I've ever seen in any game even now.

My favorite thing about the game is the more I describe it, the faker it inevitably sounds. Princess Anastasia is a playable party member. So is Gepetto. There is a vampire luchador who is mentored by The Great Gama and moonlights as a superhero vigilante. Roger Bacon give us an airship. There's a metal gear style stealth section where you play as a dog. Rasputin uses the power of Asmodeus to summon a sky palace over Petrograd in an attempt to assassinate Czar Nicholas II. This isn't even scratching the surface for how unhinged this gets and I NEED to share it with the world.

And, now that we've got the Bachelor trilogy out of the way, I am very ready to do just that. 

I'm still feeling out exactly what I want it to look like. Part of me is tempted to include Shadow Hearts 1 in it as well because they are two halves of the same story, but also part of what I find so impressive about Shadow Hearts: Covenant is the way that it not only works as it's own standalone game, but in many ways works better for reasons that I could pop off about for a good few paragraphs right now. 

With all of that said, I'm going to try and avoid doing the exhaustive crunch-heavy productions that I've been doing recently, both for my own wellbeing, and to help insure that the channel can have a steady stream of new content. So, for the next couple months, I will be diligently replaying, writing, and recording for that as I slowly and steady piece that together on the side

I've already done a fair amount of leg work with a very thorough outline, a small pile of research, and a lot of general concepts for how best to convey the story. Still not sure if I'm going to give it the 'For Those Who Will Never Play It' tag, if only cause it being a JRPG with a 3rd person perspective means I won't be able to take the kind of creative liberties with it that I'd previously been able to find with Patho, but that will likely be something I decide on as it gets close to taking shape in full. Suffice to say though, this is absolutely one of those projects that I feel strongly that I have to get Right, so I'm going to give it all the time it needs. 

Oh, also, gonna be doing more Twitch streams starting this month, so keep an eye out for that.

And with that, I think we've covered all the major plans I have for the channel going into 2023. As always, thank you so much for your support, I truly could not do this without you and your support truly makes a massive difference ^^

With any luck, I'll be back again very soon with a very unique video in hand, and then a brief little passion project shortly there after. The future looks bright ya'll!

Love ya all,
Peace~

Ruby Anne Seals 💕✨