General Vibe Check (December 2023)

It's Jackson here again, stopping by the ol' Patreon to see how everyone is doing. These little blog posts are quickly becoming one of my favourite things to do, surprisingly. It's no surprise I love writing but it's also just super fun to stop in and get everyone's thoughts on where the show is going and, more importantly, the 'network' itself now that we've added multiple shows. You guys make it super easy and rewarding, as well, as you're all so kind and thoughtful with your responses. I'm not just saying that because you guys give us money. Outside of a few interesting fringe cases, you guys are extremely friendly and understanding and we love the community and audience so thank you very much for your support.

A few notes for this month;

- It's Christmas time, and we want to celebrate with you! I'm giving away an Amazon gift card ($50) to 5 individuals over this Christmas season. Just drop a comment in here letting us know what your favourite moment has been this year and I'll pick someone each week to receive a prize.

- We released the first and second episode of THE RED THREAD and the reception has been incredible. We can't thank you enough for the support on this new show and we're really excited to continue doing it FORTNIGHTLY for the foreseeable future. You can listen here, or you can watch on Spotify or the YouTube channel.

- We had Mr Sark back on for another fantastic guest epsiode. This was one of my favourite episodes of the last few years and Mr Sark continues to just be a force of nature when it comes to good vibes and hilarious moments. Check it out if you missed it.

- There was a slight dip in consistency with only one Bonus being recorded and released. The reason for this was due to scheduling difficulties from Thanksgiving and added workload with the additional series. I do believe there might be more scheduling difficulties coming up with the Christmas period but we're going to do our best to hit a schedule that looks like the following;

Week One: The Official Podcast, Criminally Stupid, Bonus Episode
Week Two: The Official Podcast, The Red Thread

Scheduling it this way is a whole lot easier because locking down three recording dates with Kaya in a week is far easier than three recording dates with Charlie (just due to amount of things Charlie is currently involved in). Basically, I'm working on getting this to a manageable level of consistency for us.

- We trialed a new format for Criminally Stupid with Epsiode #11, where we do the regular TCAP format for the first half of the episode and then transition into the Baited chat-log at the end. We're very interested in hearing feedback for this!

- We passed 100,000 subscribers on The Official YouTube channel, and then hit 150,000 shortly after that. Thank you so much if you've subscribed to the channel. It's been a fantastic move and we're super happy with how it's turned out. If you haven't subscribed already, please do! It helps us immensely. We'd also appreciate if you'd share the show with any of your friends or family who you feel might be interested in any of our shows. I feel like we have stuff for most people now!

- We released our shows on iTunes and Amazon Music. You can find links in the descriptions of each upcoming episode. This was hotly requested so I'm super happy to finally have made it happen. As an aside, however, we're currently migrating hosting platforms for the show and we may lose video functionality on Spotify soon for a few months until the new hosting platform is able to add functionality.

- The Official Twitter (https://twitter.com/OfficialPodYT) will now be used for more direct content shout-outs instead of Mariah (one of our moderators and close friends) shitposting. She's held down the fort for the last few years on the twitter, basically using it as her playground (and we appreciate that, it spawned some hilarious moments) -- but I'm going to be repurposing it now and using it exclusively for content drops and teasers.

- We celebrated 7 years of Official Podcasting and I gave away a copy of The Talos Principle 2 (go buy) to the person with the most hours watched on their Spotify wrapped. You can find the tweet here (https://twitter.com/OfficialPodYT/status/1730208297469522055). The fact that there was a considerable amount of people with over 30,000 minutes of the show watched absolutely floored me. The person with the most was 140,000 minutes. I don't even know how that's possible. It was mind blowing. Thank you for 7 years. I love this show and this audience.

That's everything for this monthly vibe check, I think. I just want to reiterate again what I said above real quick. We've been doing this for 7 years and it's super easy to lose yourself in that kind of timeframe, or you fall out of touch, or you lose sight of what's important, or you forget just how lucky you are to be a part of something like this. I want to thank you all for making this possible for us. For giving us a platform for the last 7 years. We really appreciate it and I join every recording thinking about how fortunate and lucky we are that this is what we get to do for a job. You guys make that possible and you guys are the best. Thank you and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful holiday season. We'll still be here, with new shows and content for you to listen to while you work off the Christmas eggnog.

Thanks for everything,
Jackson