quantifica june

Hey team! This one is a mixed bag, but a mixed bag is an improvement on two months of bummers!

MANA

Here we have the full stats on my "quickie weekend video" that took over two months and is bombing in views! I'ma confess: I have regrets, but I like the video, and I'm glad I made it. Wish it had gone faster! But it's a balm to just do something silly, and, when I was able to get myself to work, I was glad the work was fun.

Recording was more work than usual on this one due to a bunch of tech difficulties. (I had to record the audio for the outro three times because of microphone problems.) And having to redo the ad read was a time sink as well. Those tacked on a lot of extra labor near the end. But, given The Unexpected tends to happen every time, I think it's still within range of what we can consider "normal production." Which brings us to...

MANA AVERAGES

This is the third release since I started mana tracking individual videos, which is enough to do some back-of-the-envelope math. This is the good stuff right here! This is what I've been building towards.

Roughly speaking, it looks like a video takes ~5.5 mana per completed minute. The trendline is actually pretty straight on this, so that seems like a good estimate; as more videos come out, we will get a better sense of variance, how Alt-Right Playbooks measure up against Protagony, and so on and so forth. But this is a good starting point! Because I can plug this in with March's observation about reasonable mana expenditure and my knowledge that, these days, one page of a script translates to about 3 minutes of finished video, and we can finally make predictions!

Example: let's say I have a 9-page script. We can assume that's about a 27-minute video. My mana-per-completed-minute average is 5.44, round it to 5.5, we're looking at 148.5 total mana. Round it to 150. Knowing my reasonable mana expenditure on video work ranges 15-25 per week, we'll call it 20, divide 150 by 20, we get 7.425. Round it to 7.5. Voila.

We can make the rough estimate that a 9-page script will take 7 1/2 weeks to complete. This won't be universally accurate, but it's a ballpark. I can look at a script and assume how much longer til it's online, and plan my time accordingly. (This gets a little squidgy because writing the script is, itself, one of the things I'm measuring, but I can't make the prediction until the script is finished, which means by the time I say "7 1/2 weeks to completion," I'm already a week or two in. Which is nice and all - we can already see the end of the tunnel by the time we enter it! - but it means I don't know how much I've bitten off until it's already in my mouth; might do some math on the lengths of outlines vs. completed scripts in the future to help with this.)

FINANCIALS

This is both encouraging and worrisome. My conservative prediction at the start of the year was that my sponsor rate was going to trend down, but that hasn't happened yet, so my Nebula payout was much bigger than predicted. That, plus some extra scratch I brought in elsewhere, put us well above target for this month! But, with no release til near the end of the month (and YouTube once again freezing my ad money), AdSense is way lower than expected, and Patreon continues to lag behind prediction. The new video's weak numbers more or less guarantee that the next sponsor payout will trend down, so that boost is not gonna happen next time.

All in all, we're still in good shape, but I don't like how much I'm getting bailed out by Nebula and bonus labor. It remains a priority to put out a bunch of Alt-Right Playbooks in quick-ish succession and do the Patreon revamp, but looking at my schedule... I don't see it happening til August at the earliest. Which means July is gonna be a slump as well, in all likelihood.

In happier news: I have finished the essay I'm writing for Jacob Geller's book! It's in final revisions now, and I will get paid when those are completed, so there's some bonus money slated for this month as well. It will hopefully keep me above water while I set myself up for a better August/September.

BINGOS

Two more on the board! No obvious next move - I've got 2 out of 5 on three different lines right now, which is promising, but no guarantees yet. Without revealing too much, the middle horizontal is looking most likely, but I won't know til the very end of the year, as it's got things like "don't have [blank] happen." The middle vertical is also possible, but it has a longshot in it. Far right vertical depends on a number of gym accomplishments, so that's anyone's guess. Things are getting exciting.

JUNE MINIMIX

More tunes! June's emotional valance was... extremes. Joy in spite of grief, grief in spite of joy, exhaustion and relief at the same time. I'm going to be reeling from this month for a while. Overall keeping it together, and things are at least... settled? I guess? The road to recovery is gonna be long, but it's started.

Anyway, playlist reflects that, is all I'm gonna say.

Welcome to the Black Parade
- hey um did you know this is a really good album? I'm probably the first person to tell you that The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance is a good album.

A New Year's Anxiety
- sent by a partner; Florence Welch's band pre "and The Machine"

Lost Cause
- :(

Is Your Love Big Enough?
- Spotify rec from months ago that I started listening to again

Rainbow Connections
- happy Pride!

Leave Her, Johnny
- I made a sea shanties playlist last year, and I really love this version of Leave Her, Johnny. started listening to it a lot in June. first heard it sung by Andrew Plotkin at the closing ceremony of Narrascope 2019 (which is, incidentally, where I first wrote the notes that would become Protagony).