November Update: Beginning of the End

Hey team!

Compendium 1

Embedded above is the first fully-animated-by-me-and-no-one-else thingamabob since I Hate Mondays back in 2020. The CO-VIDs were very sparse in their animation, relying far more on footage, the GamerGate video was also sparse because they were slides from a talk, and Mike has been handling everything on The Cost of Doing Business. So this is me, doing TARPB the way I used to, for the first time in pushing two years.

This is part one of the Compendium script I've been working on. It's a lightning round video where I burn through all the techniques I've stockpiled in my research that don't require whole videos but that I wouldn't want to wrap the series without covering. I don't know whether this will be one long video or a playlist full of 2-5 minute shorts (or, most likely, a long video with a link to an unlisted playlist so people can share specific arguments if they want to).

It's been a while since I did this, and I'm a little rusty. I can't tell if this is up to my old standards. I am definitely less willing to create unnecessary work for myself; once upon a time I would have created new characters for the conservative pundits but I just reused old conservative pundit graphics and, you know what? Probably nobody cares but me.

I wish I had more to show you. I'm heading to California for the holidays on Tuesday and will be pretty much off the map until the new year, at which point I'll be gearing up for birthday shenanigans. I'm sorry it's not more, and I'll need to pick up the pace if I'm going to resume a reasonable work schedule, but this is more than I've been able to do for most of 2021. So I'm a bit pleased.

As for how working on it was: it appears I can sit in my desk chair for upwards of 45 minutes with no trouble! On my chiropractor's advice I get up for at least 10 minutes out of every hour to make sure I don't have problems, but I haven't seen any ill effects just yet. We'll see how things are when I'm working more days out of the week - right now I'm only fitting in short bursts here and there, mostly because of the holidays. But it's fascinating to see how far I've come.

Work Flow

These leads to the next big question: what even is my work flow now? My back is doing well because of constant maintenance - I meet with a trainer twice a week and go to yoga on Mondays, and the days I don't have workouts I'm supposed to get at least 4,000 steps in. This is the primary reason I'm not in a bunch of spinal pain any more, but it means my working hours have to be a lot more flexible.

This past month I've experimented with some different structures. One thing that worked was just pulling that laptop out when I have even 20 free minutes and pecking away at something. I managed to write a 3-page script in a week this way. I like it! It definitely fits a lifestyle that has to make more room for other obligations. So far I haven't found it very effective for animating - I could conceivably edit on the laptop this way, but I can't easily break out my Wacom tablet while I'm sitting on my girlfriend's couch, you know? So, for that, I still need desk time, until I think of something else. Now that things are opening up again - and, as of Friday, I'm Pfizer-boosted - I'm looking into renting co-working space or starting to work from the library again. I don't like wearing a mask for hours on end (it gives my styes and makes my beard look foolish), but it beats working from home.

I'm also running up against the issue, as I resume working at my desk, of my iMac being horribly old and slow. Like, clicking on Spotify to actually being able to listen to music takes upwards of 15 minutes sometimes. The question is whether or not to upgrade/replace the desktop or start doing all my work on the laptop, which is generally faster but Media Encoder often crashes on large exports. Seems everywhere I look, there are obstacles that can only be solved with money I don't have!

Not sure where things are going to settle on this, but I'm exploring options.

Thinking Fourth-Dimensionally

As often happens this time of year, my thoughts are turning to the future of the channel. Especially now, as I work one what will be the last Alt-Right Playbook videos before the conclusion(s). I feel like I've spent so much of this year struggling just to make stuff again, I haven't had space to figure out what happens after that.

Which is not to say I haven't thought about it. I think about it constantly. It's just been hard to make decisions. I have thoughts as to what might be my focus after ARPB is done, and maybe even how I'll structure my time, but, hell, I don't even know how I'll structure my time three weeks from now.

But here's a thing I've been considering:

At this point it's been over two years since we were even attempting a video-per-month schedule. That's partly the extenuating circumstances of a back injury and a pandemic, but it's not like I was perfect at it before then, either! Comes a time you have to consider whether that's what you should still be doing. A major factor, even before COVID, was simply that the videos were getting longer, I was doing more and more research, and I was becoming a better and more labor-intensive illustrator. So, I confess, I don't feel terribly bad about things taking longer - if anything, I was worker even harder than when I maintained the monthly schedule.

But I know some of the things I want to do next, and it's certainly not gonna be easier. I want to do this series about the history of leftist revolutions, and that's gonna take way more research than TARP has taken. And there are all these other projects I want to free up time for - a breakdown on the history of adventure games, fiction projects, maybe even [gasp!] some video game production.

So there's a very real possibility that, after ARP wraps, this Patreon will become a catch-all for a number of different projects, rather than just supporting a YouTube channel, and the channel itself may switch to more of a quarterly schedule, or perhaps a "when it's done" schedule like HBomberguy and ContraPoints have been using lately. I don't make the kind of money they do, so that may not be sustainable, but one thing thing I've learned from the last two years is that, when my output is irregular, my Patreon doesn't grow... but it doesn't shrink, either. So maybe I have the runway to get some other projects off the ground.

This are just ideas, and it's hard to say what will or won't happen, given I don't even know how popular the next series will be. For now, my main focus is finishing The Alt-Right Playbook, and moving forward from there.

Thanks again for your support and patience,

-I