January Update: New Year's Resolve

Welcome to the new year, twenty-nineteam.

Surprise Successes

I tell you what, 2019 is off to a good start, and after two years of bullshit I am here for it. 

My year kicked off with Hbomberguy's Donkey Kong 64 charity livestream, which blew up beyond even the most delirious expectations. I didn't end up talking on the stream at all, but I was camped out for long stretches of the weekend in the Discord with a ton of awesome YouTube and Twitter personalities, watching the whole thing take off, listening to Chelsea Manning and the voice of Donkey Kong and Adam Conover and freaking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez make appearances.

The stream made a lot of people feel hopeful to a degree they hadn't in a while, and the feeling was infectious. I did a short (for me) Twitter thread about what I feel made it so special.

The other surprise success was the release of the new video. Each installment of The Alt-Right Playbook has been outdoing the one before for a little while now, but The Card Says Moops is the first video ever to outdo This Is Phil Fish for opening week traffic. TIPF broke 170,000 views in a week; The Card Says Moops broke 200,000 in five days. I have spent my career making peace with the fact that I peaked in popularity with my first video and was never going to do those kinds of numbers again. But now it's finally happened.

As the cherry on top, We Don't Talk About Kenny broke 1 million views this week as well, making it the third video to do so in the last six months.

Having a mix of personal achievements and a brief moment of political optimism is making me feel capable of kicking some ass in 2019, and I hope I can spread a bit of that feeling to you. Feels like we need to hold onto it where we can.

Squad Goals 1

It's a new year, and that's when people usually make resolutions. I'd like to be one of those cool people who has some wholly unique thing they do every year that reframes the conversation, but... I do resolutions, I just call them "goals." So: I have two major work-related goals for 2019.

The first is to tackle that big, narrative project I've teased a few times. I'm keeping the details close to the chest about the subject, but I can share a bit of the work that's been going on!

What work was done last year was a lot of note-taking, outlining, and researching European folklore. I came into 2019 with the themes and a lot of the plot ironed out, and I decided to get the ball rolling just a smidge in January. On New Year's Day, I tweeted that I would need to hire illustrators for a project and solicited portfolios.

I got, um... *checks notes* about sixty. :O

This is all very preliminary still. After releasing The Card Says Moops I wrote the first page and a bit of the actual script, but, until the script is done, I don't even know how many drawings I'd be commissioning. And it's becoming clear that I can't hire artists at what their worth out-of-pocket, so I'll probably have to do some crowdfunding for this gig. But, for now, I'm hiring a handful of artists each month to do audition sketches and paying them out of my savings. The first batch of sketches should come in next week, and then I'll commission some more until I've got a whole crew.

So we'll go from there. I can't say this project will be completed before 2020, but I want to at least be working on it this year. I'll keep y'all posted!

Squad Goals 2

The other work-related resolution is to launch the podcast this year. Work on that is much more preliminary - I'm trying to do this thing where, instead of leaping feet first into a new project, I slowly ramp up into it, so January was "begin narrative project ramp-up" month and February's going to be "begin podcast ramp-up" month.

The format of the podcast is I want to have a list of questions that I ask everyone who comes on. It will have enough flexibility that we can go off on tangents, but everyone gets asked the same sequence of questions. This makes it especially easy to give folks a sense of what they're agreeing to because I can send them any episode and they'll get the idea. So  my first step is just to compile a list of people I want to interview, think about what I'd want to discuss with them, and reverse-engineer a list of questions from that. ($10-and-up patrons, I will probably post drafts of the questionnaire to the BTS blog.)

A thing I will need before I can start a proper podcast is a better mic. I've never been super happy with the audio quality on the channel since I graduated and no longer had access to the MassArt sound studio, but the visuals carry a lot of weight on YouTube. But if I'm going to work in a purely auditory medium? I need better sound. So that's a thing to save up for.

Odds & Ends

Obviously, another goal for the year is to get those two missing videos to you! I got The Card Says Moops online about a week before the end of the month, so I've been able to put a little work into the next script already. If I can, now and then, shave a few days off the release schedule, I should be able to sneak in an extra video here and there and get us back on track! I make no promises as to when, but my goal is to do this by the end of the year.

And that's Innuendo Studios in 2019! All my other resolutions are personal goals, so I'll keep them to myself.

What kinds of things are y'all hoping to accomplish this year? I'll be in the comments. <3

-I