Weekly Status Report: 2025/12/28 to 2026/01/03

Happy New Year!

I actually did take it easy this past week... for the most part. I did set up a new archive for videos on an external 5 TB drive... as it stands, old videos take up about one terabyte of data, but that's not counting Fullmetal Alchemist, which is on another drive I need to locate... It was a REALLY big folder.

Status on the Shira interview: she last responded Monday and said she's busy right now with holidays. I'll nudge her again this week. Sorry for the delay on this. As for the interviews with Marc Thompson and The Orgg, I will be getting those out sometime after I finish watching the content I need to for the next couple videos. Expect the Kiki's Delivery Service retrospective to drop Friday.

I've tried recently to figure out pain points in channel stuff and how to reduce pressure. Some stuff I've already done and announced, some stuff is new:

Adding new team members

My research team now consists of five people: Blue Baron, Xavier, Abhi, Ashley Yume, and Kate. They help with a variety of tasks from gathering art to helping watch shows. They will be incredibly helpful in the years to come given how complex some stuff is going to get.

Retiring from regular anime convention appearances

I planned for Anime Expo 2026 to be my final anime con, but since I can't feasibly commit to appearing, Colossalcon East 2025 was my final con appearance. Cons take up too much time, money, and energy to be feasible for me to balance with my YouTube channel now.

Hangout streams

We are going to rearrange how hangout streams are scheduled. Instead of being every month, they will be every two months plus a hangout stream/Q&A the week after an EVF episode launches. This relieves pressure on one weekend a month and will give me more to talk about each stream. November and December's hangout streams being a clusterfuck inspired me to make this change.

Episode scheduling

Yeah, this isn't really changing. I will still announce a super general timeframe when an episode will launch when I'm comfortable doing so. The episodes planned for this year, as I've said, have a ton of work done on them already since most of them were planned for last year. The only exception to that is Blood Blockade Battlefront -- I only decided to cover the series because of Mike McFarland's present condition, so I started completely from scratch outside of the fact I've seen the anime before... granted, it was years ago, but still.

Just because a lot of work is done doesn't mean these will come out on time. Kinnikuman is a testament to this. I started work on that video in JANUARY 2025, with production picking up in momentum that March once PaRappa dropped. I thought the video would be done by summer, but with how complex it ended up being, I couldn't get it done until LAST MONTH. In hindsight, there were a lot of missteps with development, some in my control, some not, but I will talk about it more in a behind-the-scenes post in the future.

Production timeline

I have revamped how I approach production, which will IN THEORY reduce a lot of pain points. I want to give it a try with Blood Blockade Battlefront and Project Rebrand right now and see if it works out the way I hope it does.

Weekly Bonus:

Uh... I really don't have one... Uh... Look! I finished my Hoenn Dex in Pokémon Home! Unova, here I come!