June Update: Bells & Carousels

Hey team!

Overdetermined to the Extreme

Earlier today you should have gotten two notifications about the Extremely Overdetermined Adventure Game Tier List: the Viewer's Guide and the first review. This was an experiment for me: in my spare time, here and there, I've been making the tier charts for this project and written some of the reviews. I've got about twenty of the former and six of that latter so far. So, today, I decided to sit down with it and see how long it takes to produce one of the actual videos.

Turns out: about an afternoon! (Assuming I've already written the script, done the math, and made the tier chart.) That's not bad, though it'd be great if I could jam out, like, three in a work day.

The goal for this project is a series of YouTube Shorts (which would probably also go on TikTok), and my hope would be to release one a day for 50ish days. I've talked to Nebula about possibly making compilations of, like, 10 reviews, hosting them there first, and having each YouTube release say "watch a whole bunch on Nebula!" They're open to spending sponsor money on that.

The current thinking is: I'll upload them here for you, and, when I've got a solid batch, I'll make a compilation for Nebula, and, only then, will I start putting them up on YouTube. I would need a fair chunk in the bag before starting to release if I actually wanted to do one-per-day, so this may take a while to go public; this was very much my "when procrastinating other projects" project.

For me, doing a 50-game project with a bunch of nonsensical math is a hilarious thing to do. It is also, clearly, not fast or trivial, so we're just gonna see where it leads for now.

Scribbles

The Captain America script is going well when I have time for it, but time has been in short supply of late. My schedule has evolved to the point where there are 1-3 hours right in the middle of every single weekday where I have non-work obligations. Given that my ADHD meds only work 6-8 hours and I'm not supposed to take them later than noon, that's really not ideal! So I've spent a chunk of time this week playing musical chairs, trying to reschedule things, shunt them to the mornings or the evenings, to give myself longer stretches of work time. It's improving a little, but there's a lot of finagling still to do. I've freed up one long workday and have packed a lot of half days for the coming week.

Lot going on of late.

Also, very randomly last week, I sat down and wrote like three pages of a completely different script?! I'd had an idea for a CO-VID back in 2020 that I never got around to making, a thing about the ending of Breaking Bad, and I was reminded of it the other day while watching Jack Saint's video on The Existential Horror of Straight White Men. Just popped open the laptop and the whole thing poured out of me in a quick, succinct three pages.

So naturally I looked at it and said "that's interesting but it doesn't really have a point?" Which is, in retrospect, why I never made it before. So I sat on this thing a bit, talked the ideas over with a couple of people, and then started watching the last season of Better Call Saul (I was halfway through the final season when my free month of AMC+ ran out, but it's on Netflix now). And, after finishing off the show, I think I know what the video should be about. It will require some slight restructuring and probably another page or two of writing, but I've got a complete idea now!

Given how many irons are in the fire at the moment, though, that may be a minute as well.

I am very eager to release something, so, when things seem to be taking a while, I have a reflex to grab something else that might go faster! But it never does, it's always a bigger thing than it looked at first. I mean, sure, I could've put out the first draft of the Breaking Bad thing and it would have probably gotten a sponsorship and some views, but I wouldn't be proud of it. Obviously, the far end of that thinking is the perfectionism that keeps you from producing anything, so I'm trying to find a sweet spot, where I'm not just kicking things out to kick things out but also not sitting on things forever.

So, for now, I'm sticking to the things already in the works, but know that there's like 2/3 of a neat script that's gonna get finished and produced sometime soon.

Glory Regained

This week I'll be running another experiment: as I did with the tier list video, I'm going to put one of the Alt-Right Playbook shorts from the Compendium script into production and see how long it takes to turn around. I've been postponing ARP because I've been juggling this freelance gig for five billion years and trying to put out something quick and advertiser-friendly on top of that. But, as part of my musical chairs, I've been able to re-prioritize some things. I can't shelve the freelance gig, but I've schedule some more time for my own work. And it's a bit less urgent that I stay advertiser-friendly at the moment.

So... I'm going to put TARP into production just to see what the turnaround time is. By next week I'll have a sense of how much work my various projects might take, and be in a better place to release again.

I hope the tier list vid whets the appetite til then. <3

-I