New Year, New Soup!!

Soup!? I thought you were deeeaaaddd!?

Sorry for the long hiatus! It's been a while, hasn't it? My job-job has been a lot recently because job-job is going through a major restructure ATM. But that seems to be winding down, and I'm no longer facing imminent unemployment, so that's good

My theme for the new year is "Routine" and part of that routine is gonna be making more time for YouTube, and actually creating those structures in my life. This is important to me, and getting back onto the creative groove has underscored just how important this is and how much I love doing it, so gonna start carving out that time in a more formal way

Anyway, on to the updates!!

Moop Doodles!
If you're a new £10+ Patreon, hello!! There's a lot of new faces!

I'm currently getting up to speed with creating the requested doodles. Bit of a "how the sausage is made" moment here; but the long of the short of it is you all live in a huge spreadsheet with tags for join date, if a custom is requested and of what, who adopted a moop and if so what, when they've been done, who cancelled -- that sorta thing

I'm currently updating the sheet, but according to the Spreadsheet I'm about a third of the way through customs. If all shakes out according to the shake master, then I'll be caught up by end of Feb at the latest!

As always, you can find a channel in the Discord which links to the Google Drive folder containing all of the doodles to date. If you haven't got in touch about what you'd like, please do ASAP! If I haven't gotten in touch with you, please poke me to do that!

Next Video Progress!
The Simpsons: Hit And Run Isn't As Good As Your Remember (Sorry) -- I won't lie, I have hated looking at this video. I have wanted to do literally anything else, and for the past 4 months I have done literally anything else. Then I hit something of a productivity spike in the 5 days between Christmas and New Years, and the final hour of the video is now two thirds done!!

What's currently bottlenecked the process is my confidence in parsing C++. I think it's accurate, but that chunk of the video bugs me, and I've asked noted YouTuber Simon Clark to parse it and see if it's accurate

He also has a cameo in the video! He's doing a riff on the ending of 22 Short Stories About Springfield, which is neat. Waiting for the audio for that. Then there's regular animating, spit and polish and so on.

Which segues us nicely into:

Videos moving forward
I've not been idle when I've not been looking at the SHAR video.

A friend told me about a philosophy for reading, where you should treat your To Be Read pile more like a wine cellar. Read what takes your fancy in that moment or that evening.

I really like this approach to content making (as well as reading). The SHAR video is fun, but it's not the meaty thing my brain wants to chew on

This will be of particular focus for the £10 patreons, but what I'm essentially thinking about moving forwads after the SHAR and nuclear weapons videos are done is making videos that grab my interest, in the same way I approached content in the early days of the channel. This would likely mean rejigging the vote privileges for future videos, and replacing them with something that fits the wine cellar vibes -- like, say, 5 video topics in a vote but I get to choose which one I wanna make of the top three. Or maybe removing the perk altogether

There's gonna be a "sounding out" section for those on the £10 tier so I can guage feelings around that. But on the subject of videos...

Upcoming Video Pre-Prod!
Remember when I was talking about nuclear weapons development?

The script for Parts 1 and 2 combine to 181 pages!! I did a rough back of the envelope calculation for that, and the runtime would work out to about 2 Oppenheimer's

The PDF for the Souper cut will be attached in a separate post for your reading pleasure!

I've also almost got a first draft for the Ecomodernism video script I wanted to make. Expect that soon

Quirked Up White Boy Event Horizon:
So my friend and I have finally caved and started a films podcast.

Well, it's ostensibly about films and the weird things my pal learns while doing research for Screenrant articles, but the ideatl is to take a more "breadth not depth" approach to film discussion. In this vein, we christened it "Let's See Where This Goes"

It could be there's a good reason why most film podcasts don't structure themselves like this, so we want feedback. Any and all. We wanna make it as polished as we can. So please give it a listen and tell us what you think!!!

Other things in/out the pipeline:
I did a Collab with friend of channel and amazing video maker Zenny! You can watch it here:
https://youtu.be/IA1iOhX_tN4?si=K_Ej3Ga5JOq-GsNN

Zennys videos are amazing and I'm officially now shilling for them. Give it a watch! Then give his other stuff a watch! They're bangers!

Also - upcoming collab with Simon Clark!!! The video will be on geothermal energy. So watch this space!

Here's to a New Year. Hopefully a better one, and one with some content!
- Soup