End of July Updates!

Bonjour, Mon Coeurs!

It's the last Friday of the Month! And that means it's time for another piping hot plate of updates!

Next Video Progress:
The Helen Keller video is proceeding in earnest. I've agreed to be sponsored by Ground News, and in the agreement contract the video needs to be finished by October 31st. I'm aiming to get it done a lot sooner than this, but I actually have a firm deadline for the video now! That's exciting!

It's undergone a few last-minute restructures: One is after an expert I emailed yonks ago got back to me on Keller's later life. Robert Irwin's quote has now been placed in the context of the time and what was going on in the States, and I've fleshed out Keller's later years.

The second was a quick rerecording after I'd dug through the Professor Sokolyansky archives (no easy feat seeing as they're poorly indexed and in Russian) and found out that some of his thoughts on Keller had been mistranslated by the PhD thesis I was using as a guide. It didn't change the substance of what was being said, but it personally bothered me.

Those restructurings were finished yesterday and, with them added in, I'd say the video is just over halfway done. The music and audio recordings are in place, a big amount of the archive footage has been added, and I'm slowly adding in copies of annotated archive documents and primary sources. There's a screenshot at the bottom to get a sense of what the timeline looks like as of today

One thing I'd like to do is use custom doodles for people who lent their time and talents to the project - namely voice overs, and custom drawings. If you're a £10+ patreon I'll use your custom doodle but if you gave your voice and aren't I'll be reaching out to you to ask what sort of avatar you'd like to represent you in the credits

Addons and Extras:
It's been over a year since I decided to make YouTube videos, and uploaded my first one. I'd like to do a retrospective on it - because it's definitely my weakest vid. I've written a script and gotten the footage recorded for it, so will find the time to make that as well

Also I've been umming and ahing over turning the channel "The Emporium Formerly Known As Soup" into a place I can put dumb shorts I have in my brain. I've had the worst joke pin-balling in my brain for ages now and I want to get it out my system/test if its a good place to put that sort of thing. So look out for that at some point 

Sadly I've had to shelve a few of the bonus projects in the pipeline because the more I've looked into them the less workable they seem. I know I owe you guys some bonus content so will try to get some done.

Also the Simpsons Hit and Run script I've needed to get out of my system has balooned to more than 50 pages. I'm scared. 

Events:
I've spent yesterday and this morning setting up a dedicated TF2 server for the Discord! Why?

Well because tomorrow at 7pm GMT we're having us a games night! We're playing Mann Vs Machine! I've had a play-around, and whilst Mann Vs. Machine on official servers can only support up to 6 players. But apparently a quirk with how Source supports 32 players, and how it only renders 22 robots at a time means you can push it to 10 human players. I've tested the server, and it works (yay!) and I've written a script that should (should) allow for 10 human players in an MvM game.

It'll be a bit of a live fire test environment but if it works then we can look at making MvM nights more regular. I might also look into how to host a few community servers in games we play regularly like ...well, mainly Civ 6 and Dread Hunger. But it'd be cool to have a little gamer space for the discord. If it doesn't work then, depending on interest, we can do a regular game on an official server or piggyback on a community server that can support up to 10 players, or default to good ol' reliable Civ 6!

Anyway, stay cool and stay hydrated!
- Soup