State of the Skeleton - August 2023

Hello again Skele-fam!

First of all some business stuff - Patreon changed the way they handle payments starting this month, moving all transactions overseas. This shouldn't mean anything really, except this may have caused your pledges to be flagged or rejected from your bank or what have you. So be sure to double-check that all your Patreon pledges (not just ours!) are going through!

Anyway, hope ya'll are doing well and not melting into a pile of jello in this weird, ambitious, and unnecessary heat we're having this summer. We got a big update this month! Some big news!

Earlier this month, Grace and I went to EVO! The fighting game convention, by the way. I'll be honest, I'm not sure exactly why it's called EVO. Our first time ever! But I didn't go there to throw down on my "sick" SF6 skillz, it was a trip we'd planned months ago and was more intended to be a vacation where a few YouTube friends were also going to be. EVO was just the first weekend of August but since it's in Las Vegas, we stretched the trip out on either side of said weekend for dedicated wave pool and margarita time with some friends we don't get to see too often. I don't like to gamble so I was interested in just chilling the hell out and trying not to get sunburned (which, I didn't by the way! a rare occurrence for me!)

However, despite spending limited time at the actual convention, we both came home covid positive! The first time we've gotten covid (as far as we know). Grace got it pretty bad, I've thankfully had far more minor symptoms. One thing Grace and I definitely both got is major fatigue. We're both just exhausted all the time! We tried to get some work done last week but it was basically nothing. We pretty much spent the whole last weekend sleeping. We're both feeling much better now but we both still tested positive on Monday and still fatigued.

But I was still able to get something done, dammit, and I'm happy to announce that we're starting a new Patreon exclusive show, Uncle Derek Underground or UDUG (pronounced "you-doug")! We even got a logo for it! This is officially baybee!!

This is a really exciting new thing for a bunch of reasons!
1) Exclusive - This Patreon has been in need of some supporter exclusive content, and these videos will happen at least monthly!
2) Low Risk - YouTube is punishing when videos underperform, it'll be nice to have videos that don't NEED to hit certain numbers or risk hurting our standing with the algorithm
3) Creative - These will be slightly looser than typical SSFF videos. Our videos just keep getting bigger and bigger, for my own creativity, I need something I can crank out quickly.
4) Voting - The community gets to vote! We get awesome video suggestions all the time, and we have a HUGE list of video ideas with too many that just wouldn't fly on the main channel. So every month we'll have a poll with a dozen or more topics to pick!
5) Evolving - UDUG can evolve as we go! We'll get an idea of what everyone likes and maybe form a new type of show or format! Or maybe I've already nailed it on the first swing, we'll see??

The first episode will be posted tonight! And it will be an exclusive Patreon video!

The first two episodes have already been shot and edited. The first one is Punching Weight: McDonald's Video Games, which was spurred by last month's weird Grimace Birthday promotion they did, where McDonalds actually commissioned developers to make a brand new Game Boy Color game... that's actually really good! In fact, most of the McDonalds games are actually shockingly good! This is a video tour through as many as I could get my hands on, including an official training simulator that you can still download today. The second episode is talking over Sony's 2006 Playstation 3 E3 Conference. I love E3 conferences, they're an endless source of gaming history, cringe moments, technical errors, forgotten games, and general trivia. This is something I've thought about doing for years and with E3 basically dead now, it'll be fun to go back and relive these old moments. Maybe we'll start an official ranking of the worst and best E3 conference of all time!

Unfortunately this may mean the end to the SSFF Podcast. It's already been on hiatus since all my family stuff that happened back in spring and we've gotten a lot of questions about when it'll come back. At the moment, it's difficult to fit the recording into both Grace and mine's weekly schedules. I've thought of ways we could bring it back with a slightly different format, but UDUG is currently a project I'm far more excited about doing. And at the end of the day, you need to chase the fun and follow your creativity, so SSFP may return but for the time being it's currently on ice.

So, check your Patreon charges! EVO and Vegas was super fun. We've got covid but are doing alright. And NEW SHOW, first episode as soon as it finishes uploading and processing! But podcast is on hold. That's about it!

Thanks for the support! We'll have a vote for the next UDUG video in a few weeks, feel free to drop a suggestion in below or in the suggestions chat in the discord.

Stay powerful,
Uncle Derek