Patreon Chosen Game: Schedule Reminder [+general update blog]

Year's almost over! Finished Rain World finally lol

As a reminder, we nominate and vote for a new Patreon-chosen game for a let's play every quarter now. So everyone in the $15 tier or above will be able to nominate a game, and everyone else will be able to vote on that list of nominations a couple days later. To clear up any confusion, you have to actually join said tier or one of the higher ones to work. Sometimes people enter custom amounts as their pledge but don't actually join the reward tiers specifically, which is seen as opting out of them.

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Schedule:

Game nominations: January 1st

Game vote: January 3rd

Game premiere: January 5th-8th-ish, probably, for $5 supporters. Schedule pending for the public.

There will be a post like this one with a google form link, but the post will only be visible to qualifying supporters.

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Update blog:

Anyway, year's coming to an end, huh? Would have liked to have gotten another video essay done by now, obviously. Haven't worked on one since the last one, like, at all.

October was dominated by the Halloween event that I didn't prepare all that well for (probably because I was making that last video essay lol). November, well, I made a visual novel or my own. Neat. https://keithballard.itch.io/since-november

For December I've just been kind of hanging out and drawing mostly, outside of my bare minimum duties to the gaming channel. I know that's probably disappointing to hear, but I've been a bit depressed since the election, I'm fairly creatively spent after doing so much writing, and I'm getting to deal with fun family hospital visits on top of that. So it's been kinda nice to lean back, listen to some video essays, and work on improving my furry art. I've been making solid progress honestly, but it's not the kind of art that I can show here, if you know what I mean. shrug

In the background I've spent all of 2024 pursuing an ADHD diagnosis, and after a full year of kinda wasting my time I'm finally gonna get tested on Monday. They've made it very stressful for me by building it up all year lol, but at least we're finally here. If I end up medicated, we'll see how that adjustment period goes. I've always wondered if it would affect my "stage" presence or not. I'm not trying to treat aderall or whatever as a magic "do my job" drug or anything like that, but it's deeply frustrating that my resolution to find answers has ended up being such an ordeal. In my last talk my therapist told me that "masking" isn't a thing that autistic people can do, which flies in the face of literally everything I know about the word "masking," and that really shook my confidence that I'm even talking to the right people in the first place, like, damn.

If I get a diagnosis I'll probably make a video about this whole process. If for no other reason than to make something "easy" that feels like it recoups a bit of how much of my time got wasted this year lmao. Similarly, I want to make a video about the process of making VNs, which is a promise I made to myself. One side of my brain was like, "You shouldn't join a game jam because you need to be working on this whole Video Essay career thing and you're already not meeting your goals," but then the other side of my brain activated its trap card and said, "Ah ah, but we can make a video about making a visual novel. We can have both." And that was the excuse I needed to move forward I guess.

If I don't get a diagnosis, well, I still need to move forward. I think writing the VN under a time limit was good practice for being a bit more ruthless and stream-of-consciousness in my writing, doing anything to find and preserve forward momentum. I'm hoping I can continue to improve my approach so that I can actually produce 500-1000 words of writing in a given day when I want to. I also want to revisit my abandoned scripts from over the years and salvage something from them. Get over myself and actually publish stuff instead of deciding that a finished script is bad and then starting a new thing over and over again. I let anxiety delay my Black Mirror video until it's now two years out of relevance, yay.

Not that I'm desperate to find video topics. It just feels like repurposing shelved scripts is a faster way to "catch up" to where I feel like I probably should be by now. I'm excited to get back to work on my Myst video, now, whoops, two years later than I started it. Fuck. I'd like to research furries as an art movement. Hell, I'd probably like to continue writing furry VNs, though I feel like that would need to live on its own separate Patreon, and I obviously worry about being able to keep up with yet another project.

IDK, new year, new resolutions I guess. We'll see if I can move out and finally get my own space, and get a boyfriend too. Sure, keep stacking 2025 goals lmao

Good luck everyone.