Superman and other updates

Big news

PAX West 2025, we have another two panels approved, along with tentative dates and times.

1) Folding Ideas Live: Exclusive Video Premiere + Q&A | Friday, August 29 at 6:30pm

This will be the premiere of the fully scripted, polished, and complete version of Call of Duty: Ghosts - Power, Paranoia, and Orbital Tungsten Rods. I've absorbed all the feedback from the PAX East panel, upgraded it, improved it, and turned it into a finished video.

Well, okay, it's not done yet, but we've crossed several major milestones. What the timeline is going to look like: a rough draft will be posted to Patreon in August, the video will premiere at PAX for a live audience, and then assuming everything has gone well it will go live on YouTube the following morning.

You'd assume that since a draft of a script existed in the form of the panel that the writing process would be pretty straightforward. I assumed so, too. While big parts of it were pretty straightforward, take the outline and clean it up, there were some very keen criticisms of the panel that were challenging to integrate in a way I was satisfied with.

2) Movie Game: The Movie: The Game: The Panel | Sunday, August 31 at 5:00pm

This is a collaboration with Mikey Neumann. I'll be leading him on a comedy journey through the wacky world of tie-in video games. I'm still working on pulling clips and images, but this is coming along quite well and I'm really looking forward to it.

The State of Other Projects

This is How You Get Jarhead Sequels is still in production, it will just likely be done in [month redacted] as Ghosts took priority once the panel was approved. Re-approved?

Belle and the Importance of Place is also still a go, under ideal conditions I would like to squeeze this out before PAX, at least a Patreon version (I'm still massively waffling about the scope of this, basically being pulled in two vastly different directions).

Big Things in Small Towns, Kara's schedule, my health, and the weather in Calgary haven't been conducive to making good progress on this project in July, and there are higher priorities for August. We have a very solid concept, but as a travel-heavy video it requires a lot of things to line up.

New Channel Trailer is written and shot and partially edited, it should be done this week.

Gen AI Project of some kind? Look, I don't know. I'm so fascinated by the emerging side effects of heavy chatbot use, the cultures that are springing up around it, but it's also a huge moving target. I feel like at the very least I need to start producing something on the subject before it just violently explodes out of me.

Health

This is something I don't particularly like talking about, not because I can't talk about it or find it embarrassing, but rather because I feel like it's too easy to talk about in a way that risks hijacking one's entire personality. Not only can I talk about it, it's something I can talk about long past the point of any audience's patience.

Since 2021 I've felt that my already shaky attention span was made significantly worse by, well, everything, in a way that has absolutely impacted my life and my work. I've struggled for years with the almost stereotypical contradiction of feeling "unable to write" while producing some of my best work ever. A big issue, which has occasionally crept into videos, is a implacable impulsiveness, days or even weeks of restlessness where I feel compelled to work on nothing that's in front of me and instead charge out to "just make something."

I tried last year to turn this in a positive direction, tried to harness that energy into rough-but-finished mini projects in the hope that it would build a momentum. However more often than not this impulse simply results in me sitting at home staring at a pile of useless footage that lacks any direction or intent. Worse it has frequently led to me sitting on a rock two hours away from home, staring at a camera with nothing to say, gradually realizing that I've played myself again and rushed out the door without a plan, then I spend another two hours driving home, stewing in that sense of failure.

After a somewhat comical doctor's appointment for something entirely unrelated, at his suggestion I decided to try medication.

The process has been a mixed bag in a way that was almost disappointing. Obviously the dream is a magic bullet that fixes everything in one go, but only slightly further behind that is the total disaster that allows you to decisively write something off. Emotionally the worst outcome is the one that forces you to make decisions and sort out your actual priorities.

While some side-effects were extremely disruptive and required dosage adjustments, on the whole I've felt more level and less intimidated by the size of the morsels I'm trying to chew.

The big, sad clarity that's come from it all, though, is that while the chemicals in my brain have been a problem, so have my personal habits, but then in rearranging all of these things, finding a medication dosage that balances effects and side effects, changing daily routines, changing diet, no gate to a promised land has swung open. I have not entered a mythical space of perpetual flow state, where words simply tumble out of me onto the page, rather I've spent two months making a series of changes in exchange for slightly-above-unity gains on the other side.

Conclusion

So, there's a big update on where everything is at.