TUESDAY BLOG: EGGS

Morning. Hope everyone had a nice Easter weekend. 

We had a full-on family Easter. I amazingly managed to see all of my kids – though not all at once – over the course of the weekend. They all live in completely different parts of the country and they’ve all got busy lives, so I don’t see them anywhere near as much as I’d like. 

On Friday we took the grandsons out to the air museum. Bruce is mostly obsessed with tractors and combine harvesters, but that interest pretty much extends to any big machine. Planes did the job. 

Otto turns one this week, and his personality is starting to emerge. Having now raised far too many children, it has been interesting to see the ways in which they’ve both changed over the course of their lives, and also how they’re all very much the same people they were as kids. 

Otto is very different to how Bruce was at one, so I suspect they’ll be very different people when they’re older.

I mean, I’m completely different to either of my sisters, and they’re completely different to one another. The old nature versus nurture thing is pretty obvious to me: you’re born the way you are, but that can be shaped – to a point – by life experiences. None of us come into this world as a blank slate. 

SHOP TALK

We’re away filming next week and I can’t wait to do something a bit less heavy.

I’ve been putting together the cutaways and animations for this next batch of videos. I’m sticking with the same sort of graphical style I used in the Poland ones, though I’ve evolved it a bit – trying for something a touch dreamier, for reasons that’ll become apparent.  See above and below. Remind me to never do another video about water, because it's a pain in the arse to draw.

I’m eager to move on from Poland – though we’ve still got the Igor Witkowski video to come. 

We kind of experimented with the release of the Poland videos, to see if the channel could support more frequent uploads. The first two did great, though the second was slower than the first. And having been reported by an idiot, it killed the reach of the next two videos, so it’s tricky to gauge. 

Sanja was uploading shorts last week, in part because we’re trying to re-train the algorithm to suggest us to the right audience. We were still getting pushed out mainly to Cheapshow on the last two vids, and not a single one of the Cheapshow subscribers were clicking through. Unfortunately, that many shorts so rapidly also cost us some subscribers.

I think we need, minimum, two weeks between our videos, especially because they’re generally on the longer side. Though the most recent one was just a couple of minutes, and that did terribly. Who knows? It's a game, and the rules make no sense.

“When are you getting Gannon back?” read a comment on The Wolf’s Lair video this morning, from someone with a Vorratony profile pic. 

For the record, we did invite Gannon to join us for the next ghost hunt vid, but he declined. Once we get the next main channel vids out of the way, I’ll be focusing on Drong’s Challenge, which has plenty of Gannon and Eli.

As I say, it has all been an experiment, and we’re in a period of transition. Might be time for a new Q&A to set out our stall. Maybe when we’re in Yorkshire.

This week I have a bunch of day job stuff to get out of the way before we go away, but we also have Corner Shop Corner to come. Sanja’s done the assembly edit, and I need to get in there and put on the bells and the whistles. 

And Biffo’s Brain: I’ll try to get around to putting up the deets of the ghost hunt later today. Sorry. Not had five minutes this weekend.

Right! Work to do. Speak soon.

Paul