Onwards

Hello my beloved patrons!

It's been too long since you last heard from me. Let me tell you why this is all taking longer than you (and we) expected, and what the current progress is.

What’s Below:

• Creative Updates

- What's Happening Now?

- What's Happening After That? (The "Traditional Format" vs the "Dynamic Format")

- Making Mindgasm accessible to all: Removing the Gender Barrier

• Developer Updates

- Acknowledging the November update (and why it fell short of our intentions)

- Acknowledging the November update (again)

- App Navigation & Structure

- Addressing Performance

- A.I. Allie and the Reality (realtime) Engine

- A New Playback Experience

- Future App Feature Drops

• PS: Lifetime Members

• PPS: A personal thank you from my heart, to yours

• Creative Updates:

- What's Happening Now?

Creative production is not like building a house with a fixed schedule. You can't force creativity. The scale of a single lesson can be compared to a full musical album - and that is without the story and the complex teaching background. Do you know why Lesson 6 is so special? It happened, because the time was right in my own life, the stars aligned. And then it had time to evolve and get even better. Refining the concept, the story, the music over and over.

Until recently the stars just didn't align and I've lost count of the number of discarded attempts at Lesson 8. I had been doing a lot of thinking and exploration around not only the journey for this lesson, but how our overall path might progress into the future.

Scouting ahead for a path that will bear the journeys of so many individuals has been no trivial task, but I am very happy to share with you that I have had a breakthrough! The main idea, the skills, the key sounds, the overall concept for Lesson 8 has been formed. The production of the music is well underway, and the guidance is taking shape. Now comes the refining phase, narration, all those details that will give it the same depth as Lesson 6.

Taking the time this process needs would not be possible without your ongoing patreon support! You free me from financial anxiety and time pressure - only without these can creativity really flourish. I can't tell you how thankful I am for this support.

- What's Happening After That? (The "Traditional Format" vs the "Dynamic Format")

The future lesson structure is now all set, after the release of Lesson 8: "Equilibrium" (edit from Ohai: “so excited”) there will be one more chapter in the current "traditional" format - you know, the fixed, repetitive lessons that are the same on every listen.

Some of you that have been keeping up with the bits of news, might already know that we have been working behind the scenes to develop a more dynamic nature for our sessions - to keep our minds and bodies stimulated, always eager and adapting.

Alongside work on the next “traditional format” chapters, the existing chapters are currently being re-produced to fit the new “dynamic session format”.

This format opens up so many new possibilities - for example, you may have a particular lesson you like, but find it to be too short? Well, as this format grows you'll be able to keep that vibe going, without interruptions, or having to start the music over - you can keep going until 'you' are ready to warm down, not because the music is concluding.

Another example could be: You might have certain musical elements, muscular exercises, or mental techniques that you find really work for you, or that you are strongest at - conversely you may have ones that you'd wish you could spend more time cultivating. The dynamic nature of this new format gifts us the ability to allow you all to pick the things that work best for you - allowing those emerging abilities to really flourish, or perhaps for those of you who have already made substantial progress this could be something that takes you on the ride of your life.

- Making Mindgasm accessible to all: Removing the Gender Barrier

As we progress with the conversion of the existing chapters into this new format, we are also working to make them accessible to all, not limited by factors like gender or, well, hopefully anything.

The route to the Mindgasm is a gift, to all of us, we all have it within - learning how to access and unlock that gift should be available to all.

Each of us has a unique way of looking at things, and lessons learned by one, then shared with the Tribe, benefit us all. We can learn a lot from the unique-experiences of those who experience life differently to us.

This is an exciting time for us, and hopefully for any of you who were previously excluded from fully participating because of the gender/body specific language.

Alongside this, opens up the opportunity to introduce this to an open-minded partner - something quite a few of you have expressed interest in.

That covers the content, but as important as that is the how we get to it:

• App Updates:

- Acknowledging the November update (and why it fell short of our intentions)

The (NoNut-)November update was rushed. I forced far too many new features than planned on developer Ohai - still super impressed how he pulled it off anyways. Single handedly, in his freetime. Big companies with large, full-time dev teams deliver less and still take longer.

But this caused quite a burnout for both of us, and the November update was released untested with lots of workarounds under the hood. It has good looks, but the usability and performance were... sub-optimal. (_Ohai nods in enthusiastic agreement_)

We did not want to repeat this mistake. So a lot of cleaning up has been done since, and a proper foundation has been built.

All of that has been undertaken, while new improvements and ideas keep evolving as we progress. And it makes little sense to spend a lot of time finishing something that will be obsolete with the next feature. So the next update has been postponed a couple of times now, while we work get our house in order (should read: get our s**t together).

We are sorry for leaving you stuck with the old release.

But good news everyone: We are closing in on the release. I'll hand the keyboard over to developer Ohai to tell you about what the next App version will include.

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- Acknowledging the November update (again)

I'm grateful to The Conductor for pointing out the November release had taken on far too much, in far too short an amount of time - it ended up being rushed, but ultimately I feel it was a good thing overall.

It definitely had problems, and the huge rush caused a large amount of "technical-debt" under the hood that has had to be repaid. Much of this has been done, and as the code has become more organised and optimised, so has the experience of using the app itself.

- App Navigation & Structure

We have listened to your feedback regarding the Navigation and Structure, you were right of course!

It totally had some problems that made it less than joyous to tap around in - the next release includes an updated UI(User Interface) that, while based around the one released in November, has been through a design process, heavily-rebuilt, and improved to make everything easier to traverse and use.

Going forwards, the UI will always continue to evolve and improve, so please don't think it ends here.

- Addressing Performance

Improved Performance - we have used the opportunity when re-implementing the UI to address some of the performance issues reported from the NNN release of the app.

The truth is, we don't want to make Mindgasm a bland experience, we want to stimulate your mind and senses, so we take advantage of cool things your device can do - but we do understand that this shouldn't come at the cost of reduced performance or pushing your devices too hard.

We will be working with beta testers ahead of the official release to ensure that performance is as good as it can be whilst maintaining the right ambience and experience, and rest assured we will continue to identify and make performance improvements going forward.

- A.I. Allie and the Reality (realtime) Engine (sounds like the title of a novel about a certain tank-engine)

A.I. Allie and her realtime engine are in the process of being rebuilt from the ground up.

Allie is our guide to the world of Mindgasm, and wants to be able to help us along every step of the way, not only with guidance during the lessons, but to help us discover and learn about our next steps, as well as highlighting our emerging abilities.

This release adds the groundwork required to allow this to happen. There's lots of cool features that can be implemented due to this work - AI Allie is going to be helping us all a lot more in the future.

- A New Playback Experience

The experience of going to play something in the current app is less than ideal - it was a very quick implementation of an 'always present' player, intended to allow the audio to keep playing, in the event that we ever left the screen with the player on (whether accidentally or intentionally).

We have since separated the media information and player screens, along with rebuilding the Player UI from the ground up, to make it genuinely useful and easy to use.

I'll include an actual changelog when the release goes out, for those of you who are technically inclined to peruse.

- Future App Feature Drops [and The Conductor who Tamed Lightning] (ok, so now the novel has a sequel)

After tidying up the NNN Hackathon code we can now work much better going forwards, leading to faster, more regular updates, and actual feature drops.

It opens up so many possibilities to make many of The Conductors ludicrous (but excellent) ideas, and a few decent ones of my own become a reality - here's just a few of them:

> Allie will dynamically change her look to show you what and how strong to flex. She'll pulse in rhythm with the Eternal Wave, or help build the energy along with the building of the music, for example.

> Have Allie and the music content react to your very own biodynamic feedback  - imagine a session that grows with you, and knows when you're on the verge of something great, so it can help tip you over!

> Bespoke Allie Spaces: Different scenes, akin to the current experience of when you open the app and see Allie floating in space - these would have long evolving audio to set the stage for your own explorations and unguided rides.

> (Anonymous) Progress tracking & Achievements - to help you all see just how far you've come in your journey, and ideas for where to go next! This is also useful for unlocking bonus content/areas when the moment is just right for your progress. If you so wish, you could even share your achievements in the Mindgasm Discord Server to quickly show your level of progress (which could be really useful in getting a tailored response when seeking help/advice). This could also serve as a level of verification of your experience, along with a measure of 'trustworthiness'.

> Casting audio and video to other devices - listening to Mindgasm on your awesome audio system, or basking in the glow of Allie on your huge 4K TV! (edit from TC: “I'm sooo excited for this one, with all the eye candy in preparation”)

We recently had a big creative ideas period, and have lots more features in the pipeline (the list is pretty big!) - many of which have already been given a green-light (and some of them are just really, really cool - I'm genuinely excited for quite a few of them myself). Maybe if I bug The Conductor everyday we can get a bit of a public roadmap into place for everyone so you can all share in the excitement too.

I should hand it back to TC before they try and convince me to agree to another wonderful, but ridiculously out-there feature ;)

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Thanks Ohai!
You see, we will not run out of new features anytime soon - and these are just a few from our much longer list.

Stay tuned!

• PS: Lifetime Members

To our long standing Patrons who have completed the 6 months of subscription, as promised, you have automatically been set to free lifetime access in my patreon records. You are free and clear forever. Everyone with a valid Emailadress in Patreon (not changed afterwards) has been set to free access. You'll still have to cancel your patreon subscription manually, we'd loose too many users at once if this was automatically. Also, I hope you consider supporting us a little longer if you can afford it.

As one of the things that are still missing from the app is user management, the only way to access the paid lessons without a running subscription (but lifetime access) is the legacy page: http://mindgasm.net/education/
We hope to get this to work through the app in april or may latest.
Thank you for your support!!

• PPS: A personal thank you from my heart, to yours

The government just forced me to pay back the Corona subsidy I received to survive as a musician through 2020 - because although entirely necessary to survive, they decided living costs of the self-employed don't count as business expenses.

The music business I was running suffered extremely throughout the pandemic, and has since been dismantled. Still, the debt stayed.

Without the ongoing support from all of you open-minded humans, I would have had to leave the place I call home, and would probably have given up being a full-time musician altogether.

It is through your desire for exploration, and passion to expand beyond the culturally-defined limits of body and mind, that both I and this project have reached a place where we can sustainably grow into the future.

We are making great things together, and I know we will all continue on to better, and more beautiful places as our journey continues.

So another whole-hearted "Thank You"! For saving my ass.
I shall repay that good deed!

The Conductor