March Newsletter
Added 2022-03-01 17:11:35 +0000 UTCMerry… spring? I know it’s been a while since we had a newsletter. I broke the streak. Again. BUT IT’S BACK. Not about how many times you fuck up, it’s about how many times you unfuck up. SCIENCE.
So, yes. There’s been a lot going on. In between the YouTube algorithm kicking my ass, a literal war in Europe, and a lot of personal stuff, it’s been a kinda difficult to pull all my thoughts together into a newsletter. But there’s also been some really amazing stuff going on. It’s swings and roundabouts, if the swings had all the structural integrity of jelly and the roundabouts were and infinite spiral of garbage fires. Or, as I like to call it, Tuesday.
Videos Planned This Month
YouTube can get in the bin tbh. Not only did the evil blackbox of the algorithm take down the X-Men video (Ithe unlisted upload can now only be viewed through Patreon, tell your friends), it has also demonetised a bunch of really old videos and locked them behind age restriction software for… reasons?! Honestly the emails I’ve had from YouTube about this have been super vague, and they don’t say anything about why some have and some haven’t been age-restricted. What about the drunk ZX Spectrum series was considered 18+?! And, more importantly, the X-Men games were removed for nudity, but the reviews on LITERAL PORN GAMES WEREN’T? I despair. I do.
With that said, here's what I've got in the pipeline.
- BIG RIGS: Trucks. Very safe, very non sexy trucks. I mean, it depends on how much you like trucks, I suppose. If YouTube thinks trucks are a sex thing, we're going to have problems. Try me YouTube, I bloody dare you.
- Rise Of The Robots: in the works.
- X-Men reupload: I don’t know which part specifically YT thought only 18 year olds could handle, but I shall THINK OF THE CHILDREN and reupload the edited version soon.
News About Me
MY BOOK IS NOW FULLY FUNDED!!!!
https://unbound.com/books/video-games/
Thank you so much to everyone who donated and supported this little project of mine. You can still support and purchase the project, as some of you already have which is just bloody delightful. There’s pins, totes, hardbacks, paperback, ebooks, the lot! Thank you!
On the mental health side of things, it’s been a ride. I wrote a blog recently about my mental health diagnosis which can access here if you want to learn a bit more about it.
The tl:dr of it is that I have multiple new diagnosis for my mental health condition. The psychiatrists don’t think I’m depressed, but a combination of multiple conditions appear to have compounded and compromised my mental state that no one, not even doctors, has picked up on before.
I’m hopeful. I seem to have a diagnosis that’ll help me move forward now. Fingers crossed.
Twitch and Rats Rats Rats
My twitch streams at the moment are predominantly Rat based ‘point and watch’ adventures. I might get back to streaming games soon, but for now this is about all I can manage. It’s lovely, it’s chill, and if you want to come join us, I’ll sporadically stream in the late afternoons/evenings every other day. I’ll try and set up and stick to a more dedicated schedule soon!
And that’s just about everything.
Love you guys, take care of yourselves. Especially those of you in Ukraine right now. I can’t begin to imagine what you and your loved ones are going through. Stay safe.
Don’t doom scroll. Double check all the information you’re reading and watching before you share it.
And don’t eat too much ice cream.
Love Octy x
Note from JJ:
Hey friends! This is just a little reminder that the PR email address is for business enquires only. Any fanmail you send through there will NOT be forwarded to Octy. You can do that through the patreon messaging function. Cheers!
Comments
'Rise of the Robots'- Even after all these years, those words in that order still sends a shiver down my spine...
2022-03-02 09:45:56 +0000 UTCHooray for El Mardo!
WhatHoSnorkers
2022-03-01 20:04:05 +0000 UTCCongrats on the book Octy, super proud of you :) <3
Jordan Valentine
2022-03-01 19:25:37 +0000 UTCYouTube seems to have this problem where they like to assume viewers only ever want to watch one type of content and creators only ever put out one type of content, so you just match them 1:1 and that's it. It wouldn't surprise me if their internal tools also make stupid automated assumptions of, "ooh, this person did one video with dangerously sexy pixels in it, bet all of the other pixels are just as excessively laden with sex". Thankfully, they seem to be okay about trucks. Hot, oily trucks with their throbbing and groaning. It's great to hear Big Rigs is imminent, I have a script in my pipeline about bad games where I deliberately want to *not* cover Big Rigs and it'd be lovely to be able to say, "for that, go and watch Octav1us' video" at the appropriate point. (But don't feel any pressure on time! I have many stupid things to cover in the meantime. I just bought a copy of 1998's Hardwar, fr'instance.)
Matt Kimber (Timberwolf)
2022-03-01 19:11:21 +0000 UTCI like trucking and I like to truck ..... :)
Wazzock22
2022-03-01 18:59:55 +0000 UTCSorry to hear about YouTube being unfriendly to you. Naomi Wu (Chinese tech youtuber) has also been dealing with a bunch of random age restrictions and demonetisation of her videos. Seemingly just for “looking like a woman and making videos”: the reports claim “nudity” but even videos with way more clothing than fitness, etc, channels are still being hit. As with you even older videos seem to suddenly get “reconsidered” and affected :-( I guess someone in YouTube has decided “they don’t like that sort of thing” for some vaguely defined “I’ll know it when I see it” definition of “that thing”. Good to hear you’ve got a (hopefully) helpful set of diagnosises now: understanding “why” is a lot of the challenge in “how do I engage with this”. Ewen PS: congratulations on the book funding, it was really good to get that notification a few days back! 💜
Ewen McNeill
2022-03-01 18:41:03 +0000 UTCSending a lot of hugs, especially after reading the blog post. Putting my hand up with having a personality disorder myself (borderline personality disorder) and being one of the board members of a BPD group in Lincoln. Being batted from one diagnosis to another before landing on a PD seems, very sadly and frustratingly, the route a lot of people go through before landing on the right diagnosis. And then also realising PTSD is likely to be part of the mix. I'm really glad to hear that it sounds like you had the support of a recovery team and crisis team. I've been taking Venlafaxine for 10+ years, and no other medication has the same effect as that one. I went through a similar experience when my diagnosis switched from Bipolar Disorder to Borderline. With bipolar, in a way, it's easy to fall into the trap of "well my brain is physically wrong so fuck everything else". When it switched, there was that realisation that I can take some responsibility for making my mood better. I usually dislike the phrase taking responsibility, as it seems to be a phrase crisis teams and services dish out instead of support. But doing reading on things like dialectical behavioural therapy was a real help. Schema Therapy was also a real eye opener - that there are different parts of myself that become activated in different scenarios and have different needs to calm down. Anyway, sorry for the long winded comment, it was just very relatable. Feel free to send a PM if there's anything I could help with or whatever.
Gary Watts
2022-03-01 17:28:27 +0000 UTCWould you consider to mirror your channel to Odysee / LBRY. I think it is an automatic process you can set up. There are a ton of quite popular and non-conspiracy youtubers. That means quite a few non-conspiracy viewers. Larry is on there: https://open.lbry.com/@Larry:f Oh, and cinemassacre uses it to store their updated renders previously on Amazon video direct: https://open.lbry.com/@Cinemassacre:b
HW
2022-03-01 17:27:41 +0000 UTC
