"Middle Dewey", A Channel Reboot, And A Series of Exciting Ideas

Hi! I'm Noah Gervais, and I sure did have a rough year in 2018.

Probably one of my all time favorite comedies is Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox story, which is a biopic parody. There's a scene where Dewey, the main character, is just having a complete meltdown at the back of the tour bus and one of the bandmates asks, "Hey man, is Dewey *okay*? He doesn't seem like himself."

"Naw man," another bandmate assures him, "That was Early Dewey. This is Middle Dewey." 

It's a ridiculous cliche`  that achieving some level of personal success makes a certain kind of person miserable and crazy for a while, but for me this past year has been living that cliche` and trying not to be too public about it.  

As some of you may have picked up on, I've been struggling a lot this year with depression and some emotional turbulence. I've tried to keep one hand on the rudder when it comes to the channel but I think everyone who's followed the channel for a while has likely noticed it going through a bit of a slump in terms of output. 

I've also reduced my social media presence to near zero after realizing that self-flagellation isn't a good look and wasn't much working as the apology I wanted it to act as. So I figured I'd just speak up when I had something. But being depressed also means not thinking clearly, and I've gone through long months convinced my entire bibliography is worthless and anything new I had to write would be like so much cold vomit on the internet's floor. 

So the catch-22 is that expressing that fear is to be rude to, well, you all who have been so steadfast, kind, and unflinchingly supportive even though this channel's very existence has seemed tenuous and erratic at times the past year. 

I've hit a few milestones, a five year anniversary, hitting 100,000 subscribers, that I haven't felt like I've earned the right to mention or celebrate because I have so many unreleased projects and my general feeling towards the channel has been that I've failed somehow and was freshly every day compounding that failure.

Which makes it hard to be productive. 

Another joke from Dewey Cox: "Dewey's gotta think about his WHOLE LIFE before he goes up there on stage," but in the context of depression that can be the struggle. Creating something suddenly becomes about justifying my own ability or right to even create something in the first place, and if you've gotta think about your whole damn life before doing your basic job, well, it's a problem.

It took me about the whole year wrestling with this and losing before I started to realize that I had to approach my depression as an actual illness and not just, like, a trait. So I went to a real doctor and got some actual antidepressants and I've since managed to actual make progress on my outstanding projects. I was worried about the popular myth that medication like that makes it harder to be creative, but it turns out that that's all complete bullshit. I've been a thousand times more productive without hours spent yelling at myself. Depression is a sickness of perception, and being able to lift the fog of it isn't unlike putting on a pair of glasses after trying to see without.

My anxiety about these 2018 projects is lingering, though, and I still feel ambivalent towards whether my back catalogue holds up as worthwhile or not. So what I realized I need to do is a soft reboot of the whole damn thing, close out everything on the books and open a new volume.

As the end of January approaches, I realize I'm not gonna hit it on 31st. So instead of freaking out I'm simply setting a concrete date for the revamp so I have time to get everything in order and even turn it into something positive.

So! On FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8th, I'm having a celebration of sorts and releasing every outstanding project from the past year so I can move forward. I'm going to try to use YouTube's Premier feature to be on hand in live chat to actually answer questions and celebrate hitting 100,000 subscribers even if it's technically a little after the fact. 

These include:

Wolfenstein: The New Colossus in Close Critique (Delayed since August 2017)

A Thorough Look at Dead Space (Delayed Since October 2018)

Manic Pixie Dream Worlds: A Critical Look at American McGee's Alice Games 

What's Been Going on with Far Cry 5's DLC?

What's more is that with a soft reboot I want to start doing genuinely new things. So I've gotten a Playstation 4, a passthrough box, and a used XBox 360. The channel will no longer be PC Exclusive and I can go and experience all these console classics that people have been talking about forever and I've never played. I imagine everyone can guess my #1 priority,  but just to be clear the first official video of the 2019 Channel Reboot going to be "Ballad of the Console Western". 

The hardest thing of all to figure out what to do with is my travel content. It's by far my favorite to create, but it's also exponentially more expensive than video game content with a *much* smaller number of people willing to watch it. My wife and I settled down a bit, and so I can't go full nomad like the original idea. So, a more focused trip and a more focused idea seems like the way to go. 

That being the case I'm extremely happy to announce that the Bus has a mechanic's appointment this Friday to get her ready for another 10,000 miles. This time, however, it's going to be a 45-day condensed odyssey to do something I've always wanted to do my whole life: a Fallout tour.

I'll be covering the real-life maps of Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas while also visiting other historical sites and ghost towns relevant to the history and aesthetic of the atomic era. The crown jewel of the trip is the April open house at the Trinity test site, where the first atom bomb was detonated and the world changed forever. It's a little radioactive, sure, but they'll let you bring the dog so it's on. 

This should net two videos: one focused on Fallout landmarks specifically, and structured around the game experiences, and another done in the style of my other travelogues where I can talk about the trip in a broader context. They'll overlap slightly, but I think they'll likely turn out to be very distinct from one another. This trip isn't theoretical, I've waited to announce it until I'm 100% positive I can make it happen. Even if you felt the travelogues weren't worth watching, hopefully the Fallout-centric one will better justify the money spent from Patrons who primarily want video game content. 

Lastly, some numbers. I've been trying to figure out if there's some objective way to estimate if I've been letting folks down with my output in 2018. So I broke down the past three years by the numbers.

2016 was my most productive year ever. I did 14 videos covering 30 games.

2017 was the year of the bus. I did my 3 travel videos, but video game coverage did suffer coming in at only 11 videos covering 18 games.

2018 is harder to reckon, because I did no travel videos and only published 9 videos. But I still covered a record *39* games. Even if you count the Neverwinter Nights video as only 2 games, it's still 27 games. If the videos I release on the 8th are retroactively added to the stack, the year actually holds up okay. And if you don't want to count it that way, well, then February's gonna start strong. 

I want to apologize for having been distant, as a creator, and not interacting much this past year. I've been sad and kind of unpleasant to be around for a long while. I'm trying to put that behind me, but I dug myself a tidy little hole and I've been a few weeks shoveling it back in. 

Thanks so much for your patience and support.

--Noah