Weekly Update:

Hey Saucy Ones,

Let's let's just get it out of the way:

yes, I am among the many who've been hit by YouTube's restricted mode thing.

However, while I am annoyed, I am not concerned. I've got all of you after all and Patreon surpassed YouTube a while ago to be the largest part of my income. Thanks a million for letting me be able to not sweat stuff like this.

Okay cool I'll probably talk more about this in videos for all the not patrons but for now here's the quick and dirty for how I deal with this: mention it a few times in videos but no standalone video, push streams and social media more to get more people on more places to know I'm making videos, and MAYBE partially reopening the Discord to the public. That's a big maybe though.

On the apron front:

I know that the majority of you have received your aprons by now and the rest of you are about to get them. I've compiled my list of patrons who pledged or renewed from August 2nd to Monday, did a count of how many aprons I had on hand, and as I type this I'm printing out the graphics for the aprons I'll need to fulfill all of them. I'm also aware for the handful of you who will have your yearly pledge renew come October 1st and I've accounted for your aprons too if you choose to renew. I've got a pretty intense week this week so i think what I'm doing to do is print them all this week and try to mail them next week but who knows? There's always the chance I get everything I need done ahead of schedule and I have the time to print the shipping. Hey! We got apron stuff down to one paragraph, nice!

Now about Indieween:

Indieween is going to be a daunting task. For reasons I'll tell ya later I basically have 5 week to make 8 videos with 9 cooking segments in them. Why that many, because I'm a sick fuck who pushes himself to the limit, see that a new limit has been defined, and then pushes himself to that new limit. Why 5 weeks? I'll be out of town for part of October and can't well make videos away from my computer or stove.

Lucky me I've been in tough spots before and know how to hand this. The first step is making a clear list of smaller tasks for each video so I can track my progress and not be so easily psyched out by the sheer volume of work

As you can see here I've already played almost all the games, done all but one of the cooking segments (I'm on the fence about that one and might change it), and I've outlined several of the videos as well as started writing one of them. By the time you're reading this I intend to be done writing that one that's in progress and onto writing the next one while getting ready to record the first. I'm actually kinda glad that I haven't finished writing the script for Zero Protocol yet as the other day a big update dropped which included a new ending a a lot of new QOL stuff.

After this will be Brush Burial which I think I might just be able to get completely done this week on top of Zero Protocol because it's a short game and these are shorter videos which I can now make more efficiently. I'm trying to sacrifice as little quality as possible which should be hard at all because part of the point of indieween is to showcase smaller games that normally wouldn't have enough meat in them for a video. Lucky me I was able to knock out not one but TWO games for indieween during last Friday's stream and I think I'm gonna get started on the last two during this Friday's stream.

And on Abiotic Factor, Project Zombiod, and other big videos:

I'm already thinking that Aboitic Factor is going to be early-to-mid November and then once that's done I'll get to work on the Fallout: New Vegas California Compliance Run* (I'll be updating the ruleset well before that). As for project Zomboid, it's in an odd position: I'm clearly not having a good time playing single player as on intended difficulties and I don't want to hate-play the game and end up with a video that ruffles the feathers of the kind of person who obsesses over a niche thing, ends up knowing or not tying their whole personhood to that thing, and then takes any criticism of that as a grave personal rejection (can you yell I've been down this road before???). This leaves me with two choices: either use custom difficulty settings to play with kid gloves on and have a decent experience or wait for multiplayer. I've heard so many times now that,

"oooooh, you just gotta play with friends"

"Zomboid is such a better experience when you have more experienced players showing you the way."

"you just gotta wait for them to fix multiplayer so we can play together and then it'll be so much better"

I've made my stance clear on games that are "better with friends" so I won't repeat it here. I'm between a rock and a had place and right now it seem the best option is to kick the can down the road and worth on other projects. Sorry, but it looks like this year's patron-voted video is probably gonna be out next early year.

That's all for now, stay saucy!