Knowing Better in 2024 - Some Changes

Hello everyone!

I made a post like this last year and people seemed to appreciate the updates, so I figured I would do it again this year. Here’s a wrap up and my plans for the future.

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2023 was a bit rough for me, not only personally but for the channel.

It started off quite strong. I stuck to the work schedule I came up with in my previous announcement and I managed to get the Christian Science video, a project that should have taken four months, done in only three. I had to throw out the 6hr/day work schedule and pull several 10s and 11s to get it done, but I did. Why would I put myself through that? Well, because I had a sponsor deadline. After that video, I was never quite able to get back into that stable work routine.

During that video, I mentioned that I filmed a few vlog segments that I decided to cut in the end. One of them was on the day Atlas was diagnosed with cancer – Lymphoma, to be exact. It is inoperable, all we can do is slow it down with steroids. He’s been on a twice daily medication ever since and is doing well so far.

My next project was Vegetarianism. Thanks to the success of the Christian Science video and its feature-length runtime, my sponsor, Nebula, paid me slightly extra to break the project in half and create two one-hour videos instead. Of course I accepted the deal, but I didn’t realize what a challenge it was going to be.

For the most part, both the Vegetarian and Kellogg videos used the same sources. The difficulty came when it was time to write them. I needed two theses, two intros and conclusions, two plotlines, two titles and thumbnails, two of everything. I had to figure out what information would be in this video, but not that, or maybe both.

It’s at this point that Peabody was also diagnosed with cancer – Insulinoma this time, which is also inoperable. For those who remember my previous ferret Wheatley, this is what got him in the end as well. Peabody already had Adrenal Disease for a few years, which was being treated with a hormonal implant. He was responding well to the medication at first, then the pharmacy put his specific formula on backorder and it was an absolute mess trying to find a different one that he would accept. A few weeks ago, he had to be taken to the ER because he was having a seizure. We’re at the point where I need to mix it into his “critical care” food and hand feed him with a spoon twice a day.

So because of those stressors, a single video that I hoped to have done in June ended up being two videos that came out at the end of September. The Kellogg video was then published on Youtube in November.

Since those videos were completed, I’ve been working on my next video, which many of you have already guessed will be on the Seventh-Day Adventists. I finished the research just before Christmas and am about a third of the way through writing the script.

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2023 by the Numbers

I use Clockify to track my hours, mostly for myself, but I also post these numbers on Patreon.

I worked a total of 1294 hours in 2023, down from 1623 last year. I had planned to keep a tight 32-hour work week schedule, but as I said, that seemed to fall apart around the middle of the year.

Averaging all of the 2023 videos together (Pilgrims, Christian Science, Vegetarianism, Kellogg), here’s how it breaks down per project and how that’s changed from 2022:

• Video Length: 1h 29m (-7m)
• Research: 117h 21m (+20h)
• Writing: 71h (+6h)
• Filming: 41h (+13h)
• Editing: 84h (+5h)
• Post-Production (Subtitles, thumbnails, etc.): 6h (NC)

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Changes in 2024

Sponsors

I kind of want to get away from being held to a deadline that I will either pull many unhealthy all-nighters to meet, or more likely, fail to meet. No sponsor has ever given me grief for having to push a video back by a week or even several months. But I mentally beat myself up for it every time. It’s a personal failure.

So the Seventh-Day Adventist video will not feature a sponsor, but I will probably mention my Patreon and other ways to directly support the channel. If those grow large enough, perhaps I won’t need sponsors at all in the future.

Patreon

I plan on utilizing my Patreon to keep fans more informed about what is going on behind the scenes. So every month, I’ll be writing up a summary of what the next project is, what resources I’m using, where I am in the process, and all of that. Patrons can currently see the source list for the upcoming SDA video.

Twitch

I’m rebranding the Twitch channel to do work-with-me streams. I’ve also heard them called study-with-me, study streams, or body-doubling, since many people seem to work better when they’re watching someone else work. Basically, I’ll be doing 50-10 pomodoros on stream. For 50 minutes, I’ll be working on my video in whatever capacity and then for 10 minutes, we’ll be chatting and catching up.

Previously, I would stream myself doing research, writing, or editing, but I was always interacting with the audience. Sometimes I would play games that were related to the topic, other times I would be reacting to PragerU or commercials. The problem was that I felt like a teacher again. Every day that I streamed, I had to come up with a lesson plan for what we were going to be doing, which felt like an unnecessary stressor.

I will still do the occasional gaming or candy-making streams, and since it’s an election year, I imagine we might do a few debate watch-alongs or something. But those will be rare and likely announced beforehand.

Streams will start on Monday, February 5 at 12pm Pacific. Since this is a new format and everything, I don’t want to nail down a schedule until I’ve found the right flow, but you can expect me to be live 2-3 afternoons a week.

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Final Thoughts

This year, I’m focused on getting back to the basics.

I had a lot of grand plans for 2023 and looking back, I feel like I stretched myself too thin. I had two major merch drops: the notebooks and the plushies. I hired a Spanish translator to work on captions for the channel – every video from Company Towns to the present now has them. I worked with a composer to create six new background songs and a new theme – a Spotify album is forthcoming. And those are only the successful ones.

I don’t have any plans like that this year. I want to focus on maintaining a healthy work schedule, making videos, and showing you the process. No more crunching to get a video done before a deadline, or asking to have the deadline moved only to crunch at the end of the next month too. Videos will be done when they’re done.

I’m expecting the SDA video to be complete in early March and I’ll have it up for early access on Patreon for longer than a few days, for once. Which also means it will be available early for Youtube members on the Community tab.

I appreciate all of your continued support, both financial and emotional. I am forever grateful that I have this job and I will continue doing it for as long as you all want me to. I have no plans to retire any time soon. See you over on Twitch on Monday!