Update: China project and future plans

It's been 2-3 weeks without a video and unfortunately I have to disapoint you in that the project i am working on is going to take its time. It's not just the research, but also the new art and animation style that is holding me up somewhat. To give you a little spoiler, it's going to be one of the longer videos I make and it will be about the ever growing geopolitical influence of Communist China and how the West, but in particular the United States, are failing to appreciate and combat that ever growing threat. I also had to take a week off because of exams during which I did almost nothing whatsoever releated to youtube, but I hope you can understand that. The lenght of this production process also left me wondering if I need to set up a system that could allow me to pump out short videos, that wont be patreonised. As some of you maybe saw already, I made the decision that from now on all videos that are under 12 minutes long will no longer be monetized on patreon. 

There is also something else I need to adress, which is the fact that over the course of the last two years I have lost a considerable ammount of patreons, more thant 3 quarters in fact. Which means that I am immensly greatfull to those of you who have chosen to remain. It means I also have to take steps to attract new ones, as tightening the belt can only go so far. As some of you may or may not know, I have always had a policy for my channel since the day of it's beginning to have open DMs and to respond to every single subscriber and viewer who cares to ask questions or give feedback. I am going to stop that. I left most discord servers that I was in and from now on every monetized post here will come with my skype contact and discord contact. I will be available to you guys from now on and will shut down the open DMs. I will also invite you into a server I have been running for some time in which I write my youtube videos, post notes on ideas, as well as post general scripts and concepts. It's a mix of a "to do list" as well as a system that allows people to view and critique my work as it is in progress. You might not know this, but this is how I have worked for at least 4 years now. Everytime I write a video I make a group of 8-12 people to watch and view my work before it goes public and to have them critique it as much as possible. The idea behind it is to smoothe out any flaws. Unfortunately people took advantage of that 2 years ago, but I still continue to work like that. From now on I wont do the group thing, but instead invite you to be my pre-production and prodcution critics. That is of course, if you are interested in such. It will of course also give you the opportunity to suggest topics. An additional change that is coming, is that I will post a list of video ideas in a poll after every video, for you, my patreon, to vote on what I should work on next. If you have any other suggestions on how I can engage more with you, I'd be very greatfull. 

Hope you are having a great time, yours, Joe.