(An Unfortunate) Calxiyn End-Of-Year Update

Good day everyone! First and foremost I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays! I hope everyone is enjoying their time off or their time with family and friends!

As you may have noticed, I have taken yesterday and today off, and plan on getting back to videos tomorrow. But I have a few things I wanted to provide an update about for patrons and also for free / public members.

A few days ago, my mom was notified that she “no longer has a position” at the company she works for. I will keep the details vague, but I mentioned in the discord server that the company went bankrupt a few weeks ago. However it was bought by new owners. We thought that would be a good thing but unfortunately, the new owners have let many people go right before Christmas (as this happened a few days ago).

Because of this, I’ve been re-evaluating to try to figure out how I can help her better, since right now, I am spending too much time on my videos and not making enough to be useful. I was already planning on re-evaluating my current workflow after Villainess / Migi & Dali to figure out where I “went wrong” in terms of scheduling my time, what I need to do differently, etc etc. So here are some of the things I want to change starting this week and for the beginning of 2024.

Multi-Streaming: I am definitely going to start multi-streaming and was going to do this regardless. I am still going to keep games that will be edited, such as Twisted Wonderland & Genshin Impact to be Twitch only, but I want to stream on both YouTube & Twitch for stuff like Little Goody Two Shoes, Slime Rancher, Stardew Valley etc. I am also going to do shorter streams (such as just chatting) outside of gaming and when Arnold goes home, try to have a specific time for my streams to start.

Reaction Wise: In order to be able to create more content (and faster), I have been considering uploading Timer / Subtitle reactions to YouTube again. If you remember, I used to do this for Code Geass, FMA:B, etc before changing formats. I have been thinking about how to make sure everything is fair, especially for the $10 patrons. Currently, my Patreon tiers are structured so that $10 patrons have exclusive access to most full length reactions (starting after the change, not including the ones on YouTube like Madoka / Geass / etc). When it comes to videos in general, $5 patrons have early access within a week, while $10 patrons have early access within a month. My thinking is that I will only do timer/subtitle reactions on YouTube for old shows. For example, something like The Owl House that is not currently airing. In this case, the reward for the $10 patrons would be early access, such as seeing four reactions right away per month Vs having to wait weekly. It currently takes me an entire day to edit 2-3 reactions for YouTube (and that’s being generous). And during particularly bad weeks, it’s taken 2 days. 1 day for recording, 2 days for editing, and suddenly, half the week is already gone on just two videos. I’ve fallen behind with Twisted Wonderland editing, haven’t been able to start any other games, and haven’t been recording with Hunter as much because I haven’t wanted to do more editing and sacrifice being able to do the streams. I also miss doing scripted videos like rewrites, and I haven’t had a lot of time. So until I can afford some help, I want to try this out and see if the reactions get around the same amount of views that I’d expect reactions for an older, not currently airing show to get.

YouTube Shorts: I have been dragging my feet on this because I don’t particularly like change (lol), but I have seen people within our niche such as JC posting shorts and I got interested. For example, JC has been doing shorts about RWBY Character design for individual characters. I’m thinking about topics in a similar vein, and potentially shorts out of already created content, such as “My Mom guesses Ruby Rose!” From RWBY Character Guessing. So it’ll be a mix of “clips” and stuff that’s just too short for an entire video 10 minute video but still interests me.

“This is now a livestream”: Along those lines, I am going to covert some video ideas Hunter & I have had into live streams. I’m considering anything that has been “super annoying” to edit in the past or also, things I think could work as livestreams because I’ve seen it done. For example, Genshin Impact Guessing / tier lists. I don’t want anyone to think that we aren’t going to put effort into our content anymore, but I want to run a “test” to see if our streams can get the same or more views compared to our videos. On one hand, I know that YouTube doesn’t recommend livestreams the same way as regular videos. On the other hand, livestreams during RWBY season were still visible, and these ideas may benefit with audience interaction. We had an idea for "Reading your unpopular RWBY Opinions" a while ago and something like that, where chat can chime in 'live', may actually work better.

More Patreon Rewards / Fixing up YouTube Memberships: I haven’t settled on the details for this, but I’ve seen rewards other creators have that I currently don’t. I’ll make a separate post about this.

Ko-Fi: After I sort everything else mentioned out, I want to run a sale on commissions. Be on the lookout for that if it interests you.

That’s basically everything for now! I have a lot of things I want to do in 2024 (more gaming, more reactions, manga reviews, rewrites, etc) - but I realize that in order to do more I may actually have to do less when it comes to how much attention I’ve been giving individual videos. Tomorrow I will make another post asking for patron submitted suggestions for some new shows (I’m thinking Legend of Korra, Owl House, Gravity Falls, that sort of thing). I hope you guys are well and I’ll continue to update you!

- Calxiyn