Something New Is Coming January 2nd 2023

Greetings and salutations!

While I have a holiday letter coming (as tradition dictates), we have something else to discuss in the days leading up to Christmas, and it’s this: On January 2nd, 2023, Last Stand Media is launching a new show. Its logo, as you may have surmised, is attached for your perusal.

As discussed during Episode 251 of KnockBack, we wanna shake things up a little bit. For those that didn’t listen to that podcast, Dagan and I lay out what we deem is ‘the future’ of our retro and nostalgia offering, one we began all the way back in February of 2018, and one that (until this very month) had never had so much as a single week off. And in embracing these changes, we’ve given ourselves the opportunity to spawn something fresh, something a lot of people have been asking for.

So, here’s the rub: KnockBack is going to be published half-as-much beginning in 2023. That is to say, you’ll see it every-other-week. There are multiple reasons for this, but paramount among them is the notion of time spent versus value garnered. We put a lot of time and effort into preparing for KnockBack, as we do for all of our shows, and we really hope that’s illustrated within the content itself. Yet we feel -- due to the wild nature of KnockBack’s topics and potentially overwhelming status of its backlog -- we may be spinning our wheels. It’s hard to treat a show run by my brother and I as a commercial enterprise with objective markers for success, but it is. And in analyzing all of it, thinking about everything, and talking extensively within the company, we’ve decided to make a move for the benefit of the company.

Now, I don’t want to underplay the show’s success. Quite the opposite, for it deserves its accolades. KnockBack has grown respectfully over the years, though modestly compared to our other shows. We had several thousand listeners in the beginning, and depending on topic and across platforms, we’ll get somewhere around 10,000 listeners per episode, sometimes much more if it’s a big topic. This puts KnockBack in the top 0.1% of all podcasts by traffic, which is amazing. But for a fan-funded podcast network like ours, we need to keep in mind this aforementioned time-versus-value equation and extract as much as we can out of each move we make. Between Patreon, YouTube, and podcast services, a notable episode of Sacred Symbols may be listened to by 10 times KnockBack’s audience. The question is, can we get more of that legion to check out our other stuff? I feel like we haven’t really even been trying, and that inkling of complacency doesn’t sit right with me, because we do so much good stuff here, and I want all of it to get its shine.

Everyone who has ever listened to a single episode of KnockBack knows the universal truth about the show, which is that Dagan is our secret weapon. But we need to deploy him more wisely, and this is where the new mystery show comes into play. I won’t tip our hand yet with anything more than the logo, but needless to say, not only will we be able to keep Dagan involved with the next project (which he will be co-hosting alongside yours truly), but this will hopefully allow us to get him in front of more of our audience, which in turn leads people back to KnockBack. And while KnockBack has been a strictly Moriarty affair (almost to a stubborn degree, we admit), our new show will incorporate the entire Last Stand universe, each and every episode. Meanwhile, KnockBack can breathe more, allowing us to focus on bigger, better topics in an even more in-depth fashion. We especially hope that this will let us get to more games on the show, which we’re suspecting this will facilitate. I want to be clear: We are committed to KnockBack, completely. But we’ve gotta do better by it!

So, beginning January 2nd, Monday publishing will switch off between the new show and KnockBack. Nothing else changes. Sacred Symbols, Sacred Symbols+, Defining Duke, and Defining Duke Ultimate will all continue unabated and unhindered at their normal days of the week, with no missed episodes, even over the holidays. Likewise, core Patreon perks won’t change, and the new show will join the early-and-ad-free cycle we’ve had going for a long time now. (One thing we do want to underline, however, is that we will no longer be accepting listener mail for KnockBack, nor doing fan votes, and the new show will by its nature have no fan interaction. This quite simply allows us far more flexibility, and will also allow us to hide topics better instead of spoiling them by nature of soliciting inquiries.)

I can’t wait for you to see what we have cooking. See you in the stars. -Colin