Return to Normalcy - Update 04/14/23

Hey ya’ll!

Hope you’re doing well! I am doing much, much better than when we last spoke. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first, some house cleaning.

In case you missed any of them, there were 4 videos posted last month:

Perhaps, This is Hell: SIGNALIS (Summary & Analysis) [Feat. SulMatul] - An over 2.5 hour long look at a modern horror masterpiece with SulMatul

The Brutal Theatre That Invented Modern Horror - A look at the history of The Grand Guignol, an influential and bloody French theater company.

The Bachelor Finds Peter Stamatin's Reddit Account - A pathologic shitpost

Neon Genesis Evangelion's Original Ending Was Good, Actually (A Video Essay) [REUPLOAD] - Reupload and reedit of the Eva video

On top of this, as many of you know, I was also managing a long distance move. So, with all that said, I’d say that March was a success! While things didn’t play out exactly as I’d originally planned, I’m incredibly proud of how everything came together overall, particularly of the SIGNALIS video which received a shout out and a response from the game’s devs.

Additionally, I’m happy to confirm that our move went off without a hitch. Officially all settled into our new place and finally had a chance to breathe. No small part of why the move went so well though was because of the overwhelming support that all of you gave. I won’t lie, I was deeply anxious about bringing it up during the SIGNALIS video, but the response was stunning to see. Within a few days of the video being live, we’d received more than we’d possibly hoped, and enough to make the financial struggle of the move from a looming fear into a secondary concern. So to all those who contributed to making this whole process easier by supporting the channel both here and on Ko-Fi, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. It sincerely made all the difference for both me and my partner during what was a very scary time for us, and I won’t soon forget it. I’ll also be doing my best to pay it forward with some kind of charity even within the next couple months once things have settled down again.

On a related note, I do feel I must give ya’ll an apology for my radio silence the past couple weeks, both on here and on twitter. I wish I had a sexier reason for it, but the simple reality is that after grinding so hard to make so much content happen in such rapid succession while managing the move meant that, as soon as the move was done, I completely deflated. I’ve been very physically and emotionally burnt out by the whole ordeal, and frankly am still recovering. Suffice to say, it’s been A Lot to deal with, even by my Replays-Patho2-For-Fun standard, but I do feel myself slowly but surely returning to equilibrium. I don’t expect it to be much of a stall on production given that the primary way I’m unwinding right now is by playing games that I know will eventually be relevant to the channel, but still, I do feel it's important to note that that’s where I’m at for the moment.

So, with all of that said, what comes next?

Well, in the immediate short term, not too much to be honest. I wouldn’t expect anything else until May. I will be largely occupied for the next week or so with a couple freelance gigs that I took to help cover the cost of the move. Additionally, I will be slowing down production a bit to kind of recover from the non-stop crunch that lead up to March, at least while I’m getting things in order to start editing again on the next project. After the stress of the past few months, I’m doing my best to take care of myself and make sure I don’t burnout, so making sure I have some time to be a proper human seems wise. This does not mean that I am not working on Codex though, very far from it. When I’m not working on freelance work, I’m beginning work on quite a few projects that I’m hoping to have complete by the end of the year. These projects fall under 3 general categories:

Mega-projects

Or, in other words, the Haruspex video, as well as the Director’s Cut. These are obviously my top priority. However, for aforementioned reasons, I am doing my best to pace myself, which for right now means going where my motivation takes me. Additionally, my time with the SIGNALIS video has shown me that I don’t need to go as over the top on every video as I do on the Patho videos, and hence could get away with doing some more casual stuff (casual by my standards). That said though, it is my aim right now to post them both around the same time, with a vague deadline of around August. This is subject to change and likely will, but still, that’s my current goal, in no small part because, ideally, I’d also like to get the first part of Morrowind, For Those Who Will Never Play it Out this year too. One thing at a time though.

SulMatul Collabs

It’s safe to say that the collab I had with SulMatul on the SIGNALIS video was a success, yes? I know I’m certainly happy with it, as is she, as were all of you judging from the flood of kind words I’ve heard about it from ya’ll. And, given how much fun we had doing it and how well we work together, we’ve naturally decided to keep it going and make these collabs a regular occurrence for the foreseeable future.

So, after a brainstorming session to put together a good list off possible subjects, we’ve decided to make the next next video about the 2018 queer mecha visual novel, Heaven Will Be Mine. It’s a game that, much like SIGNALIS, is very important to both of us for very different reasons, so we’d like to give it the proper treatment it deserves. This will likely be similar in size and scope to the SIGNALIS video, but will roughly follow the same Summary & Analysis format. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it the next time you see me as scripting and casting for this has already begun and will likely be completed soon because Hayley is a terrifyingly fast writer, she’s ungodly, I don’t know how the fuck she does it.

One-offs

These are smaller (as in less effort, runtimes will still likely be absurd) projects which are meant to stand on their own. Some are experiments, some are more traditional content. All of them are things I wanna make:

From Caelondia to Hades: A Supergiant Games

Before I got spirited away by SulMatul to do SIGNALIS, the major video I was planning for March was this, and I still want to make it. A retrospective on Supergiant Games, their releases, and why I believe all their works are 10s (in and so much as 10s are even really a thing). I did a ton of research, found a lot of really cool info that I haven’t seen any other retrospective talk about and it’s just something that I’m really passionate about making even if I know that everyone is going to hate my Hades opinions. The Bastion portion of the script is mostly done, Transistor section will be a cake walk for reasons I’ll explain next time, and I’ve completed all of the primary research, so should come together smoothly from here.

The End of Evangelion Is (Not) A Happy Movie

Reposting the Eva video has been really great. It’s been incredibly cool (and reassuring) to see how many people still think that video holds ups, and how much it’s meant to them. However, I remember there was a common take that I had to see a lot of when I first posted it, and I am now seeing again en masse. Namely, that I was wrong in my insistence that the End of Evangelion is a tour de force of misery which was deliberately crafted by an incensed creator to upset his audience as much as humanly possible. As it turns out, pointing out that End of Eva isn’t a happy movie is, in fact, a hot take. And, like, if you’re one of those people who believes that, then I have no hard feelings towards you, as someone else who was deeply impacted by EoE and it’s message, I totally get it.

But also, you’re wrong, and I desperately need to talk about why for about an hour, in no small part because I think it’d be a good pretense to unpack EoE at large.

Provided that the Eva vid doesn’t get dunked by copyright again, I’ll likely start work on this after the Supergiant video and work on it in parallel with the Haruspex video. If all goes well, maybe we’ll even be able to do a video about the rebuilds.

Cool Games You (Maybe) Haven’t Played Vol.3

Game recommendation video where I rapidfire suggest 5-6 games over the course of around 20 minutes, because there’s some obscure titles I’d like to spotlight. This will be a relatively quick, straightforward project, but one I’ve been eager to do for a while. Sometimes I just like talking about games I like, ya know?

The Shakespeare Riots

So, if there was any sore spot this month, it was the Grand Guignol video underperforming. As our first foray into Theater History content, it is disheartening. That said, I’m not letting it dissuade me yet, and I still have every intention of doing a video on The Shakespeare Riots. The more I research it, the more I realize that it’s not only a really good piece of theater history, but a really good piece of history at large, and one that would really benefit from having a spotlight pointed at it. I’m gonna be trying to figure out better ways to go about information presentation, may even consider a Jon Bois style, but we shall see when we get there. For now, this is on the backburner, but still very much on the agenda.

The Stardew Valley Farmer Owes OSHA Millions, & Is Probably Going To Hell

Yea, this is gonna be one of those experimental ones, but sometimes you just need to take a silly idea and run with it. In this case, that silly idea was me innocently asking our resident artist and script editor Clark a simple question: How many OSHA violations was the Farmer from Stardew Valley liable for? I asked this, not remembering that Clark is the kind of person who reads OSHA regulations for fun.

Long story short, Clark has been combing through OSHA, FFIS, EPA, & USDA handbooks to find out exactly how much the Farmer is going to get annihilated the moment a petty regulator rolls on through, and it’s our plan to do a complete rundown of all the issues one by one.

This’ll be a fun one where we try a few ideas for presentation, may even bust out the green screen for it. The script is already mostly done, mainly just one last stretch of research. Once that’s finalized, we’ll probably knock it out quickly in between whatever major projects we’re on at the time.

So, tl;dr

-I’ll be focusing on some smaller projects as I set the stage for the Haruspex video, both for content variety and to help make sure I’m pacing myself with work

-Expect to hear about Heaven Will Be Mine, the Supergiant video, and Haruspex when you next see me.

-Likely won’t be any other major updates or posts for April while I get scripts in order and wrap up freelance work, will definitely be quite a few updates come May

-Lots of other stuff planned out for the latter half of the year as well

And with that, I will say thank you all for the support one last time and get back to work. Very excited to be in a better place, very excited for things to come. I’ll see ya’ll again soon. Love ya all~

Peace,
Ruby <33