August 2019 Recap

August is over and all that's left is the melted blob formerly known as Texas. After mutating to inhabit these harsh and cruel lands, we made a bunch of videos for you all. So what happened over the past month that pertains to Modern Rogue?

[ PUBLIC ]

We posted 8 new Modern Rogue videos at a total runtime of 2h 3m 32s! We finished our 3-part fire eating series, covered some articles, spy stuff, radio stuff, and saw the return of Trever in a bar context for the first time in a while. I also quietly made a handful of guest playlists on youtube so that you can easily binge all of our videos featuring x. It's not quite comprehensive yet, and some of these already existed in some form, but now it's more formalized and there are more of them.

• MR204: Fire Newbie Learns 350,400x Faster Than The Pro (30:52)
• MR205: The Encryption That Can't Be Cracked: OTP (11:00)
• MR206: 4 Weird Uses of Rogue Science (10:12)
• MR207: We Emailed Nuclear Codes via Shortwave Radio! (18:45)
• MR208: Emergency Ninja Smoke Pen! (11:33)
• MR209: Understanding Cocktail Shrubs (14:44)
• MR210: Testing 5 Spy Escape Tools (13:57)
• MR211: How a Dead Man Tricked the Nazis and Became a War Hero (12:31)

We've updated our caption process just a little bit since last month, where we now upload them as soon as we get our contracted captions back. They're labeled as having revisions in progress for transparency that they aren't final, but they are often still much better than YouTube's auto-generated captions. This way people who need them have something that's more usable much faster, and there's no ambiguity as to whether or not they've been rigorously checked yet. Then they get finalized and fully corrected when time is available, which then has their disclaimer removed.

The Bizarre Briefing, our behind the scenes business podcast, published a July overview and we'll be recording our August overview live at approximately 17:30 central time later today on twitch.tv/nightattack.

• TBB: Energy - July 2019 (2:08:58)

[ $5 PATRONS ]

Plenty of First Pass Edits this month, about 8.5 hours worth, including some from our older but very popular videos. I hope to find the time to do that with a few of our other classic videos as well.

• MR204-FPE: Jason Learns Fire Eating (1:37:26)
• MR205-FPE: One Time Pad (34:10)
• MR059-FPE: Understanding Whiskey (54:36)
• MR207-FPE: Sending Email via Radio (1:55:34)
• MR062-FPE: Ordering Whiskey (45:58)
• MR197-FPE: Homemade Fuses (1:23:06)
• MR195-FPE: Ferrocerium Flashbang (36:18)
• MR211-FPE: Operation Mincemeat (40:03)

Of course these patrons also have full access to our Discord server, and contributed to Brian and Jason's impromptu Q&A on Sunday while the rest of the crew was treating the studio space for sound dampening.

[ $30 PATRONS ]

I heard just last week that we had proofs come in for the Q2 shirts, so I'm hoping those get shipped ASAP. It's a bit of a nebulous process to me, in all honesty, as everything outside of the design phase happens out of my sight. But with that in mind, Q3 designs are well underway, even if a bit late in the quarter. I'm thinking about doing a design schematic based on a brief ionosphere joke. I've posted some work in progress visuals to the discord, but will post more publicly once the design is finalized.

[ HQ UPDATE ]

As you may have noticed from the spy tool escape video, our kitchen no longer looks like an abandoned playground for delinquents. It has a sink, some counters, a whiteboard with the scrawlings of a madman, and now some furniture that was recently donated to us. I believe some appliances are soon to be installed. Air conditioning seems to be functional, and most of the toilets seem to work, too.

The studio room, also known as the big echo room, just got sound treated on Sunday. We had been using it effectively as a storage room for all manner of things. That's where DAVE had been residing, and oh-so-many supplies. Now it's cleared out, sound dampening panels are installed, and it sounds like podcasting equipment will be moving over... soon.

[ COMING UP ]

We just recently collaborated with LockPickingLawyer, so expect to see some videos on that relatively soon. We have some more stuff with Trever, and a smattering of other loose ends that'll be tied up. We've also planned on recording a thing for patrons later this week, so maybe something will come out of that in the not-too-distant future.

Brandt H. -- editor, camera operator