I'm Back! - Plans, Schedules, and Taking Suggestions

Hello!

To those who have recently so graciously decided to support my work and join: Welcome to the Supper Mario Broth Patreon! Here, you will see the full extent of my passion and dedication for Mario with long-form articles, podcasts, and other in-depth content! To those who have been members for a longer time and whose support has enabled me to get this far through my times of need: Welcome back to the Supper Mario Broth Patreon! I am so terribly sorry for not having had the ability to update it due to my real-life responsibilities, but now I am doing this full-time and you will see this space become as lively as my public accounts!

No matter whether you are a new or a long-time subscriber, the one thing I want to tell you all is: Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. You are the reason I have been able to work on Supper Mario Broth at all since 2018, you are the reason I have found purpose in the darkest hours as my family's health worsened and they passed away, and you are the reason I am able to dedicate all my waking life to the research, documentation and preservation of Mario now. You have saved my life, and I will do my best to make you proud for believing in me and giving me this miraculous chance.

For all announcement posts like this one, I will provide a summary near the beginning of the article that you can read if you are busy and are only interested in the main points of the message. Here is the summary for this post:
1. I am physically fine. I then go in-depth on the precautions I will take to protect my physical and mental health in these coming months while I am still affected by my mother's passing, so as to not risk overworking myself, so please do not worry about that possibility.
2. The first step is already taken - the restoration of all regular posting as it was before. This will be the baseline for the work I will provide in the future: the ten daily posts across all Supper Mario Broth websites. Now that I am doing this full-time, I will be able to multiply this output with greater frequency of regular posts, the addition of long-form Patreon content, and new accounts such as the Supper Mario Broth YouTube also receiving regular content.
3. Content will ramp up gradually. This is to both be able to gather accurate feedback on what kind of content you would like to see most, and to protect my health. Starting from next week, I will make one long-form Patreon article per week alongside adding more content to the regular output of the public sites, occasional experimental posts, and video content. By December, I plan the output to double, and finally, to reach a full realization of my potential in early 2025.
I finish the post by asking for feedback and suggestions for what kind of content you would like to see!

Now, if you would like to read about these in detail, here is the full message:

1. My Health and Steps I Will Take to Protect It Going Forward

One request I have received more than any other in all of your wonderful messages of support and well-wishes is that I should take care of my health in the wake of my mother's passing, and not let my enthusiasm for my new full-time work lead me down a path of overworking myself and suffering from burnout, mental fatigue, and other related issues. I agree completely. I have, in the past, been guilty of doing just that whenever I had pockets of free time and suffering from exactly those consequences, which I now have a duty to do my best to avoid to be able to bring you the most high-quality and consistent output I am capable of producing.

The last 10 days have been a blur, a whirlwind of emotion I am incapable of adequately describing. On one hand, the sheer shock of discovering my mother's passing, the stress of communicating with the hospital, morgue and funeral home, the difficulty of having to contact my remaining relatives and tell them of what happened, the responsibility to plan for the funeral, and the strain of trying to keep myself together during all of this. On the other hand, the fear of losing my only remaining purpose in life, and of my last memories of it being the ridicule of my audience as I am rightfully shamed for believing I deserved to be able to do my work as a job... which then through your incredible generosity have turned into elation, an outpouring of heartfelt messages of emotional support, and a desire to continue creating even during this time. This has been the most eventful time of my life, and I am so happy, so unimaginably grateful, that you were able to turn this tragedy into hope, and save my life.

Now, the funeral is over, and the visiting relatives have left. I am alone, and have all the time I need to start working on Supper Mario Broth. However, of course, being alone after losing someone this close to you is very often the catalyst of the tragedy truly "sinking in" and the grief taking a hold over you far in excess of anything you have felt immediately after the event due to the adrenaline release of the stressful situation dulling your deeper emotions to allow you to function. I am very aware of this, and so I will be very careful to listen to my feelings and - should a dark cloud form over my thoughts and prevent me from seeing the joy in my work - immediately contact local support groups that have been recommended to me by the funeral home, as well as seeking the emotional support of those readers who have contacted me and offered their time to talk to me privately over Discord messaging or similar services.

Another thing that I will make sure to follow is the rule that even though this is a full-time job, even full-time jobs give people time to rest, usually in the form of weekends off and vacation time. I will implement both concepts in my own way that I believe is most suitable for the operation of Supper Mario Broth: through quiet days and breaks.

Quiet days will be days on which I will minimize my active content output. I may (and in fact plan to) still make posts actively, so these are not true "days off" in that sense, but most content you will see on those days will have been scheduled in advance instead, and I may not respond to any private messages or Patreon comments until the next regular work day. Quiet days will not usually be consecutive like weekends are, but rather be distributed across the week with 2 per week, such as e.g. Tuesday and Friday one week, then Monday and Thursday the next etc. These are my equivalent to weekends; I hope this is acceptable!

Breaks are my equivalent to vacation time. From time to time, I will take a complete break from active posting and replying to messages for around 3 days. You will still see my regular scheduled content during this time, and some scheduled content will even be long-form so the output would be so similar to regular operation that you may not even realize I went on a break to begin with unless you happen to message me during that time! I do not see any good reasons to go on breaks of longer than 3 days at a time unless in emergencies, so doing one of these per 45-day period should give me enough time off to approximate regular vacation time afforded to employees around the world. And, of course, I hope it is acceptable for me to take unscheduled time off in case of illness or emergencies, which I will attempt to minimize as much as possible should those scenarios occur.

Perhaps you might be interested what I do in my free time. I believe that now that Mario is my full-time work, playing even more Mario during my quiet days or breaks - as much as I would want to - will not be productive as it would provide no time for my brain to rest from constant Mario input and could lead to mental fatigue. Instead, I will pursue another passion I have had for my entire life that I have had so far very little opportunity to do: nature walks. I love nature, and I love walking. However, due to my responsibilities as a caretaker for my family, I was unable to leave the house for more than a few hours at a time, as they required regular care to even be able to go to the bathroom and it would necessitate additional arrangements for me if I could not provide immediate assistance in those cases.

I am blessed to live on the outskirts of a metropolitan city, just on the boundary of where the city buildings end and the outlying satellite settlements (what would be called "suburbs" in the US) begin. As such, I have access to a forest very close to my home, and can continue walking through it to reach the surrounding countryside that contains fields, rivers, lakes and more forests.

I am particularly fascinated with transmission towers, also known as electricity pylons. The way they criss-cross the landscape and create these imposing and beautiful rows of towers growing ever smaller and disappearing behind the horizon is, to me, a perfect example of the joy and wonder of discovery that I love so much from Mario games, being realized in the physical world.

I love to follow the pylons and see where they bring me, through what fields and forests they run as they continue seemingly infinitely, over the next hill, past the next village, spanning the sky. Many people need to hike through dangerous or exotic terrain or climb tall mountains to feel a sense of adventure; I just need to follow the pylons.

I hope you forgive this sentimental aside, but my point is that this is exactly what I plan to do on my quiet days and breaks: to leave the house with just a small backpack with food and water and to try to follow the pylons and see as much of this beautiful country I live in as I can. I hope this will help me keep my mind fresh when I return back home to make Mario content!

2. Regular Posting and How It Will Continue

Those familiar with my sites will know that I have always done my best in all circumstances to post at least 1 Twitter/X post, at least 3 Supper Mario Broth Tumblr (also known as "the main site", suppermariobroth.com) posts, and at least 5 Small Mario Findings posts every day, and more whenever possible, ever since the launch of the Patreon in 2018. This is what I consider my "baseline" content and which I feel like I have the highest duty to provide, as this is the content my readers have always appreciated the most. I am glad to announce that this content is already being produced again at the same rate as before the recent events, and will remain to be produced indefinitely for as long as physically possible for me. Also, please be advised that I do now have a Bluesky account that, for the time being, is reposting Twitter/X content for those unwiling or unable to visit that platform, but will also evolve to include its own specific content over time depending on the coming development of the Bluesky platform itself.

I plan to slowly ramp up the regular content in addition to all of the Patreon content that will be discussed in Section 3 below. It will begin with additional Twitter/X posts, particularly experimental ones, on top of the regular content, as well as additional Tumblr posts also on top of the regular content, before graduating from occasional to regular increases of the post frequency. Please let me know if you believe any of my regular public sites is in particular need of having its frequency increased and I will concentrate my efforts on that site!

In general, I would like to again and specially reassure you that all the regular content you have come to Supper Mario Broth for all these years will continue being made and will remain my main priority no matter what other content I will add on top of it due to my full-time work. Even if you end up appreciating my new forms of content less than my traditional content, the traditional content will continue to receive the same level of effort, care and attention to accuracy as it always has.

3. Gradual Ramp-Up of New Content and Patreon Content

As I am sure many of you have subscribed to the Patreon not merely to support my regular work but also to receive my exclusive long-form content, I am happy to announce that it will start being made immediately. I will start off cautiously with one Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone post per week for the rest of October and November, as well as one new Supper Mario Broth: Supper Show podcast in November, but this will increase in December and finally hopefully allow me to reach my full creation potential in early 2025.

In case you are wondering what my full potential is, here is what I believe I would be able to create as a full-time work at my maximum capacity:

-20 regular public posts per day (twice what I did before)
-1 long-form Patreon articles per week
-2 long-form Patreon podcasts per month
-1-2 scripted high-edit videos for the Supper Mario Broth YouTube per month
-Additional low-edit video content like Twitch streams or Let's Play videos
-Additional Patreon content like the PDF guides I have always planned to do
-Finally, background work on large projects such as the Supper Mario Broth Database, which will serve as a nexus and documentation for all Supper Mario Broth content, allowing everyone to see every post I have ever made on a specific topic at a glance. This is a monumental task and will require months of background work but will completely transform the Supper Mario Broth ease of information access and help me evolve from being merely a "blog that posts fun facts" into a true institution of knowledge repository and archival.

Please note that the above is based on the kind of content I have done in the past and does not reflect any changes I make to my plans based on your feedback, which brings me to this:

I would like to ask you all to please give me feedback on what kind of content you would like to see from me going forward. You can leave it here in the comments of this post, or you can use the Patreon private messages or email me at suppermariobroth@gmail.com. I will record, consider and evaluate all of your comments, suggestions and criticism to hopefully be able to put together a program that will provide the most value and most desired content to as many of you as I can.

Please feel free to leave any suggestions no matter how far removed they are from my regular content - I just need to get a good idea of what kind of posts you believe you would enjoy seeing from me! Even e.g. if you saw my "Yummy Nikki" post and want more of that, or if you believe I would make great TikTok videos, or want me to make my own illustrations for posts more often, I would like to hear all of it if you are willing to share your thoughts!

Thank you again so much for everything, and I hope you will enjoy what's coming! My next post here on Patreon will be a Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone next week!

With unending gratitude,
Supper Mario Broth