InnuendoStudios
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June Update: Creaky Gears
🕑 Added 2019-07-01 19:10:42 +0000 UTCHey team! Let's chat.
This Has Been An Ordeal
As of a couple days ago, you have the rough cut for the next video. It is very, very rough, and this week will be dedicated to polishing it into something I can release publicly. It needs some script adjustments, a bunch more footage, a lot of graphics and titles, and a few other bits and bobs. After a rocky few months, I've settled into a (mostly) consistent work routine and things are coming along better now. But now we're further behind schedule than before!
I came into 2019 owing you two videos from last year, and was hoping to get ahead of schedule by a couple days every month until I'd squeezed in enough room for an extra video by July, and then do the same thing in the second half of the year. It is now July, and I haven't put out a video since March.
I asked for amnesty for April, but I still feel I owe you for May and June, which puts me an entire four videos in the hole. This is not great. But I have some ideas for how to get back on track.
The Recent Past
A few things have happened since March. There've been a couple neat milestones - Innuendo Studios crossed 200k subs, and I'm inching towards 20k Twitter followers - but the thing I wanna talk about is NarraScope.
NarraScope was a Boston-based narrative games convention put together by Andrew Plotkin and a few other local interactive fiction nerds. Boston has been a hub of adventure game production and philosophy ever since INFOCOM grew out of MIT. Andrew's thinking was that we've had these all these different groups: the IF crowd, the Twine crowd, the adventure game crowd, the narrative-designer-for-traditional-games crowd, and several other subgroups. Why not create a space where they can all share information with each other?
You can imagine, this was extremely my jam.
Talks were hit-and-miss, but Emily Short, Dave Gilbert, and Aaron Reed are always fascinating thinkers, and I came away with several pages of thoughts in my notebook, and an idea for a series of small videos about narrative.
I've had a lot of little tidbits about narrative theory and interactivity that have never found a place in a video. I always figure they'll be an aside in a video about an adventure game, or maybe just a Twitter thread I get around to one of these days. But I came out of NarraScope wanting to give them their own videos, and I think they can be how we get back on track.
One rule for this series: every video has a hard limit of 5 minutes. My videos keep getting longer, which is fine for what I'm doing, but I want to challenge myself to be brief. The goal is to explore a single idea. The closest analogue would be Story Beats, but, while the subjects are interrelated and will build on each other, they won't necessarily be building up to a larger point, or have a concrete ending.
My hope is that, here and there, I can sneak a 5-minute video out alongside one of the main videos, especially if I bank a few scripts early on. My usual rule is that a video has to be at least 10 minutes to count, but I'm going to ask your permission to suspend that rule while I play catchup.
I'm thinking of calling the series Protagony.
The Near Future
Playing catchup over the summer is going to be tricky, though. In one week, I head to Anaheim for VidCon. And, a few weeks after that, I'm making a personal trip to the San Francisco Bay for about a week and a half. I think I can have the new video up before I leave next week, but I'm not sure I can have the next one out before I leave again. It'll depend on what the subject is; I've been kicking around a few ideas for a fun 200k video, but then I cannibalized some of those ideas for Protagony so I'm not 100% sure what's next. We'll see!
I also may finally run that GoFundMe for a new laptop so I can work during my second trip, but before I go asking for more money I should probably release a video...?!?!
Then, in August, there are at least three events I usually attend: the Boston Festival of Indie Games, GameLoop, and Shine. I'm not sure what the dates are for any of those - FIG broke itself into a few events, separating the indie games showcase from the talks, and I usually just attend the talks (Boston has a lively indie game scene, but I personally don't feel there's enough exciting stuff to fill a whole festival), and Shine (a Smash tournament) is sometimes scheduled opposite GameLoop, in which case I have to make a choice.
In any case, the next couple months are extremely busy, so I can't even promise the schedule won't slip further, much less get caught up. But I will continue to do my best. Any missed videos will be made up when my schedule calms down, even if it takes a little while.
A Few Good Things
Some stuff since last we meaningfully spoke:
I resumed #IanLivetweetsHisResearch, and am about halfway though David Neiwert's Alt-America, a history of the Alt-Right's origins.
I played Myst IV, Parts 1 and 2 of The Fall, Life is Strange: Before the Storm (finally), and TSIOQUE, which was delightful. There'll be write-ups for some of these, probably, but they were all varying degrees of good, or at least interesting.
I started reading novels regularly for the first time in years? I've gone through Nova by Samuel R. Delany (of course), Vurt by Jeff Noon, and am working my way through Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. Delany was a thoughtful blast, Noon was a trip, and Butler is amazing. Been mostly sticking to sci-fi. It's familiar and comforting.
A Captain Falcon main won a supermajor. Then, two weeks later, a Pikachu main did the same.
That's it for me, folks. Talk soon.
Comments
Aimee Thorne
This is my jam. I spent most of the 90s plugging Zork-like games into my graphing calculator instead of doing Algebra and making my own Choose Your Own Adventure books. Can't freaking wait. and between you, me and the rest of the Patrons, I think I've probably watched your two big series enough to justify a lack of videos for a bit. Sometimes I put them on in the background when the internet gets too douchey to remind myself this is not normal.
Ian Danskin
The 5 minute limit is primarily about challenging myself to be brief! I want to practice saying what I mean to say in fewer words, and a hard limit is a good way to do that.
PC Escobar
I'm very excited about the narrative videos idea, and if *Protagony* isn't the best title for a series about narrative ever, I don't know what is. Can we just waive the 5 minute limit right now? If the only reason for the limit is to timebox the effort put into each video, so as to "get back on track", please don't make that trade-off for my sake. I'd rather you give yourself the space needed to develop the one idea. If that means it's 10 minutes long, all the better. And the whole "four videos in the hole" thing is a kind of a sunk cost fallacy. I'm with the "wipe the slate clean" crowd -- would I begrudge you the time you spent at Narrascope or reading novels, or will be spending at VidCon, because you should be using that time to make the 4 videos you owe me? The idea is absurd. You do you at your own pace, and what you create is the better for it!
PC Escobar
I am all for this idea!
PC Escobar
You spoke for me. Couldn't agree more.
Kait Hatch
This. All of this.
AJ Gabriel
One of my favorite things about Patreon is that it can allow creators some space to take chances on new ideas and opportunities. Sometimes those lead immediately to new things and sometimes they become part of the background stuff that informs the ways we think and make and connect to each other. The narrative videos sound really cool and are totally my jam but I'm okay with things taking the time they take, and if the "missed" videos never happen, that's cool, too. For my part, the time and freedom to learn and grow between projects is a worthwhile investment.
Ian Danskin
<3
Ian Danskin
They want to make it an annual thing, so you'll have another chance!
Kait Hatch
Oooooo. Parable of the Sower. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it when you are done. I much prefer the Lilith's Brood series, but there are bits in the Parable books that are just So. On. Point. Also, as ever, I love what you do and have no demands on your time. You'd have to not put out a video for a year, I think, before I'd be concerned. And even then, my concern would be that you are okay and not about thinking I'm entitled to anything from you. I know you've written about this at length, and how the SuperFans are solid and that's fine, but it's the middling folks that drop off. That sucks. Especially when this is your livelihood. But also, f*ck Capitalism. I'm kinda over pandering to the masses and reinforcing the idea that value, cost and price are all the same thing. I wish I could contribute more to you. Not because of what you produce or how frequently, but because I value everything you have already done and giving you money seems like one of the only ways to express that gratitude. I reference your videos SO much. There probably isn't a week that goes by without me recommending one to someone. Or being able to send one to someone as a way of explaining my understanding of a topic (Lady Eboshi is Wrong is a genius example of understanding the relationship between absolute and relative truth and I totes use it to combat the spiritual bypassing I see in so many dharma practitioners). So, carry on in whatever way works best for you and I shall remain your solid SuperFan. :) Which is saying quite a lot. There are very few cis-gender white dudes I hold in high regard. *laughs*
Alice
Wow, I love those designers and had no idea that conference was happening! I live in Boston and wish I could have gone :(
Allan Anderson
I think I already mentioned my interest in Narrascope-mulched musings. Your plan sounds great!
Magnus
I'm not a big-spending patron, so I can't speak for those who spend much more, but: How about we wipe the slate clean, eh? You stop beating yourself up over some ill-conceived "debt", and we move into the future with joy in our hearts and less stress on our minds. I dunno, just a thought. You take care of yourself, bud.
Nikki
There are two ways to get at not catching up with a set schedule - work faster, under which both the quality of your work and your own well-being usually suffer, or rethinking that schedule to one that fits better _and_ serves your mental state the best possible way. Work is never 100% easy and fun, but it doesn't need to make you worry more and more either. I don't pay you for a set amount of content, I pay you to see whatever great stuff you come up with, and I want to be able to watch that with the knowledge that you didn't beat yourself up over it.
I obviously don't speak for other patrons but I don't feel like I'm paying you for specific videos to be produced. Other creators I back on Patreon have this model but I became a patron knowing that it wasn't your model. I'm happy to help support the work you're doing, irrespective of the regularity of output.
