TODEPOND TIMES: No Music

Hi.

It's time for another weekly edition of the...

🐸 TODEPOND TIMES 🐸

What's new this week?

No Music

I put out a little teaser trailer for the next video. Go watch it! And then come back here.

It's part 2 of the current trilogy of videos: The Sleeping Tode Trilogy.

As you can see, tode is *still* asleep. And bot went missing. So it's berd's turn to do a video.

As you can also see, it's not coming soon. It's coming *eventually*. I hope that's ok. I want to make it good. In the meantime, I'll carry on doing these weekly mini-updates.

By the way, did you see? In the trailer, there's a new berd animation by Flora Caulton. They're nodding their head up-and-down.

It's one of *many* new animations coming in the video. I'm saving all the rest for the video itself.

TheDreamBerdagen

A streamer, called ThePrimeagen, did an on-stream read-through of DreamBerd (my joke language). He (and his viewers) seemed to enjoy it, which is really nice!

You can watch the whole thing here (warning: slightly edgier vibes than here).

It's always fun to see someone enjoying the jokes that our community has made. Many of them are mine, but increasingly, more and more of them are contributed by the community. So... thank you to all DreamBerd contributors for making it what it is!

It's also really helpful to watch someone react to it in real-time. It shows me which jokes work, and which ones don't. From watching ThePrimeagen's reactions, I have some ideas on how to reorder some of them to make 'em land more reliably. Some might also need shortening/lengthening.

The same thing happened when Raphaël de Courville (EDIT: sableRaph is their handle, that's why I remembered that!) did a reaction video to it a while back! Watch it here.

Red Line

Last week, I started explaining my idea for a future video. It's themed around *time-travel* (again). But before we get to that...

What's that thing called?

You know, that thing at the bottom of a YouTube video. It's the red line that fills up as you watch more of the video. And it sometimes has a circle attached to its end.

One thing I try to do with my videos is: Set up some expectations. Like... every video starts and ends with a similar sort of structure, with similar features. And within a single video, there's usually a repeating pattern too.

After setting up some repetition, I can then mess with your expectations by deviating from that loop.

So... In the video, I could display something on the screen that *synchronises* with the red line at the bottom. It moves along with it - in the exact same position. It represents the passing of time throughout the video.

And then... we can break that expectation. What if we move it a little bit ahead? We could peak into the future of the video, and then come back to the present, and watch it again!

We could even... go back to an earlier part of the video, and see that part within a whole new context - giving it a whole new meaning.

We could even... go to the past, and *change* something. When we return to the present, things will be *different* in some way.

We could even...

We could... We could even...

No, that would be a spoiler. But I promise I'll make it one day.

Hey, thank you so much for being here. Loads more people joined this week. Welcome to all of you! And welcome back to all the old-timers. I'm so so thankful. Wherever you are in the world, whatever you're doing, I hope you have a great week. 🐸

Days since tode fell asleep: 168
Days since bot went missing: 133