FALL SEASONAL UPDATE

The leaves are crisp and the air is brisk – it’s Fall and I’m thrilled.
Time for another seasonal update! Here’s what’s new and what’s next for OSP.

Obligatory “YouTube Is Being Weird” disclaimer.

You might have seen a handful of your favorite YouTubers saying words to the effect of “YouTube Is Acting Very Weird :( ”. Quick summary: it’s unclear exactly what happened, but the current prevailing theory is the perpetual war between AdBlockers and YouTube escalated in August, with end result that views with AdBlock aren’t getting counted anymore, so some channels have seen a 10-30% “drop” in views overnight. Those views weren’t monetized in the first place, so revenue isn’t affected (for us at least, some channels have gotten truly hammered), but analytics are fickle and YouTubers get understandably antsy when Line Go Down. We’ve definitely noticed a drop, but it’s not as calamitous as others have reported.

ALL THAT TO SAY – we are completely fine over here, but we remain extremely grateful for your support on Patreon. We never take it as a given (and always encourage everyone to put their own financials first), but your enthusiasm for our work and support of our channel means a lot to both of us. It is a tremendous comfort to know that even if YouTube went truly haywire, we have an excellent safety net here on the Patreon.

Halloween approaches! Ready the pumpkin trebuchets!

First off, October is on deck, and Red’s got a killer slate of spooky videos ahead – a Trope Talk on Haunting The Narrative, a Detail Diatribe on Over The Garden Wall and into Dante’s Hell, and then… the really big boi, clocking in at 48 minutes and literally longer than the Mummy Special: The Count Of Monte Cristo. Please pray for Red’s drawing arm.

Meanwhile, I’m finally getting around to my long-delayed history of New Zealand in early October – Indigenous People’s Day is America-centric, but I think it’s in the spirit of the holiday. November or early December I’ll be following up my World In 1900 video with an 1918-1939 Interwar history chronicling the bridge between WWI and WWII. That one will be an absolute monster and I can’t wait to crack it open. End result is I’ll have a perfect trilogy of videos before WW1, between the wars, and after WW2, combining for a history of the 1900 that perfectly skips both world wars. Hilarious.

Somewhere in between that, I’ll have a History-Makers on Raphael and the School of Athens painting, and ideally something out of Medieval or Renaissance Roman architecture. (Cyan and I are hopping to Rome next month to all the fun Holy Year stuff, so I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for a good video topic.)

And continue praying for Red’s drawing arm, because at the end of the year, as always, is the next Journey To The West.

Bonus shenanigans on the channel~

We’ve had a good handful of bonus podcasts in the past two months, between the episodes on Video Game Nostalgia, Superman, and the extremely pleasant surprise of chatting with Austin Wintory and Matt Nava about Sword of the Sea. But now that don’t have anything release-date-sensitive, the bonus episodes will return to the usual seasonal cadence, and the next one will be the New Year’s Bonus.

Speaking of Sword of the Sea, that’ll be the game we stream for our end of year charity stream. Then, starting this winter, Red is planning to do a fresh-file stream series of Hades 1 into Hades 2, similar to her Breath of the Wild → Tears of the Kingdom series.

Checking in on Book StuffTM

Big year for OSP and Books! Aurora hit shelves this summer and was a USA Today bestseller, and Volume II is in progress and slated for March of next year. The Veneziad was unfortunately delayed due to a cascading mixup from earlier in the year, but is on track for a holiday shipment. And, behind the scenes, I’ve been hard at work on something a lot more OSP-related – More on that when we have good news to share.

Voting time, help me pick a video!

And now it’s time to turn it over to you, because here’s the sitch – various circumstances have conspired to crunch my time the last several weeks. So my current pace won’t be enough to finish my next video on schedule. That leaves me with essentially two options. 1) I have a Detail Diatribe in the vault for just such an emergency, about my approach to telling history, but also 2) I was debating cutting together an “Ancient Greece Re-Summarized” from the 2-ish hours of material from the ~14 videos I currently have from the Minoans through the Classical Period. The eventual “Complete History Of Greece” from the very start to the modern day will run at least 4 hours long, but it’s also at least three years away from actually being done. I don’t want to overload y’all with uber-long videos, but they do seem to always be a hit.

Essentially, which of these do you want to see first? Whichever one doesn’t get picked here will likely go up sometime early next year. Vote and let me know!

And that’s everything! Thanks as always for sticking with us, and we hope you enjoy the next slate of videos coming down the pipeline.
-Blue