SPRING SEASONAL UPDATE!

Hello patrons and happy spring! Little late on the draw here, and I intend to get sloshed on amontillado and bury myself alive in Fortunato’s cellar in recompense.

TRAVEL FUN TIMES WOOOOO:

–Red and I are finishing up an absolute marathon of travel this season, kicking off with the OSP & Friends excursion to Iceland in February, interweaving some USA-based travel between the two of us, and continuing through the past weekend’s trip to New Zealand to attend Hello Future Me’s wedding. It was absolutely awesome, Tim and his wife were the most gracious hosts, and New Zealand is a flipping wonderland. Me, Red, Cyan, and fellow BookTuber Dominic Noble who joined us all had a blast.

–Meanwhile, I also had the best time seeing so many people at Pax East! Adam and I were thrilled by the turnout for our panel (I underestimated by roughly two orders of magnitude so that was a pleasant shock), and were so pleased to meet so many people at the meetup event later that evening. (The panel will be released as a DD in two weeks, stay tuned!) This was literally my second ever convention appearance and I was really touched by everyone’s enthusiasm. We’re already thinking ahead to next year’s Pax panel!

CHARITY STREAMS HAVE BEEN HELLA FUN:
–In the past season Red has done a (nearly) full playthrough of Breath of the Wild, and not only has she had a fantastic time with it, but it’s raised a staggering total of nearly $64,000 for Turkish & Syrian earthquake relief, the National Parks Service, and the Internet Archive. Thank you all so much for enjoying the streams and donating so generously to some great causes.

UPCOMING VIDEOS & PINS:

–With all this running around dutifully obliterating our schedules, we’ve been a little out of sorts, and mostly focusing on keeping the OSP ship steady despite our weekslong absences from our usual workstations. You’ll notice we have two Detail Diatribes this month, one from Red and one from me, but aside from those, we’re back to our standard fare. We’re excitedly jumping back into work, and are super excited for some larger projects coming up.

–Namely, in the next few months we’ve got Red’s much-requested and long-awaited Epic of Gilgamesh, plus a deep dive into the Nine(-ish) Realms of Norse Mythology (final title pending). Red’s two bigboi videos this season will be accompanied by a few videos of mine, such as a look at the Ziggurat of Ur, and a survey of Ancient Mesopotamian Cities, and the Norse video will be paired with an architecture dive into the Hallgrimskirkja church in Reykjavik. Last year we had some success with thematically paired videos between Red and I when we did Mycenaean Greece and the Post-Homerica right alongside the Trojan War video, so we want to do more of them this year! It’s a fun way to coordinate our videos across different subject matter and get that good teamwork feeling. Exact timing on these two big videos is not yet sorted, so we can't give a specific month for each, but they're set for this spring one way or another.

–And all this will accompany new pin releases! We’ll have a Gilgamesh and Enkidu pin pack for the former, and since the Ursa Major pin was such a hit, we’ll launch the Gilgamesh video with another constellation pin of the Bull of Heaven, so there will be two concurrent pins on sale. This is new, but we’re excited to experiment with it, because man Red loves drawing the constellation pin designs. We’re also planning a Thor & Odin pin pack to go along with the 9 Realms video.

–In the meantime, we’re doing our Spring Cleaning Pin Sale this Friday, running for two weeks, so we’ve got a selection of our original and gold pins available for you to order. Some pins are sold out and won’t be available in this sale (for reference, we've got just 10 Artemis and Apollo's left over in the original black frame, and a couple hundred in gold), as usual we’ll have eeeeeverybody back in more substantial stock later this year for Black Friday. If something catches your eye, be sure to use the Patreon-exclusive promo-code "SpringHasSprung" for 10% off (shhhh, it’s a secret).

BOOOOOOKS?????????

–A long long long time ago (beginning of last year, feels like forever in YouTube years sometimes) we’d teased the possibility of OSP-related publications. WELL, we are THRILLED to announce that Red is now officially represented by a literary agency, and we’re in the process of shopping her webcomic Aurora around to publishers to make a physical edition(!!!!!!!!!) of the comic’s first arc, which is nearing conclusion in the coming months. This will likely be a yearlong project, as publishing takes time, but we’re extremely excited to see this become a book you can actually hold in your hands! In the meantime, the comic is currently in its 21st chapter, and you can read it all right here at https://comicaurora.com/.

OTHER ASSORTED STUFF:

–We’ve been experimenting with putting podcast clips up on YouTube shorts as a non-intrusive way to let people know the podcast exists. Let us know if you enjoy them (or if you don’t) and we’ll try to adjust our strategy. Red had fun animating the TTRPG Etiquette clip and is working on another animation about Iceland from a few episodes back, but because of the turnaround between recording and uploading the podcast there’s not time to reliably get an animation done, so our current strategy is to drop a clip of the cold open on YT Shorts when the podcast comes out, and then periodically upload animations of older clips when we have time.

–Overall, our goal for the year has been to make some kickass videos for you, and we’re pleased with how the next few seasons are shaping up.

–I’m taking a look at how I structure the different series on my side of the channel, and doing a soft de-branding of City Minutes. Last year I rolled the Antique Antics series back into History Summarized, and I think I have an opportunity to do that here as well. I’ve enjoyed the concept of the City Minutes, but I think I can take what I like about it, drop the arbitrary time limit and roll it into a more standard-looking History Summarized-lite video. They’ll still be shorter and still look at networks of cities, which is what I enjoyed about them, but I’ll make it look more in line with the rest of my videos. So after much experimentation, we’re back to the trifecta of History-Makers, History Hijinks, and a slightly wider-ranging History Summarized. Feeling good, but of course, let me know any thoughts you might have on this. I realize that I’ve probably been overthinking the branding on all this, and the simplest and best option is just to do it “normally” as a HS style video.

QUESTION TIME!

–One additional thing we’re working on is retooling our merch operation. We’re working to create a much better experience overall, and we’ll likely have more to share for the summer update. Exciting stuff! In the meantime, we’d like to ask what kinds of things you might want to see from us that we’re not offering yet. By volume, most of our merch sales are in stickers, but we know they’re not for everyone. We’ve got a poll with some options for more complex products that may be more interesting to have, so let us know which corner of your life you’d like to decorate with Red’s art.

And with that, Spring is full speed ahead! We’re looking forward to this season’s videos, and we can’t wait to show you everything else we’ve been working on behind the scenes.

-Blue