NEW YEAR'S SEASONAL UPDATE!

Happy New Year, Patrons!

Thank you so much for hanging out with OSP in 2022, we’re so immensely excited to jump into the new year with you all.

I’ll do my best to keep this seasonal update as concise as possible – I could write my usual “5 paragraphs more than was probably necessary” but I want to try and make this quick, efficient, and digestible.

Looking Back At 2022:
The past year had a lot of accomplishments channel-side that Red and I are extremely proud of: from fundraising ~$70,000 for Ukraine humanitarian relief, to making videos like The Trojan War that have become instant all-time classics in our hearts, to fulfilling projects like the Wukong vinyl figure and The Woman Cards. Last year on New Years’ I had promised you all that the boundaries of what “OSP” means would grow, and I would like to think we accomplished that. That said, this year had a handful of off-channel challenges for us – moving houses, getting sick, projects taking significantly longer than budgeted, lots of things that took focus away from regular work hours and made it difficult for us to go above and beyond. We did accomplish most of what we set out to, but we had to make some concessions. Most people won’t even notice, but we notice, and we feel confident that we’re in a much stronger position starting this year to do cool things without cutting corners.

Videos This Year:
To start the year, we’re doing what people have asked us to do for a long time now: take a break. This coming Friday I’ll be doing a multi-hour stream of Assassins Creed 2, trying to finish out as much of the game as I can, then later in the month Red will be leading the charge with a Breath Of The Wild road-trip style stream, and in the middle of that we’ll be doing a Pokémon Violet stream with Cyan in the gamer-chair! We’ll have a fundraiser alongside each of these, but really this gives us an excuse to hang out on stream and take two videos off the schedule. Fear not, January will see two regular videos – a Trope Talk and an Architecture video – and then it’s back to weekly in February. Most creators take January off entirely, so we don’t want to leave you with nothing to watch, but self-care is important and we need to practice what we preach.

From February onward, we’re excited for the projects we have in the pipeline: Red is completing her Trope Talks on the Five Man Band with a look at The Heart, we’re continuing the series on classical Greece with The Greek Dark Ages and one on The Polis Age, we’ll do another Shakespeare performance (possibly for the Ides of March), we’re going to the oldest written story in history with an animated Gilgamesh, we’re hoping to do a deep dive on the twins Artemis and Apollo, and I had so much fun with my Fall of Rome themed season that I might do the same thing with Venice.

Books???:
This year we’re aiming to finally launch some of the written works we’d teased last year. Red has Aurora, I have my cagey secret venice story project I’ve been cagey and secret about, I hope to god that I can actually announce something for you all in the spring or summer – but after running in circles with a nonfiction book for months only to scrap the concept entirely, the last thing we want to do is over-promise. Books arecoming, and we absolutely cannot f***ing wait to show them to you.

Streams:
Our goal is to pivot more to the after-dark style of stream since they’re extremely fun and comparatively stress-free to set up and run, but we’re also aiming to do more frequent big-group streams. We’ve got the bundle of streams in January as mentioned, and with hope we can do some sort of big group stream event once a season at least. Fingers crossed, but that’s the goal.

Other Merch:
We’re going to have plenty of new pins in the store this year, branching out to new and different pantheons from the Greek, but we’re also exploring new merch items that are fun, cost effective, and cool. We’ll still have new colorways for the Monkey of the Month Wukong vinyl toys. And there may be a couple other things we can do this year, but we’ll save those announcements for the relevant seasonal updates to come.

I am still planning on doing the switch-over of the tiers to get physical prints for the $25 patrons and open up the exclusive monthly digital illustration to our $10 patrons, it’s just been a long several months and I haven’t been able to yet. But soon! Soon.

General Good Vibes:
Broadly speaking, we’re feeling good about the new year. We often do, and rightly so perhaps, but after a year with two major channel milestones (2 Million Subscribers & 10 Years) there’s a distinct feeling that this year will have some new Instant-Classics like the Trojan War video as well as some landmark side-projects that show what else Red and I can do when we’ve got a community as fantastic as you at our side. That’s about as much as I can say without getting sappy about it, but in genuine honesty, thank you for being here with us. We hope you have a wonderful start to 2023, and we can’t wait to make you laugh and teach you stuff in the new year.

Lastly, it's time to turn it over to you. As we're planning our live-stream strategy for the year, what kind of stuff would you most like to see?

Cheers,
-Blue