Just thought I would drop a note, now that we’ve entered 2021 (FINALLY!), regarding this little website.
I will be cutting back on the content some this year, at least for now, in the following ways:
- I am returning to Sunday-only Blog posts, unless something else worth talking about pops up during the week.
- I am curtailing the YouTube videos over on the Scormey Rants channel, again. The two month experiment in bringing back weekly rants didn’t go especially well, and it effectively worked out to hours of toil for only a few views each.
- “Loot Mechanics” and “+1 Podcast of Slaying” are swapping places in the weekly line-up, starting this coming week. This will allow LM to be a bit more topical and fresh, which isn’t as important to +1PoS, since it is a more opinion-driven podcast.
Now then, these changes may not remain this way forever. I may decide to bring back the videos at some point, but likely not. YouTube putting ads on videos like mine that aren’t eligible for monetization, just so they can make money off of them without paying small creators like me, was the final straw. It was bad enough that they took away what few pennies per month I was making pre-Adpocalypse 2.0, when I was tossed from their Partner program for simply being too small of a channel, but to then put ads on my videos without my consent anyway, so they can make money off of them, was simply beyond the pale! Plus, like I said, I was spending hours making each video, and only receiving a handful of views each. I do appreciate the support, but I would do better focusing that effort into other forms of my content.
As for podcasts, we continue to see solid growth on all three shows month to month. While the service I was using to track individual downloads appears to be completely useless, my webhost shows me how many hits each file gets. This doesn’t guarantee each hit was a download, mind you, but with thousands of hits per week each, that does indicate there is interest there, and not entirely by Bots crawling the site. I can link most of those hits back to Facebook and Twitter, actually.
In short, things are looking good for the podcasts, especially my solo Actual-Play roleplaying podcast, “Ronin Roleplaying”. Speaking of RR, I have all of 2021 finished, and had planned to be well on the way to recording 2022 and beyond by this point, but that hasn’t come to pass.
You see, I keep changing my plans for Season 2 (2022) and beyond.
Originally, I wanted to move to a quarterly podcast, changing games every three months, plus the Halloween special. But then I decided that this would mean taking literally forever to play many of the games I have been dying to try out Solo, so I switched back to a bi-monthly format. But that idea kinda sucks, so I considered changing monthly, but that actually sucks more, since I’d barely be able to enjoy each game that way.
To make things worse, I have a LOT of games to get through, and they keep interfering with each other. For example, most of my newest games are “Powered by the Apocalypse”, but I have a current rule that keeps me from playing games that are too similar in design, too close together. Same goes for many of my older games, as a good portion of them are similar to, or outright based upon, one of the many forms of “Dungeons & Dragons”. In short, programming is kind of a bitch, with these rules!
So, I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet. I have a lot of ideas, but not sure where to go with them. Luckily, I have a lot of time in which to decide, since I’m already done with all of 2021, so I’m in no hurry to work on 2022 and beyond. In fact, it might be better to just take some time to figure things out, rather than jump right back into working on Season 2.
Hell, I’ve even considered scrapping all of the shows for 2021, and starting over, now that I have a bit more experience with solo roleplaying! Of course, that idea got jettisoned out of an airlock, because – while I’m not completely proud of every show I’ve done for the remainder of Season 1, there is enough there that is good, that I don’t want to scrap it all and start over!
Then again, with COVID-19 vaccines becoming available or not, if we remain stuck mostly in our homes for 2021, I will likely be able to record all the way through Season 5 this year alone. I’m not planning that far ahead, mind you, but it is possible. Once I get started recording again, I will be able to record two months worth of “Ronin Roleplaying” in a weekend, and – bumping up against the Burnout – upwards of six months worth of shows every month! More likely I would only do half of that, but I do tend to go a bit overboard when I’m roleplaying, so…
Anyway, if you have any thoughts on all of this, please feel free to comment below, or talk to me about this on the Discord server.
