Welcoem to posts!!
in the future - u will be able to do some more stuff here,,,!! like pat catgirl- i mean um yeah... for now u can only see others's posts :c
2025 State of the Channel Address: âFrom the Ashesâ
What happened to âonward and upward?â What happened to ânew videos every month or so?â What happened to Daniel?
Well, strap in, because the answer is a strange and sad one: this year I was the victim of a severe environmental poisoning incident in the place I was living. Symptoms set in rapidly in late February (as I was finishing up production on the SpaceChem video), and it took another three months of substantially worsening before we figured out the cause. Mightâve never figured it out if not for the fact that eventually my wife began developing symptoms as well. After leaving the contaminated property, her symptoms were gone within a couple months . . . but my far worse condition has taken seven months to mostly resolve. All told, it has been 10 straight months of hell, and I am still not at 100%.
Suffice it to say that, in my quiet absence from releasing videos this year, I went through the hardest and most horrific experience of my life by an extreme margin. All but a small sliver of this year was taken from me, and replaced with a previously unimaginable depth of pain and misery. From mid-March to mid-July, I couldnât watch films or play games . . . let alone write about them or produce videos. Things came back sluggishly after that. Recovery has not been a linear climb. Iâve fought for every iota of progress through a painful regimen of physical and mental rehabilitation.
In August (despite being far from well) I was finally able to slowly resume the paused production on the Half-Life video. A fact that may be of interest to some of you is that, because of the abrupt beginning and long duration of this experience, there is a moment in the âMatter and Formâ section of âHalf-Livelyâ where about five months pass between me saying one sentence and me saying the next.
I went into 2024 with the best of intentions and the greatest of optimism for this channel. You may think I would like to avoid repeating that mistake for 2025. After all, the degree to which my plans for 2024 were violently demolished can not be overstated. But my plans for 2025 are, if anything, more ambitious still. Donât get me wrong: Iâll still be working as methodically (read: slowly) as ever. Nevertheless, I have a discrete set of high-priority goals for this channelâincluding several huge, as-yet-unstarted analysis projects that I deeply desire to complete. I donât need to finish them all in the year ahead, but my experiences since February have made me realize that if I donât make a concerted effort to finish them as soon as I canâI may never complete them. Things will start modestly, with a string of simpler review-style videos in the immediate future. But in the background Iâll be beginning the first of those big new projects in earnest, to the degree my symptoms allow.
I didnât get to properly celebrate when this channel reached 20,000 subscribers in June. I was never sure whether I wanted to make a big deal of 20,000 or 25,000. Well, that decision was made for me. If/when I reach 25,000 this year, expect an unusual video and a big announcement.
Thank you for your patience. Iâm grateful to have survived, and to be back among you all. Iâve missed you. Happy New Year . . .
Sincerely,
Daniel
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2024 State of the Channel Address: âOnward and Upwardâ
Unbelievably, against all odds, the past year was another incredible one for the channel. Delays forced me to make two fewer videos than I intended, and there was no explosion of views even remotely close to what the Dark Souls video experienced the previous year . . . yet the channel still grew by about 5000 subscribers!
Thatâs almost a third of the channelâs total count coming in 2023 alone. Thatâs remarkable to me. Whether youâre new to the channel or have been around for a while, I canât thank you enough for joining me here.
I mentioned delays a moment ago. One monthâs delay happened as a natural consequence of the Demonâs Souls, Armored Core, and Journey projects taking longer than expected. Another monthâs delay happened, sadly, because I was quite sick for almost the entirety of November. Managed to cough so much and so violently that I bruised several ribs. That was a new experience!
Now, I go out of my way to explain this stuff because my last address of this kind mentioned âtwo large projectsâ that I intended to publish in 2023. As it happens, only one of them materialized: âSlayer of Reason,â the Demonâs Souls video.
But the other one is still coming, and soon! I intend to publish it around March or April. Itâs a weird one, simple on the surface but delving deeper and deeper as it goes along. Itâll probably be about an hour long, and the main topic is one of the most highly acclaimed games of all time. (There should be one or two other videos out between now and then.)
Once the bigger video is done in early spring, one of my primary goals will be making significant progress on writing my next âfeature-lengthâ philosophical analysis of a game. I have plans for at least two more such long-form philosophical analysis videos in the future.
Other than that, you might notice a bit of experimentation with my video thumbnails this year. Iâm very fond of the clean, legible look they currently have. And I have no intention of ever making them ugly or obnoxious. But all of the statistics I can access on the backend of the channel have been telling me for years that a big thing holding my videos back from additional success is that their thumbnails donât persuade new viewers to give them a chance. The main thing I would personally criticize about the current design is that my thumbnails fail to convey the angle or approach to the topic that the video will have. So, you may notice me adding words like âanalysisâ or âreviewâ to them somewhere, or incorporating the video title into them, or something else. Iâm open to suggestions.
Speaking of suggestions, feel free to ask questions or make comments below this post. And as always: Happy New Year!
Sincerely,
Daniel
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2023 State of the Channel Address: âTodayâs topic is . . .â
This has been a wild year. To put things in perspective, exactly one year ago today, when I published my first address like this, I thanked everyone profusely for their âoverwhelming reactionsâ to my Dark Souls video. At that time, the view count of that video was below 70,000. Now itâs up over 900,000.
Similarly, a year ago the channelâs subscriber count was about 3,500. I still have that many now . . . plus an additional 10,000 people.
Folks periodically ask me if I am annoyed that the channel is not more successful than it is, or if it bothers me that YouTubeâs mystical algorithm so frequently snubs my videos. On the one hand, absolutely, it would be nice to be reaching more people. But on the other hand, I do not take it for granted that over 13,000 human beings have pressed a button saying theyâd be interested to hear when more of my work is available.
I strongly appreciate it, and am humbled by it, and I intend to do my best to continue providing the sort of material that caused so many thousands of people to press that button.
Along those lines, the year ahead is full of promise. There are already two large projects that I fully intend to publish this year which are very exciting to me. And I donât mind telling you that one of them is my second âfeature-lengthâ FromSoft philosophical analysis. Iâve been working on writing it throughout the past year, and am finally closing in on completing the first full draft. This is not to say that itâll be some bloated monstrosity; in fact, thereâs a good chance itâll be around the same length as the Dark Souls analysis. Thereâs just an extremely large amount of primary research, secondary research, playing, writing, and editing that goes into a big project that really matters to me.
At any rate, although I work at a slow and deliberate pace, Iâd like to make it clear that---while my channel and site arenât yet at a stage where I can justify working on them full-time as my only job---I am always working on them as much as possible. I am still as full as ever of ideas for new projects, as well as enthusiasm for making those projects a reality. I have every intention of continuing to release videos as frequently as I can, indefinitely into the future.
For anyone curious, the two absolute best ways for an existing subscriber to support this channel would be to give a chance to videos of mine on subjects that you donât find familiar, and to share videos of mine that you personally enjoy with people you think will enjoy them.
Just like last year, feel free to ask questions or make comments below this post. Happy New Year!
Sincerely,
Daniel
100 - 18
2022 State of the Channel Address: âHello, welcome to The Gemsbok!â
For a while after starting this channel, it was practically dormant; across several years, only a handful of videos were published. But just before 2020, The Gemsbok YouTube channel entered a period of very active production, growth, and improvement. In the just-over-two-year span since then, I created 26 of the channelâs current 31 videos.
That key turning point came about because I set myself a new goal as 2020 approached: publish a video every month. I havenât always succeeded, but holding that goal in mind has kept me actively working on a new video and/or article project at all times since I set it. This fertile period has continued to today, and has brought about considerable improvement to my abilities as a video and audio editor. I intend to keep the channel in this state of high activity indefinitely into the future.
I have a lot of ambitious projects planned for this channel. Many of them are only in the earliest of planning stages, but I can already tell you that some resemble the Dark Souls video in many respects. So, I just want to say that I am very grateful for the overwhelmingly positive reactions that âUnchosen Undeadâ has received. The creation of that Dark Souls video was an enormous undertaking that involved hundreds of hours of work, and if it had not been so well-received there is a chance that many of those ambitious future plans would have been shelved.
But as the channel transitions toward more large projects like that, I will still be aiming to get as close as possible to monthly uploads---at least for the time being. This means that plenty of shorter videos will continue to be mixed in (including game reviews, shorter game analyses, and movie videos).
All that being said, however, the first video of 2022 is going to be about a game, and itâs going to be the second-longest video on the channel, at about 40 minutes. It will contain an even balance of thematic analysis and mechanical analysis, so it should have a little something for everyone. Despite the videoâs length (and some complicated aspects of the edit), I aim to publish it a few weeks from now.
Whoever you are, I am glad to have you along for this ride, and I honestly canât wait to show you some of the projects I have in mind. Feel free to ask questions or make comments below this post. Happy New Year!
Sincerely,
Daniel
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Analysis of games and films, written and produced by Daniel Podgorski
My style of writing and analysis comes from a formal background in literature and philosophy. The videos on this channel range between (1) applying strategies and concepts from literary theory and philosophy in order to provide close readings of games and films, and (2) lighter review-style content.