I think this has more potential value than any of the other places where I share my work

An editors retrospective

It's not working.

Especially when the wind kicks up and you can hear the creaking of dead wood leaning on one another trying to fall over.

This is another less involved post on my part. I've spent the last two weeks getting ready to attend my little sisters wedding next week. My life has been a mess of shopping for appropriate gifts and finding dress pants that fit me. In the midst of the madness I thankfully found some time to speak with Putnam last week. The other half of the Dwarf Fortress development team who has spent the last few year modernizing and optimizing the code of Dwarf Fortress. This interview exists in two formats, the messy audio interview that we recorded. With one redaction due to not being positive something could be talked about publicly. Along side my edited version that I've released this morning on YouTube. I'm also attaching all of the links to videos that I used in the video as source credits. Here is the YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/l_HIBr6YWaQ Putnam Interview July 2025 uncut 0:00 /1589.676349 1× * * * ## This Weeks Schedule Things are going to be a little less dense this month. I have the wedding that is mentioned above next weekend and I will be traveling for a doctors appointment the weekend after. Followed by a small camping trip with my Dad to end his summer vacation. I do have a few projects in the works and Jupiter Hell Classic releases next week as well. Content will get more dense when fall sets in. Streams this week will be Tuesday - Thursday. I will play the following week by ear.

Retread the steps that got you to where you are now.

Sieges, Crossbows and lots of Dye. Bay12Games Interview.

I wanted to let everyone on this email list know that Tarn Adams will be joining me on stream this week. It will be hosted live on both Twitch and YouTube. If you have not seen one of these before the format is quite straight forward. I have a google form set up and I am actively collecting questions. Tuesday night I will close the question submission and format them into a document. During the stream once I finish asking my own questions I'll pull questions from the viewer submissions. Hopefully this round goes without any technical difficulties...! The schedule for the interview is 10am Pacific, 1pm East, 6pm GMT. Here is a link to the form. https://forms.gle/kNhj6xSgwxvWtt8e8 ## The week ahead. Along side of the interview with Tarn. I'll be playing my normal dwarf fortress agenda. Hopefully this week we can make some moves into finishing the current fortress. An invasion of hell might be closer then you think. I plan to stream Tuesday - Friday.

Some of the switches got loose as well and would fail periodically. It was time to say good-bye.

I've been burnt out since March.

May 3rd until the 13th I vanished from live streaming. I did this because I have a huge backlog of footage. Roughly 1.5 terabytes of video and this number increases every single stream. I use a plugin called _"Source Record"_ it acts like a filter within OBS and allows you to record a scene not shown by obs. Using this plugin I record gameplay of whatever it is I am streaming. This does not record my voice, Alerts, Twitch chat or anything else shown on stream during the game play. Just my footage POV and in game audio. I started doing this just before I began recording my highly viewed. _"I played the worst map in Dwarf Fortress history"_ Since uploading this back in August of last year I have been recording all of my Dwarf Fortress footage in this way. Building up a huge backlog of footage. I could easily make a dozen or so videos of things that have happened in the fortress over time. However there is something holding me back from diving into the editing hole and simply cranking out these videos. Time and funding. Some of these videos do extremely well, When this happens it more or less covers the time I spend working on it financially. Then I often get an influx of interest from the videos and that is reflected in my stream. The process is simple, spend the whole weekend editing content and upload a video. The video does well and I reap the benefits. However, I had three videos in a row that did not perform as well and had a major impact on me mentally. The first of these was _"Caves of Qud: A Beginner Friendly Experience"_ While I was really happy with the final video and many of those who watched it loved the result. The video did not perform anywhere near as well as I needed it too. Its slowly chipped away as time has gone on and at this point I would say the video was easily worth making. But that week I released it was soul crushing. I spent five days 8-10 hours per day working on this one. When it released it took a month for me to break even on time spent. After the release I knew I needed something to maintain the channels momentum so I kept my head down and released a video about Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode. I released this video just two weeks after my video on Caves of Qud. The short run time and small portion of footage made for a much smaller editing lift. However due to a poor thumbnail choice by me and perhaps not the best title work. Combined with the shorter run time. This video did okay. Not great but just okay. I was happy with the result and moved onto the next project. I wanted to make something out of the footage I'd just finished recording for Halloween. It was for a fortress called Ghostcandy. The idea with this fortress was the ghosts were hunting my Dwarves. Its probably my most violent and harshest video I've made. Things don't just go south they go SOUTH. I loved the process of making this one but again, I spent a whole weekend and then some in between my normal hours grinding. Then on top of that this video also under performed in a similar fashion to my video on caves of Qud. After the first day I'd made the money back that I had spent on commissions for art and it took a month for me to cover the time spent editing. While I love this video and recently re-watched it. I do think I over edited it in spots and I could see why the retention on it has not stuck. I think I made some ambitious mistakes here that I needed to learn from. There was a gap in videos like this. Adventure mode released so my next project was a tutorial for Adventure mode. It was commissioned by kitfox so it was paid for regardless of how it did. But I had this lingering feeling that I'd failed. The last three projects had not even come close to what I'd achieved with the first few. I could not even really figure out why at the time. After these projects I moved. This took a chunk of me that tends to be taken when your life changes on such a massive scale. I was exhausted and did not even miss a stream. I kept at it until I started getting sick. It was just a cold, but it was a bad enough cold that I needed a break. I took some streams off and attempted to replicate my success from summer last year and took a bunch of footage of my Gremlin who became a baron. This was the result. This one took off, it matched the success of my early attempts at these large scale videos. My main take away here is it does not matter how much work I put in or how I feel about the video. Sometimes due to things outside of my control or my own errors videos won't always perform. Here lies the issue, If I cram through the weekend without skipping a stream to edit videos the quality can drop and I can misjudge the quality of my own work. It tires me out and negatively impacts my mood the following week. It hurts my health because I don't leave my desk for an additional 40-50 hours in a week. The sustainable way to make videos like this is to take the time and edit them in a way that is both healthy for myself and the audience. I decided then and there when I made my next project I'd take a week off and edit it and I did. In early may I took 10 days off of streaming. The first two days were spent relaxing like a normal weekend. I ran some errands and relaxed at a local brewery. After that I went to work. I got to work; The video I ended up making was a shorter project based on recent footage. The result was good! I think, while it has a shorter run time the response has been good. It could be performing better at this point but I think the time I spent on it resulted in a quality video. It took roughly 30 hours to make and has pulled 60k views at the time of writing. Most of my videos take 50-60 and break even at 100k views. My week of editing was only half done, It was Thursday and I started work on another project. The next project has been in editing hell for about a month. Its about my Vampire fortress _"Winterthrone"_ it started off as my holiday project. It's fitting that I'm editing it in time for the start of summer. That took up the rest of the week and I took off Monday as a breather before I returned to streaming. Overall this is a much more healthy and effective way to put together projects like this. It gives me time to work on things without the sleep deprivation of after stream editing sessions. I also get to actually take a day and relax during weekends. But the unfortunate part of doing this is its a net negative in a financial sense. It cost me about a week worth of gift subs to take this time. Without going into exact numbers I absolutely lost money that week. The video could also have been edited in the evenings and I could have simply worked harder and finished this project. That would have paid better but it would have cost me more, physically. Some time has passed since that editing week and I'm still plucking away at the vampire video. I got some work done this weekend but my head was not really in it. I've considered looking for an editor on and off. However I'd still have to do quite a large portion of the work. Voice recording and likely a rough outline as well. Unless I want to pay someone to sit and watch my streams and I don't really make enough for that. While it would be cool I'm not in a situation where that would be the most responsible thing to do. I could send a project file to an editor with a rough draft. That idea becomes a bit complicated because I use an open source editing software called KDenlive. It is quite powerful for what it is but whoever I send the files too needs to use that software. They'd have to remake my work in another program or I would have to learn new software. This is not a post where I am pretending to have any of the Solutions. If I did I'd be talking about how I solved the balance of work that I've built for myself. It is closer to a venting session. I love the videos I make and the response I've seen. I love the result of making them. Editing can feel like a slog and often takes a lot out of me. The result is worth it even if the videos under perform. I think I've come into my own as a creator in the last year and I'm excited to see where I can take it. Maybe one day I'll find the right editor or figure out a schedule that helps me work without crushing myself physically. ## Schedule. Thank you for reading this kind of vent(y) post this week. These are just things that are heavy on my mind and I need to figure out what to do going forward. I'll keep making these videos as my mind allows and I'll keep experimenting with scheduling until something sticks. I'm streaming Tuesday - Friday this week.

Back in march. YouTube announced they would be changing how shorts views are calculated. When shorts first began to infect YouTube as a platform. They calculated views based on an initial percentage viewed. YouTube is changing how YouTube Shorts views are counted | TechCrunchYouTube is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts to give creators a deeper understanding of how their short-form content is performing, theTechCrunchAisha Malik Now YouTube has changed the whole system. Views are now calculated based on plays and replays. Meaning views for short are going to skyrocket. Let me show you some examples. These screenshots are from before the change. On the left it shows 13k engaged viewers. While on the right it shows 13.4 "Views" This is a short that was uploaded after the change. As you can see from the two shorts uploaded after this change. Revenue is still based on the same metric as before. "Engaged views" However because all plays are counted as views the overall number is way higher. This concerns me, it makes me flash back to the time where Facebook was boasting the highest numbers on their videos when compared to any other social media platform. Causing many platforms to "Pivot to video" back in 2015. In reality Facebook was inflating their views by counting page views as a view of the video. Regardless of if the user was simply scrolling past. Thankfully in this case the real numbers are being surfaced. In some ways YouTube is still showing us the real numbers and simply hiding them from the public. Then showing inflated numbers to the audience for no real reason. I assume plenty of people reading this remembers when you could simply refresh a YouTube video and increase the view count? This was why videos would get stuck at the fabled 301 views. Because YouTube had to check to make sure someone was not inflating the video manually. Insuring the views were from a real source and not some forum who decided to boost it. While in reality it was probably a little of both the reality of how the video was doing would surface after the 301 view count would fade and the actual number would take its place. I don't know how Tiktok tracks its views. It is not a platform I've ever held in much of a priority. In fact, I don't even like shorts. I don't like making them or how they are surfaced to the audience. Personally, I feel like they have been forced into my life and I'm frankly not a fan of it. That being said, I make them because I can see the wheels of YouTube's algorithm turning and so I have to make them to participate. In a perfect world I'll hit 100k subscribers on YouTube this year. In order to do that I have to participate. This change just makes them feel less real and reminds me of simpler times when people would just refresh to help their videos take off. I guess that means, let those shorts replay. It'll make the numbers go up. ## Schedule I'm going to stream Tuesday - Thursday this week so I can finish that video next weekend. I've mostly got the full runtime down and most of the voice done. Now I just need to spit shine and polish. This blog slipped through the cracks these past few weeks but I want to get it back to some level of frequency. These more stats related posts used to be restricted to members only. I honestly need a better thing to do for paying members and I'm going to be trying to figure that out over the next few weeks. Here are some recent uploads in the meantime. As always, Thanks for the support!

Over the past year, I’ve grown to have a really skeptical view of Discord. Don’t get me wrong I really like the platform and the features it offers. Back when it launched, it was instrumental in turning this weird hobby of mine into an actual career. When Discord first went into beta, I wasn’t super interested in using the platform. In fact, I didn’t even make my server an acquaintance of mine did, and then handed me ownership a few months later. I wasn’t in the beta and couldn’t create a server, but he was. I started using Discord so early that I had to explain it to my chat: “It’s just like Slack, but mixed with IRC and TeamSpeak,” was a sentence I said a lot during that era. The server grew slowly and steadily. In 2018, I earned Discord Partner status. That was a big deal for me personally it opened a lot of doors to networking events, I got free stuff, and the server received a bunch of exclusive perks. To this day, earning Discord Partner when I did is something I’m proud of and remember fondly. But no matter how many positive associations I have with the platform, it’s far from perfect. Remember when Discord tried to compete with Steam and sell games? My Discord "Games" library. * * * Yeah, they did, it even had exclusives. _Bad North_ was one of them. It was a small FTL-like experience where you command little armies of Vikings in battle. I really enjoyed it, and it ended up selling well once it made its way to other platforms. Honestly, I’m not even sure how I ended up with most of those games. I think they were either free, or I was given keys at some point. In 2021, Discord shut down the storefront and removed the ability for people to buy or release games for sale. The store itself kind of stuck around, though just in a different format. Bad North: Jotunn Edition on SteamBad North is a charming but brutal real-time tactics roguelite. Defend your idyllic island kingdom against a horde of Viking invaders, as you lead the desperate exodus of your people. Command your loyal subjects to take full tactical advantage of the unique shape of each island.STEAMDiscord item shop This is what it became—profile images and themes. Honestly, I have zero issue with that kind of thing existing. Discord also offers “Server Subscriptions.” This one’s odd to me, because from what I can tell, I can’t even see the feature unless I turn on a VPN. I know someone, somewhere, must be using it, but it doesn’t seem to be widespread at all. Discords Help page regarding these subscriptions. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4415163187607-Server-Subscriptions-for-Members The last thing Discord offers is “Turbo” something I grumble about paying for, mostly because it used to be something I got for free when I was a Discord Partner. That program was shut down entirely a few years ago. Discord Partners provided a ton of free marketing for the platform. They gave us merch, all the Turbo features, helped organize networking events, and were honestly one of the best companies to work with from a content creator’s perspective. Then they ramped up the requirements heavily. You could even lose your partnership if your server became too inactive. My server was borderline at the time, so I created a channel where members were encouraged to count to a million in sequence, one person at a time. It was silly, but it kept the activity levels high and gave the community something fun to do. In December 2022, my Discord server ballooned in size when _Dwarf Fortress_ launched on Steam jumping from 800 members to 2,700 almost overnight. That was a massive deal for me, and the server easily cleared the activity thresholds to stay in the Partner program. To this day, I’d still meet the increased requirements for Discord Partner if only the program hadn’t been shut down entirely in October 2023. Discord remains a crucial part of my work and business as it is for many people across a variety of industries. But now, their CEO is talking about possibly taking the company public. Discord is planning an IPO this year, and big changes could be on the horizonIPO will mean more revenue pressure and possibly more ads.Ars TechnicaSamuel Axon This scares me. I’ve been a bit miffed for a while now—first over the changes to the Partnership program, and then over the addition of features that felt half-baked or poorly conceived. I pay for Discord’s premium features. I was an early adopter. I watched the platform grow into what it is today. And now, I’m afraid of what pressure for growth from shareholders could do to the platform I’ve relied on for so long. It’s gotten me looking at alternatives. The one I’ve looked into the most is **Matrix**. It’s a bit more fiddly than Discord and some of the other corporate platforms, but it’s incredibly flexible—kind of like what Mastodon is to Twitter. Matrix even has some really cool community-focused features, like _bridges_. These let you link a Discord server with a Matrix server using a bot, allowing a Matrix "Space" to communicate seamlessly with users in a Discord server. Matrix also has a bunch of different clients to choose from, each with its own look and feel. Some even offer enhanced privacy features. The default recommended client is **Element** , but other popular ones include **FluffyChat** and **Cinny** —the last of which is almost identical to Discord in how it operates. All of this is free, with optional encryption, and fully decentralized. The issue? Bridging a Discord server to any other service using a bot breaks Discord’s Terms of Service. It could get your server deleted. Discord Bridge example. The last thing I want to do is break off a huge chunk of the community I’ve built over the past decade. That idea honestly scares me. I’m watching Discord slowly get worse—making more room for ads, tweaking the UI in ways that feel less user-focused. The recent UI overhaul made things more modular, which feels like it's designed to open up even more space for monetization. Aside from a few grandfathered features I was allowed to keep from being a Discord Partner, everything else has either been hidden or revoked. And it’s starting to make me sad. I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. The only logical path forward that I can see is to start building a server on another platform quietly, slowly. Invite people little by little. Not to replace Discord immediately, but to have a backup in place. If (or when) Discord goes public and starts becoming more aggressively money-hungry, I’ll stop paying for Nitro and focus on building around a more user-friendly service. Maybe I’m just being paranoid. But I don’t even have Spotify installed on my computer, and yet—it pops up every time I launch Discord. ## Schedule. I started a new fort last Thursday. But Headpunch is still alive and running. I'll be playing the new fortress Tuesday - Thursday and I'll pick up headpunch on friday for a shorter stream as we plug away at the long end game. Starsector will happen in the evenings when I have extra enthusiasm. and as always. Thanks for reading.

I've been doing this streaming thing for quite some time—back when I first learned how to set up OBS. Things were really different than they are today. Nobody knew what this industry was. It would take a long time before it got to the point where Drake was streaming Fortnite with Ninja. The terms _“content creator”_ or _“influencer”_ weren’t yet commonplace in the public lexicon. Nobody knew what I meant when I told people about the hobby I had taken up. I remember once explaining to my dad that I was essentially running a cable access show from my apartment on the internet and making some money from it. He responded in a suspicious tone: **"Are you sure those are real people and not bots? This all sounds like a plot to make people stupider."** Maybe he was onto something there—but not entirely. Eventually, my parents came around as they saw more of the things I made and watched me succeed over the years. But I developed some really bad habits in the early days. When someone asked me back in 2016 what I was doing for work—shortly after I had cut my hours at my fast food gig to try and make this work full-time—I’d generally respond with _“marketing”_ or _“digital media”_ to kind of toss off the question. This was partly because, by the time I was doing this as a job, being a _“YouTuber”_ had a lot of stigma around it. We all have people like the Paul brothers to thank for that. _"Ew, so you’re an influencer?"_ was a response I got while talking to a friend of my ex-partner. That pushed me into a place where I became so reluctant to tell people what I did for a living that I would avoid the conversation at all costs—and frankly, I dreaded it whenever it came up. Even though, in reality, most people are just simply curious. I've always had a few problems being social. Small talk doesn’t come easy to me. When you add in the additional stress of being afraid someone will ask _“What do you do for a living?”_ the problem tends to get worse, not better. Outside of the mostly self-inflicted stigma—why is this a problem? Technically, it's not. In the early days, I should have owned it—as a member of a newly minted industry that was set to take over the world of marketing! Or something. Content creation quickly became something really specific: the model on Instagram hawking fake eyeliner that gives kids a rash; the hot lady thumbnails unrelated to the YouTube video you just clicked on; and never forget the incredibly poor-taste comedy sketch videos from those early days. I felt like people would get one of three impressions of me when I said I was a content creator: 1. Broke and unemployed, pretending I had a job. 2. An online grifter. 3. An asshole. I should note that a lot of this stemmed from my own anxiety and worry about my self-image. I was afraid to give details because, whenever I saw news about something someone in this industry had done, it made me want to talk to people even less. I went to therapy in 2023. I'm still not sure how I ended up there. It started with a phone call from the diabetic outpatient center—checking in on me. This is a quarterly habit for newly diagnosed Type 1 diabetics here. The conversation ended with me being sent a referral to a psychiatrist and a therapist. This process has taken me over a year. Therapy didn’t last that long because I only had so many sessions. While it helped, I wouldn’t say it formed the whole picture. I wish I had more time in that process, but I wasn’t afforded that luxury. Since then, I've been slowly working on myself and trying to develop healthier habits. I spend a lot more time out and about. I've become the guy sitting at the end of the bar with a notebook or laptop. I’ll sit in coffee shops and write these posts or edit shorts. Working in public spaces helps me feel a bit more connected to the community around me. I'm already extremely socially isolated in the day-to-day, so I have to find small ways to combat that. The big change happened when I moved. This is probably something that happens to anyone who successfully pulls off a huge goal. It’s also an odd discovery I’ve made about my life. When you buy an apartment, house, business—or anything of high value—something shifts. Maybe this also happens when you buy a car? When I bought this apartment, something changed. People ask me where I’m renting, and I respond with _“Well, I bought the place,”_ or something to that effect. Since making this move, not one person has questioned me when I respond to the second question: _“What do you do for work?”_ Hopefully, the days of responding _“Marketing”_ are behind me, and I can just simply say, _“I'm a YouTuber.”_ The positive effect here is on my level of self-esteem. There’s a feeling that happens when you hide something about yourself—I think it’s called shame. Telling someone I have a weird, not-real-sounding job after complaining about rent going up gives people a certain impression of you. However, saying that you’ve become something kids want to be—and mentioning you own your home—feels different. I think it's helping me own what I do. And even in the last few weeks, I've started to feel like I've done something cool. Instead of just being some weird panhandler on the internet. Unrelated. I drew a ball. ## Schedule I'll be heading to my parents house this coming weekend. It is my Dads Birthday and that means family time. I got a good amount of work done on some upcoming projects already this weekend. I should have this next project done within the month. If all goes well. This week I will stream Tuesday - Thursday.

I think my last counselor would have a field day with this.