 Ahoy-hoy! Welcome to a special episode where I talk about all sorts of different things that are going on for the channel and in the SCP community. So first of all, one thing that's super important is there's a forum thread going on in the administrative section of the SCP Wiki right now talking about how people like me have been offering co-author or critique services over Patreon and they want to, well they'd love to stop it. I think they're going to ban the idea of co-authoring Patreon backing reward whatever at some point. So to that end, I'm going to be restructuring most of my Patreon goal or Patreon backer rewards. Important thing to remember, even though I'm going to be restructuring everything, I will not be taking people who have already paid for certain services and telling them that they're not going to get them. So you don't have to worry about that. Anyone who's already paid or is currently a Patreon backer can get those rewards still. Just let me know because at the beginning of next month those rewards go away completely. I think there's still going to be critique. I don't think they decided that they were going to regulate that. So I think critique is still going to be fine. I've got to get better at doing this without looking for it. I'm not used to having a viewfinder that I can look at. So I'm constantly my eye is being drawn to it, which is something I'm going to have to get used to. But if you see me looking slightly off camera, that would be what I'm doing. I'm looking at myself like, am I in frame? Sit up, make sure that you're okay. We're good to go. I was slouched down and I was a little low and I'm like, nope, you're going to sit up. Just fix this problem. But the thing is you always got to be adaptive anyway. I thought the problem was going to come from YouTube. You're constantly being told your problems are going to come from YouTube. One day you're going to get demonetized. So far that hasn't. I barely get my videos demonetized. I have a little string every once in a while where a few videos in a row get demonetized and then it goes away. It's never been a huge deal. But now we're talking about having to shift my Patreon. Everything I do is completely offside, except for sometimes I help people with their writing. When I talk about co-authoring with people, I like to think that any amount of collaborative work on a piece is a co-author personally. A lot of times other people write most of it and I just give them a lot. I mean a lot of editing, a lot of guidance on the way. And then afterwards I'm like, if you'd like to hit me on as a co-author, you can. And if not, not. That's how it goes. That's how I've been doing it for forever, basically. And now I have to think about other things that are silly to me, but important to other people. And since they're important to other people, I have to treat them like they're important. And one of those is no paid co-authors on the SCP Wiki, so no more of that. I'm still going to be offering critique, though. I mean, editing services from people are pretty common in the world. I mean, you find a friend of yours that is a really good writer and you're like, hey, help me or a tutor or anything like that. Like, oh, I'm writing something for this website over here. Would you look at it for me? And you're like, because I'm paying them, I can't post it on the Wiki. That's silly. I don't think that's going to get pushed through. Anyway, that's one half of the important things I want to talk about today. The other half, and I'm going to open up the page now, is I have opened a merchandise store. And this is something that's important just because when we're talking about money, we're talking about like Patreon backing and whatever. And honest to God, I have been meaning to do this for a long time now. I'm going to put an image on the screen right now, poof, instead of my face. It's going to be a design that I actually commissioned Lord Bung, maker of the Confinement series. He actually did an open commissions call a little while back and I was paying close enough attention. I'd been paying attention to him for quite some time. And I wanted to basically get involved and be like, hey, I'd like to pay you to make a design for me for some merchandise. And I knew what I wanted was a you're wrong about this. So you're wrong about this poster, you're wrong about this mug, you're wrong about this sticker, you're wrong about this hoodie, you're wrong about this t-shirt. And that's like the baseline design. But also I'm calling it, for lack of a better term, the judgey selection, which is just my logo, which I always thought looks a little judgy, it's like looking at you like. Anyway, there's a lot of different designs that go in it. I didn't, it didn't, it doesn't really work on like a kind of dark, like grayish black that the t-shirts normally come in. So there's, let's see here, an all over print, which I suppose is like a higher quality design or whatever. So I put it on that, there's these die cut stickers, which look really cool, iPhone cases, Samsung cases, and stickers with just, you know, whatever on it. So yeah, we've got that going on. Important to remember, my logo was actually designed by the Vulgan as well. I want to make sure and give proper credit for that, because he did such an amazing job with it. Haven't had an opportunity to order samples yet, but I did go through Teespring, which has a reputation for being, let's put this way, they have multiple reputations. There's two positives and one negative one. They have a negative reputation for dealing with copyright claims properly. There's some artist backlash against them. It's pretty much rightfully so. But any, I should say, I'm not going to give them excuses because they handle most of their situations pretty poorly. But any product creation place that just allows people to throw in designs and then sell stuff is going to have problems with copyright. It's going to have problems with hate speech, which I believe they even had problems like that kind of stuff showing up in products as well. But they are an official partner to YouTube, which means when the YouTube algorithm approves, they're reviewing my designs right now when I'm recording this. It's possible by the time this video comes out that you'll actually see a carousel of designs underneath the video that you can click on and go to their store and buy. That's a huge positive for me. I believe Teespring is the only company that actually has that kind of partnership with YouTube. So I am looking into other stores mainly because I understand the international shipping for Teespring is a bit pricey. Someone was telling me about this and I didn't know it until they told me about it, which is fine for now because I kind of just want to see if there's a demand for this stuff. There's also going to be more designs in the future, one would hope. If the current designs sell, then there will be money for me to invest in new designs. And there may be just basic like the SCP logo stuff that I could put together as well. I got a lot of ideas, but I just wanted to run these two designs first. One designed by the Vulcan, which he did most of the, I think almost all, if not all of the graphics for my channel. And one design that I specifically ordered from Lord Bung of the Confinement series fame, who just does amazing artwork. And I thought, you know what, that's iconic. I'm going to grab a piece of that artwork and use it in my design. So yeah, both of them brilliant, brilliant. One's a brilliant artist, the other's a brilliant graphical designer. And I just lucky to be able to use their designs in my products. If you're interested in buying this stuff, there will be a link in the description of this video. If the carousel is not already active, which it might be, there'll be a link in the description of this video. And also, I think because it's integrated, there may be a link at the end of the video, but they'll definitely be one at the top of the description, just at the bottom of whatever little sentence blurb I have, because I usually say something, try to say something funny in the first few lines of the description, but just below that above my Patreon backing. Yeah, that'll be that. And it's important to me that if you want to support this channel, there's multiple ways you can do it. Like I do premieres, you can do super chat whilst the premiere is ongoing, like right now, or you can do, you can buy merchandise to help support the channel, get yourself a hoodie, get yourself a t-shirt, get yourself a poster. By the way, this empty, hold on, where's my hand at? This empty white space right here, probably going to get a poster once I get some money in that I can actually buy a couple of sample products. And also I would like to see if the products are as of high quality as the reviews and reports say they are. But yeah, I'd like to put something, I think it's over here, and it's not, it's over, it's way back here behind me. Okay, but either way, it's going to be, there's going to be things on this wall pretty soon. And the only way for me to do that is obviously for you to help support the channel, as everybody here on the screen, I'm just going to go ahead and go and show, these are my Patreon backers right now. Everybody here on the screen is supporting the channel. If you'd like to support the channel, we're going to get bigger, better. That's how I got this camera, this lapel mic, which is somewhat expensive for a lapel mic. And that's how I got this computer which is capable of doing video editing. If it wasn't for your support, none of this would exist. And I am very happy to be able to bring you new content as the months move on. February is always a slow month for YouTube. So it's a really good time for me, weirdly. It's a really good time for me to do a video like this, which probably won't get a lot of views because it's all about merch and Patreon backing. But at the same time, it's important that this video exists, so you know about it. Because if you don't know about it, how can you buy stuff? And for anybody who's wondering or worrying, because of the SCP Wiki's new rules about how we can and can't make money, just don't worry about it. I'm going to work my way around it. I'm going to follow their rules as closely as I possibly can. I should say keep following the rules as closely as I possibly can. And the new rules, whatever they are, that's what we'll be doing. It does mean that I'm going to have to, I think I really should be shifting away from that anyway. We should be talking about stuff on this channel like the Patreon backing reward should be behind the scenes content and bloopers and stuff. So let's get that done. And we've already got our Patreon or our Patreon Discord stuff going on. So that's all good. Anyway, thank you very much for watching. Head on over to patreon.com for slash decimarian, pledge at any level, hit the subscribe button, hit the notification bell, and thank you for letting me know that I'm not alone out here. I'll see you all again on Tuesday.