 It's YouTube. So we have to do an update video. This is like a monthly thing now here. I didn't want to be that guy, but judging from the comments and what I've seen on the analytics, people actually like when I talk about what's going on in my personal life, along with things coming up to the channel. It's honestly kind of mind-blowing because I'm pretty boring. I'm actually a super lame guy, but you know, we hand it up for the videos and I'm glad you guys care. I truly mean that. So I left you hanging last time when I talked about the issues at home with my wife, Lindsay. Quick recap. Super quick. She has Crohn's. She's been on Crohn's medication, Humera for five years. It either A stopped working or B is causing side effects or C is working fine and there's something else at play. We actually still don't know. Six months later, she was taken off Humera. She doesn't really have much of a flare-up going on in her stomach, which means the Humera maybe was still working. That's great. Can't go back on Humera because of medication like that once you're off it. I don't know. I'm not a doctor, but apparently you can't go back on right away or at all. It's above my pay grade to understand the logistics of it. All I do know is out of all the doctors we've seen, no one seems to know Dick. No one seems to know Jack or shit about what's going on with her. The problem she's having and has been having for six months is with her feet slash calves. She has red pulsing blotches and shit all over her feet. It looks like she stepped in an anthill and every ant on the block and their cousin came over and bit her up, but they're not bites. We don't know what they are, but they don't go away. They're incredibly painful and every seven or so days she just can't walk on them. The legs blowed up beyond all comprehension and I actually have to carry her around the house like a monkey on my back, except for this Dunstan needs to check out because I'm sick of doing it. After several rushes to the emergency room, several, meaning more than three, two by ambulance because she was passing out on the floor and getting sick for 24 to 48 hours straight because of vertigo or whatever the fuck else is going on that the doctors can't answer, we still don't have answers. We are on a decent path though. They did keep her for three nights at a hospital at the, what is this place called, Mayo, I think? No, Mayo won't see us. Mayo Clinic, one of the greatest clinics and hospitals in America. Housed out of my hometown, Minnesota, rejected our plea. After several doctors stated the case, Mayo decided a month later after looking it over, we're kind of at capacity. We're not going to take any hillbillies from South Carolina, which is where we now reside. Perfect timing. So we're kind of up a creek without a paddle. That's an expression people said in the 60s. I still say it now. There actually is another Mayo, which is in Jacksonville, Florida. It's about, it's about four hours from where I'm at right now. So we thought, you know what, we're going to force their hand. We'll just drive up to the Jackson, Florida and make them see us. I guess it's drive down. We did. Left the kids home. They're old enough now to fend for themselves. And if worst case scenario, we have to stay overnight there. Actually, that would have been best case scenario, because then they would have looked at her with a team of people, then the neighbors would take over, watch the kids. Didn't come to that. We drove all the way down there. She was admitted to the ER. They see that she's down to 98 pounds, which is incredibly thin for my wife. Not that she's big, but that's just an unhealthy weight for anyone. And yeah, they just kind of sent us home. They're like, sorry, nothing we can do. Nothing we can do. So after a lot of shenanigans and hospitalizations, we finally have her on prednisone, which she wasn't able to keep in her system before. It's working now. It's not a cure. All it does is keep her feet from swelling to the point of, you know, discomfort and what's the opposite of mobility? Unmobility? I don't know. I'm not a doctor or a literate person. She is fine. She's getting better, but this is not a cure. Her feet are not cleared up. She still has Crohn's. She always will. And her new medication hasn't arrived yet. So in the meantime, I've just been kind of doing a lot of stuff around the house, the cooking, the cleaning, blah, blah, blah, blah. Why do you care? Why do you care? Well, because the channel suffers when I'm not on my schedule. Remember, I'm a pretty boring dude, but I'm juggling a lot all the time juggling. So between my real full-time job, where I design and develop websites, I also have this hobby on YouTube. It's like, it's like, makes an embarrassing amount on YouTube, but thanks to Patreon support, it kind of offsets the miserable ad sense. We're going to get to the Patreon stuff in a sec though. Okay, that's the update on Lindsey. She's actually doing better. She's doing quite a bit better thanks to the prednisone, but that cannot stay in her system forever. It's a steroid. Not good to be on those too long. So they still have to figure out what's happening. Oh yeah, they also found polyps in her lungs. We believe it's not cancer. I think they ruled out all the bad stuff, but they are going to do a biopsy. I believe this fry. I don't know anymore. I don't know. It's up in the air when they can see her. That's another fun thing. Everything's always scheduled like three weeks out, sometimes a couple months, because there's just a shortage all over the place. Again, great timing. Great timing to move. Okay, family drama out of the way. Appreciate everybody that has reached out and given advice, given support, talked about different diets. She's on a diet already. She doesn't have dairy. She eats a lot of meat, because some people brought up the carnivore diet and shit. Listen, she's got Crohn's. A carnivore diet is not going to fix that, regardless of whatever some yahoo tells you. Different diets will work for different people. That's not going to solve her problem, but she's been on diets for a very long time. She juices celery every morning. Apparently, that does something. It helps her. Whether it's a placebo effect or otherwise, as long as it's helping her, I'll drop the $35 a week on celery. Now to the channel stuff. Like I said, YouTube payout is embarrassingly bad. It's been bad for years. It used to be pretty good. Used to make, for how it works, if you don't know by now, is for every 1000 views a video gets within 24 hours, that can range anywhere from $3 to $8. So if I post a video day one, it gets like 1500 views, 2000 views. I'm looking at maybe $7.50. Day one is the most important time for your video, for 99% of people's videos on YouTube. Because that's when your subscribers are going to watch. That's when you jump in. After that, lately it seems like the video's dead. I don't know what happened. Any of my videos that are older than a few months are just completely irrelevant. YouTube doesn't push them. People don't search for it because everything is very much yesterday's, yesterday's news. I want tomorrow's news now. People are always ahead of things now. So anything that's older is just not, is not relevant. It's challenging because I used to have movie feuds that brought in a lot of money. It got a lot of new subscribers generated a lot of interest. At some point YouTube said, no, we don't like that shit anymore. It's done. You're done with that. And so it was a waste of my time to do because it took a lot of time. And the subscribers didn't seem to be jumping on it like they were or they weren't getting notified, which was a problem for many years. There's a lot of issues. Some of it my fault. Some of it YouTube, some of it just the nature of things changing over the course of a decade. And that's all fair. The Patreon stuff that I offer definitely helps. You can also do it on YouTube via the YouTube Join membership. And one of the perks I've offered now is a Mithril membership. There's also an Unobtainium one. That one is purposely named Unobtainium because it's $100 a month. Obviously you can cancel it anytime. But the perk there is you can keep getting a new movie request every single month and you can do one show request. So if you want a new episode of Movie Feuds, I have to do it. I've changed how Mithril works. It used to be every single month you got a movie request. That became a problem for me to keep up with because it's a good problem to have. It means people were actually on board like 30 bucks a month. He reviews a movie. That's a sweet deal. It's too sweet of a deal. Now some people will be like 30 bucks a Kimmy or even 30 bucks to review a movie. Okay, here's the thing. I worked for ScreenRant for a full year last year. I was there. I was making my own show over there. It was called Real Rivalries. It was awesome. It got canceled. Like all the ScreenRant stuff got canceled because that channel is garbage now. I was doing the editing. I was doing the writing. I was doing the on-camera acting. So I did the whole thing from beginning to end and I was getting 350 a video. That's how ScreenRant pays out. Each person gets 100 and some bucks. So if you're an editor, 100 some bucks. If you're a writer, 100 some bucks. So it all totals out to 350. If you're doing all three, you get the whole honeypot. Now 350 a week to do the one video. That was sweet side money. It's not amazing, but it's a fair price for the work I'm putting in. So 30 bucks for essentially a similar video. Obviously I'm not doing as much extravagant stuff. There's no green screen. I'm knocking out. There isn't video clips constantly. I'm not writing them out as much, but I still take notes to these videos. I still have to watch these movies. Half the time I have to pay to rent the movie because the shit they've requested is so obscure. I don't even know how to illegally stream it. It's just, it's wild. So here is what I had to do and this rubbed some people the wrong way. I understand, but again, I wasn't expecting people to turn out for this. I'm so happy they did. Instead of raising the price, I just said, okay, if you stay with me on Mithril, you get a new movie request every three months. So that's more like $90, which still I think is a steal. And the whole point isn't necessarily so that you keep getting movie requests. That wasn't my intention. I thought it was to support me first and foremost, and then the perk that you get is the movie review. Regardless, it was just too much to handle. So I moved into every three months. Down the road, it might even change again. I just don't know, but that seemed based on the trajectory of things that I could keep up with that. Now here's my plea. Here's my request to people that are on Mithril. Thank you. I love you. You're the greatest. I don't want to watch your shitty art house film. Please. I beg of you. I understand you saw something back in, you know, whatever time period or your mom showed it to you and no one in the fucking internet has talked about it, but that hurts my channel and it hurts me physically to have to track it down and watch it. I won't point out any movie requests from the past or the future. I'm just asking if you could maybe think about just how it would really help the channel and be fun. So when I came up with the Mithril membership, I thought, okay, people are going to let me have it. It's going to be fun. They're going to make me watch like 50 shades of gray or twilight or, you know, baby's day out or something funny that a lot of people remember because it's either nostalgic or trashy or it was in the, you know, it was in the zen geist of history. But instead I'm getting things that maybe, you know, went to select theaters in 1994 or were straight to DVD or it was some, you know, just like underground film that they saw in graduate school and it's just not interesting for a whole lot of people that subscribe to my channel. And worse, it actually hurts me in the algorithm. So how YouTube runs, and I understand this is a very long ranty video, but I'm laying out some knowledge here and you can take it and put in the bank, save it for later if you want, how YouTube currently operates is engagement. So if I put out a video like it's Ant-Man 3, MCU still does very well. If I was smart, I would just do MCU videos, but I'm not. Ant-Man 3 gets a few thousand views. Great. Avatar 2 gets eight to 10,000 views. Fantastic. Now I'm watching some random shit from 1984 that no one saw. 700 views. Watch time dwindled. Likes dwindled. Comments dwindled. YouTube sees that and they go, oh, okay, maybe this channel's not that hot. People don't seem to be interested consistently in this channel. I see he did okay for a couple, but now the next two didn't even hit a thousand views combined. Not a good look, sir. Not a good look. So then I stopped getting recommended in the algorithm. So while, yes, the support on Patreon's fantastic, and I did make this promise to watch and review whatever you choose, please don't. Please don't make it so obscure. Think about how it can be fun and helpful for everyone involved. That's my plea. I'll still review whatever you want if it's a movie, but I will be a little bit upset about it. Okay, that's it. Mithril is on YouTube and on Patreon. So those memberships are available in both places. What else do we have to talk about? Well, I have a second channel, Adam After Dark. It launched miserably because I got busy with a bunch of other stuff. That's non-movie related things. If you remember from back in the day, I used to do a show called Adam Rantz Issues, and it was just like the dumbest stuff you could possibly imagine. Buffalo Wild Wings, not releasing the wing count, which I noticed has come up again recently in the news. Taco Bell for getting to give me a straw. People not washing their hands in front of me when using the bathroom, taking a shit, birds being assholes, cats being dicks. Just random non-consequential things. I don't know if non-consequential is a word. Inconsequential is toilet paper not being the right direction, observational humor in a ranty, upset fashion that makes it sound like it's the worst thing in the world. I love doing that show. It's a lot of fun. There's a lot of videos that are completely locked behind the paywall. At $1 on Patreon and YouTube, $1 you get access to 300 videos. Adam Rantz, it's got movie feud stuff. It's got The Cringe, which is another show I'm bringing back to TikTok as a series, but that's way down the road. I'll talk about it when I actually get it done. But for right now, check out Adam After Dark, trying to get to that first 1,000 subscribers on YouTube. I'm going to be putting out at least one video a week there. That's the goal. This is still very much the focus. That was a lot to cover. I was shot out of the cannon, but I just want to end with things are okay at home. Lindsay's doing all right. Still don't have answers. Mithril's awesome. It's been a great boon to this economy, to my mental state. We just got to get it in a right place for everyone. We just got to make those videos a little bit more exciting and engaging for more people to watch so we can pull them into the channel, so we can lock them in. And one day, I can say, you know what? This YouTube thing, it was worth all the trouble. It was worth the hustle. We made it. And that Mithril membership actually will help me get there is the goal. Okay, anyway, that's it. That's everything I believe. And yeah, thank you guys once again for all the support. Please like, please sub, notification bell. I forget to mention that. The notification bell has not been rung. Only 10% of my subscribers have rung that bell, so that's another thing I have to point out. And hopefully I see you next time. Take care.