november and deadlines

Those who know me know that November is one of my least favorite months. It's not something that I can explain, but it bothers me nonetheless. So, what better month than to revive the stagnant Lachuger blog and YouTube channel right?

As the managing editor and one of the writers for Lachuger, I've been personally having trouble with identifying what the voice for what we create is. In the past it's been so much easier: I used to write most of the video essays and then the crew would all get together to play games together and stream or we'd find notable things to talk about on the "lachuger radio" (formally "take the l") podcast. The biggest issue that I've recently found with the way that we used to do things is the complete lack of consistency. This wasn't just with the sporadic schedule, but with the style and type of entertainment that we were hoping to provide to our audience: some videos were slapstick funny, some were ironic humor, and some were very serious videos.

It's worth mentioning that I'm not regretful of any of the content that was posted to Lachuger, regardless of if I was the driving force behind it. Sincere effort was put into a lot of these videos, not just by me, but by the other current, former, and associated members of the Lachuger family. That being said, these videos are now of a different era in the history of our content.

2023 was the beginning of this, not so subtle, shift in content. In that time, we've created some videos that I'm incredibly proud of, music that continues to fuel our collective creative drive, and streamed some really cool stuff.

So... What happened? Deadlines are both the greatest motivator and the greatest curse of any creative work. Up to this point, it has been an administrative decision to not have any deadlines for Lachuger videos, midnight apex music, or have a regular streaming schedule. This philosophy has, for the most part, worked for our music project, because of my personal beliefs when it comes to how "complete" a song is and the intentional perversion of "studio perfect" songs. Unfortunately, it has become apparent to both myself and Andrew that this philosophy has kneecapped our ambition to make videos, even if they are on topics that we're genuinely interested in. I can confidently speak for myself when I say that making content is still incredibly fun for me, it just has slipped down my list of passions in an uncontrolled fashion.

So, where do we go from here? Starting this month, we're going to return to weekly Friday uploads to the Lachuger YouTube channel. This is very much so a feeling out period where we can assess the amount of time and resources that we want to commit to content. This may mean that in following months that we switch to a bi-weekly schedule or if we feel like we have both the temporal and creative leeway, we may update more frequently on not just the main channel, but lachugerLIVE or, if pigs start flying, I'll start regularly streaming again.

I'm excited to bring Lachuger back in a manageable way and I'm excited for people to see what we've been working on behind the scenes for far too long.

To quote the old end screen, "new videos coming soon."

-liam