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Friday, March 13, 2020

Recovery update

For a little more than a month now I've been back to work on a "new normal" basis, getting caught up on reviews and figuring out how to most comfortably & efficiently work in the all-new studio.  Viewer reaction to the new format has been shockingly positive.  I, myself, have felt perfectly comfortable being in front of the camera again, though I do yet need to work on physical access to review subjects from behind the filming rig when doing the traditional close-up shots.

I've been marking new videos honestly as "not for kids" and YouTube hasn't overridden this choice on any of them as yet, though I still don't know if I'm completely in the clear as COPPA settlement enforcement actions have not begun to date, to my knowledge.  I remain unfortunately confident that I need to leave most of my previous 10 years of work marked "for kids" forever, though, and that loss might thus never be recovered.  New legislative efforts in the US have been initiated, meanwhile, to expand the relevant definition of "kids" to everyone under 16 instead of 13, and separately to essentially end toy unboxings & sponsored "reviews" targeted at that broad audience group. Ouch.  I'm happy to mostly not be thinking about laws & such right now, though, as my focus is back on the content where it belongs!

With the review queue rapidly thinning out I've gotten the itch to return to custom work, and as if on queue, I was contacted this week about a promising private commission!  If it goes through (so far so good) I'll definitely seek permission to share the end results with everyone.  Of course I'm also more than ready to return to New Jang City.  I walk past and around it numerous times every day and last night stopped to really look at it for the first time in awhile, and it almost felt foreign to me.  Now I'm anxious to remedy that.

Oh, one last thing.  In spot-checking the settings on some of my older videos, I discovered that at some point YouTube has stealthily disabled the standard pre-roll ads on many of them, with no discernible pattern or reasoning.  They're not "demonitized" with the fabled yellow icon, they just have essentially a "show ads" checkbox toggled off.  The only way for me to see if a specific video has been effected is to go into its individual settings, and worse, there's no way to do a bulk update to fix this specific thing.  So, I've been going through my entire library, one video at a time, clicking a checkbox where needed.  I've processed 2,000 videos as of today, so I'm almost at the halfway point.

All told, things are going well.  I'm not back to normal, as the old normal is gone for good, but the new normal is shaping up alright.  Still a few pieces need to be shaped up to complete the puzzle, though.

2 comments:

  1. Awww. No longer Early access to the few of us still regularly checking on this blog?
    Joking aside, I'm afraid I can't commit to this kind of thing, but I agree this is absolutely the way you need to go if you're continuing on Youtube. Keep it all up JANG, hope you are all well, and all the best.

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  2. The review queue thinning out? Returning to custom builds? Jang, my man, before you do this please consider building and reviewing the UNSC Infinity by MCX! I (along with many other fans) have been waiting for this review for months!

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