It's been quite a long time since I gave a comprehensive overview of my overall status with work, projects, backlogs, & plans, so I'll start with a hyper-compressed "Previously on..." style summary of the most important moments & milestones to at least get you caught up to recent times. There's a lot to cover...
My Timeline
1970s: Born
1980s: Raised
1993: Joined the online world in earnest (local bulletin board systems)
1995: First webpage
1999: First full-time permanent design job. Picked up 2 hobbies on the side, LEGO & radio controlled vehicles. Quickly decided I needed to reduce that to just 1 hobby, and chose RC cars. Oops?
2006: Started my first YouTube channel
2009, February: Did a presentation evangelizing standards-based design to the ~100-member creative team at PayPal. The deck was entitled "It's like Legos" (yes, I know) and included a Bionicle prop as a negative example about abandoning standards. Heh.
2009, March: Started publishing photos of custom Bionicle MOCs. Hrmph.
2009, September: Completed standardization & componentization of nearly all user-facing PayPal app screens/pages, 2 months ahead of schedule. Huge cross-functional effort, way bigger deal than it sounds like. Up to then, every single page was individually coded for years without so much as a consistent "Ok" button.
Also 2009, September: Exited the design world & became full-time RC car "content creator" (a term we didn't yet use back then) via my own community forums, reviews & custom projects on the 'Web, and YouTube.
2010: Started a LEGO-specific YouTube channel on the side
2013: Lost most capability to continue my practical RC work (factors beyond my control), switched fully to LEGO while simultaneously diversifying from the Bionicle & Hero Factory stuff into traditional bricks.
2013-2017: Success.
2018-2019: Algorithm & rule changes wreaked havoc on a lot of us YouTubers, repeatedly. I worked doubly hard to save a rapidly sinking ship. Created a 2nd filming space, launched 3 new channels, eventually got everything back on track. And then...
2020: YouTube settled a federal lawsuit for its flagrant violation of a 20-year-old law protecting the privacy of children online. YouTube got a financial slap on the wrist & passed all real punishment & future liability onto creators, with those making "mixed audience" content (like me) hit hardest. My income was quartered overnight. It would take years to discover the true depth & severity of the damage. Everything on my 10-year-old, 1.2 million subscriber main channel with over 1 Billion video views (with a 'B') across 4,000+ original videos was rendered unusable, completely devalued irrecoverably, permanently. Also lost was one of the channels launched in 2018 to help recover from previous maladies, as well as my fun side Playmobil channel.
2021-2026: Live streaming, Patreon, Twitch, 3rd & 4th filming spaces, 200+ Gundams & plastic models, $200,000 USD raised for charities. Due to time constraints, I had to abandon another of my 2018 channels. Realizing viewer opinions were driving the development of my LEGO city, I decided to halt that project & redo it my own way. LEGO reviews were exclusively published on a new, dedicated niche channel, and eventually all old reviews were moved over -- manually, one by one. Alternate brick brand videos got their own channel, and legacy reviews of LEGO-compatible sets were transferred there.
This is ludicrously oversimplified, but I hope it resolves the biggest viewer questions, especially those of the "Why did/didn't/do/don't you do _____" variety. The answer is, because of all of that up there.
Today
Against all odds, I'm still a "content creator" with a focus on plastic brick-based construction sets, but an old fan stopping by for the first time in years might be very confused, so let me share the current lay of the land.
On the old JANGBRiCKS channel I now only cover new LEGO sets reveals plus occasional special topics like comparisons between LEGO & alternatives. Old reviews & city/MOC videos live exclusively on newer, niche-specific channels.
I still do faceless, unsponsored LEGO reviews against a white background with faint musical accompaniment.
I'm reviewing more LEGO-alternative sets than ever, but still in the same format.
There's a small-group livestream for Patreon every Saturday that's now also open to some tiers of YouTube channel members & Twitch subscribers.
My Twitch channel is very active with regular 4-5 hour public livestreams in late afternoons/evenings (per New World timezones). Usually one of these per week is dedicated to non-brick work like plastic models, which I'd really like to do more of. I have also started multi-streaming to the appropriate YouTube channel for a given day's topic, though video quality is lower and chat is only open to channel members (Twitch is free to all).
I regularly participate in charity fundraising events, and this has been a rare unmitigated success story. These are spread throughout each year & integrated into regular livestreams.
The LEGO city room is being emptied completely to make room for a better live streaming space. The goal is to upgrade the viewer experience from something I'm satisfied with to something I'm finally proud of. This will include a significantly smaller, but wildly better diorama-style installation with the working custom LEGO trains & such. It will also provide a dedicated area for plastic model building so I can waste less time on cleanup & conversion between streams, and I'll no longer need to go to a different part of the house to grab paints or use an airbrush.
Remaining challenges
After 7+ years of stressful overtime to combat existential threats to my entire work life, I seem to have found my footing again, but not everything is rosy & fun. The number of struggles I've endured (I left out a lot for brevity) has me perpetually suspicious that the next sudden collapse of my world is just around the corner. More concretely, though, some specific damages have been incurred, and some long-term issues have intensified with time.
I work 7 days & nights/week. By that I do not mean 5 days/week plus answering some emails on weekends. I mean I have not experienced anything remotely resembling a weekend in any way in many years. I also engage in close to zero recreation beyond watching a couple shows with my wife at dinnertime before heading off to my 2nd and/or 3rd work shift.
I sleep as little as 4 hours/night, up to an absolute maximum of 6 when I'm lucky or when the chronic sleep deprivation reaches an acute state. The cumulative deleterious effect on my health is quite serious, or at least that's what doctors say.
I currently receive 2 forced "non-work" days per month due to promises made in exchange for the achievement of really high community charity fundraising goals. These are essentially critical stop-gaps that allow minimal recovery so that I can work harder, longer, and more efficiently all other days & nights. In practice, those days typically involve one extended sleep session offset by frantic work on the non-content-creation tasks I don't have any other time to address. I cannot simply "stop that & get more rest" as outsiders often glibly suggest. Every day I don't work simply puts me another day behind, and my backlog is already positively crushing. Speaking of which...
Reviewing hundreds of products per year requires purchasing & assembling those hundreds of products. Carefully processing this constant stream of plastic mass after the videos are published is an overwhelming task that I've not been able to prioritize highly because viewers care about what they see on their screens. Everything that happens behind the scenes is of no consequence anyone but me, so long as I keep pumping out reviews as fast as humanly possible. Shelves fill. Boxes stack up. Floors become treacherous obstacle courses. It's usually a struggle to keep up, but in recent months I've frequently reserved an extra half hour here, extra hour there, to make positive progress against this overwhelmingly chaotic buildup.
YouTube comments remain contentious and affect my productivity & ability to enjoy anything I do.
To protect my viewers from truly atrocious abuse (from other viewers), I have always manually moderated comments.
Unbelievably, YouTube does not provide tools to enable delegation of this task. Designated moderators cannot access a channel's moderation queue (!), they can only browse through videos like normal users and delete bad comments if they happen to find them by checking every comment & every nested comment thread, one at a time, manually, constantly.
"Haters" are not the problem. They are easily identified and permanently blocked, period. The main issues are regular members of the LEGO/brick fan community personally assaulting my character or that of other commenters (or entire swaths of humanity) with outrageous depth & specificity over miniscule differences of opinion about plastic toys & collectibles.
Turning off comments is not an option -- people hate it, YouTube punishes the reduced "engagement" with less recommendations (rapidly killing the channel), and it spawns increased off-channel vitriol.
All I can do is continually work to cautiously reduce my level of care for what viewers think, which feels awful and completely wrong. I can't only be receptive to positive & supportive comments and ignore & dismiss any I disagree with, as I'm pretty sure that would make me... a bad person.
Lastly, I can't conspicuously omit all mention of the LEGO Ambassador Network, aka LAN. A brilliant, unbelievably low-cost contracting wing of LEGO marketing, this program has dramatically transformed brick-building social media across all platforms. Most popular creators have been gobbled up by the program, each doing dozens upon dozens of hours of promotional work for the company every month in exchange for very low $10,000s, and often even just $1,000s of yearly payment in product. With surgical precision they publish nearly identical takes on official LEGO press releases and curated set designer self-"reviews," all at the exact same company-scheduled moment, weeks to months before the products are available to buy. Their own in-hand sponsored reviews saturate viewer feeds weeks to months in advance of retail availability as well, sometimes within 24 hours of the initial reveals or, in the case of the slow-moving BrickLink Designer Program, perfectly timed to drum up preorders. Meanwhile, these very sponsored reviews are almost never properly marked as such, thereby clearly & flagrantly violating platform terms of service, a bannable offense and deception of viewers evidently nobody is reporting and LAN management is happy to overlook (I told them about it privately and they did nothing). This has left simply existing as one of increasingly few independent, non-sponsored reviewers especially challenging; by the time we can get our hands on a product, most of the views have been soaked up and most viewers no longer care. Many of us have been driven off completely. A handful remain. I'm still fighting the good fight.
In Conclusion, for Now
It's been a whirlwind over here for years, but I'm finally, truly in a better place. One day I woke up to abject hopelessness & despair, 10 years of hard work nearly entirely invalidated, and now I see light at the end of some proverbial tunnels while I've actually emerged from others. Through all of this, many of you have kept coming back, and I humbly thank you. I appreciate not only the material support through Patreon, channel memberships/subscriptions, and use of my affiliate links (huge, huge help by the way), but all of the small, genuine positive interactions like a little, "Hey thanks for this video" here or "Just gonna lurk in the stream" there. Against a backdrop of big bads & extended stresses, the little nice moments stand out more than ever & provide palpable boosts to morale.
In the next handful of months I don't plan to make any big changes to my video formats or release cadence, but the livestream transformation, relaunch of the LEGO city project, and continued cleanup of years of behind the scenes mess will add some check marks to the "win" column and maybe even erase some smaller losses.
Onward and... at least horizontal. Maybe even a few more ticks upward if my luck doesn't run out.
