The new State of the Wall on the new website is new here! …errr NOW here.
Click “Read more” to check it out!
Schedule of Upcoming Episodes
6/2 – Speed Steer #5
6/9 – Batman: Jazz #2
6/16 – 2001: A Space Odyssey #2
6/23 – Comic Book Quickies #3
6/30 – 300th Episode
7/7 – Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters #1
7/14 – PSA Hell?: Batman: Shadow of the Bat #56
7/21 – Sinnamon #1
7/28 – US-1 #4
As always, the schedule is subject to change for one reason or another. In addition, I’m still contemplating whether or not there will be an upcoming episodes list on the new site. While I COULD place one on the sidebar as it was before, I’d prefer to keep the website as uncluttered as possible and you don’t really NEED the list permanently there.
The iTunes Situation
A number of people have been asking about iTunes, in particular why new episodes have not been appearing there. What’s the answer? I haven’t a clue. While iTunes distribution was offered a looooong time ago for Blip videos, they have not been an option for me for quite a while. And even then, since I don’t use iTunes, I don’t know how it works… but I’m under the impression that if you got the episode from iTunes, you were just downloading it without an advertisement being played or the like, so there really isn’t an incentive for me to put the episodes there unless it was a paid service.
Not that I’m AGAINST putting stuff up there, just that for those asking me about it, I’m not exactly encouraged to go and do it at the moment, sorry to say.
That being said, iTunes does offer another possibility that people have been throwing in my direction: digital downloads for the DVD. I know some people simply can’t afford the DVD or shipping options prohibit them from shipping to specific locations, sadly. As such, if anyone is familiar with iTunes distribution could let me know how this works, I’d like to know – would I just upload an ISO or would I put up the individual episodes and offer them at a combined price equivalent to the DVD?
Issues with the new site
The good news is that so far no one seems to be having any big issues with the new site! There have been occasional hiccups, like a certain browser not loading images properly or the occasional 404 page because it didn’t load properly, but so far everything is running pretty smoothly! We did have some issues with Disqus when we launched the site, but most of those problems seem to have been ironed out and it’s working well.
The site is designed to be mobile friendly, so feel free to try stuff out on iPads or the like! That being said, as has been pointed out, not all the videos are working on mobile devices, particularly apple ones. The reason for this is that a lot of older videos (mainly pre-100th episode stuff) were uploaded when FLV and flash were what was used for those videos. Now, eventually these ones seem to just break over time on their own, leading people who want to watch older videos to contact me and alert me that they’re broken so I can just reupload them and they work just fine afterwards, but I haven’t taken any active steps to reupload every video because, well, there are a lot of them. However, if I want people to watch the videos on mobile devices (well, I don’t want them to, but PEOPLE seem to want to do that, so I’m going to accommodate them) I’m going to have to do what I can there. So remember: if you spot a video not working, be sure to contact me on any of the various social media platforms available and alert me of the video’s failure and I’ll get to work reuploading it.
Another issue is tagging, which is also going to be time consuming. A lot of videos (particularly vlogs or one-off videos or brief series) are, at the moment, untagged because there were 750+ posts on the old blog that got transferred over and I hadn’t accounted for the new site when initially tagging them. Eventually they’ll get sorted out (and in particular there have been a lot of requests for Live Shows to get their own section, so that’ll probably get done), so in the meantime bear with us and let us know if a video needs to be tagged.
Feel free to keep offering suggestions for improvement of the site. While not all ideas will be implemented, feedback is important and we tried to design the site to be the most user-friendly and intuitive place to watch new and older material.
History of Power Rangers
No real update, what a shock. Obviously preparation for everything else, including the new DVD and website (and storyline) took priority. As always, History of Power Rangers is not over and as a side project I don’t prioritize it like I do other works.
However, people have also weighed in on the idea I threw out of taking a month off of AT4W to finish off History. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be doing it. While I still think it would have been a great idea, a recent event has convinced me how catastrophic it could be for me in terms of views. Several weeks ago, the SCI-Spy #5 review was accidentally scheduled for release on Tuesday instead of Monday, so it didn’t get put up on TGWTG until Tuesday. And while a lower viewcount could be partially explained by the fact that it’s not a “name” book like Batman, the viewcount for it was catastrophically lower than usual, meaning that people are used to seeing Atop the Fourth Wall at a certain time and a certain day. If I miss it, I risk losing a lot of views and possibly even risking having people forget about the series altogether if it’s gone for any extended period of time.
Unnecessary paranoia? Possibly, but I’d rather not take the risk if I don’t have to. So what’s the other alternative? Getting ahead of the game. For several weeks I was actually ahead of the game on episodes, with at least an extra week completely finished ahead of time around the time Midwest Media Expo was happening. I’ve fallen off of that due to spending time editing videos for the DVD, but I know I can get back on that now that I have a month in between conventions and no DVD to release. So if I can get ahead of the game again, I should be able to release Atop the Fourth Wall AND History of Power Rangers side by side with each other. We’ll see how it goes.
DVD Volume 2
The DVD appears to be arriving for people, so yay! Just remember that if there are any problems with your copy or about its arrival, feel free to send me an e-mail! And I’m sorry that Kunaki doesn’t e-mail you with a tracking number or confirmation details, but 99% of the time it went through just fine and there’s nothing to worry about. And of course whenever you’re using Paypal to order, be sure to double-check that you have an address listed in your Paypal account, otherwise the order won’t go through to Kunaki. So far we haven’t had very many of those this time around, but the possibility still exists, so if there’s a problem, feel free to contact me through the Contact page.
Live Shows/Pokémon Omicron
Obviously posts for these have been slower, especially the live shows since I’ve now done two of them. Needless to say I’ve just been busy with everything else around here, but progress is being made. The Pokémon Omicron Let’s Play has lots of raw footage that I need to edit, but I’m making progress. I now have four episodes that I’m sitting on and I intend to do a few more before I start releasing them again. Having a buffer is nice.
And as I have to frequently remind people: when I stop doing a major show that’s part of the site, YOU WILL HEAR ABOUT IT. I will make it a major announcement, I will go to the tallest building in the world, hook up speakers, and scream into the microphone that it’s ending. If it’s going to end, you will know. And at this time, NO, these series will not be ending until they’re FINISHED. A delay in a side project does not mean it’s stopping. Which brings me to…
Revolution of the Mask
No, this one ain’t stopping either. I will be uploading the original two issues as well as issue three and soon issue four to a new site THIS WEEK (even if it kills me) to finally get some momentum on this again. It might take another three years for issue 5 to come out, but damn it, it WILL happen.
AT4W: The Movie/AT4W Episode Guide
With the second volume DVD out of the way, my free time for AT4W projects turns to these. The movie is obviously the priority because it’s going to require the most effort involved in putting things together. The tentative plan is to finalize the script, secure the approval of the script by the actors involved, finish the budget (via learning prices for set construction and storage), launch a Kickstarter/IndieGoGo in November, and then film in March/April. As I said in the initial post where I announced the movie, this is all tentative plans and could be changed as things develop, especially since it’s likely to happen in working on a movie, but this is the plan as I see it. And no, I’m still not answering plot questions.
But that brings us to the other AT4W project that people expressed an interest in – the Episode Guide. The good news is that as I’ve been uploading the backlog of episodes at least a year old to Youtube, I’ve also been writing up Ruminations on those episodes (probably the most time-intensive part since it requires me to think back to older stuff that’s not the most exciting, but still was an episode). Some of them, especially bigger episodes, will be expanded due to the text limits put on the youtube text boxes for inputting information and had to be cut from what I had intended to post, so there’s one more incentive to get the book when it’s ready for release. Other things I’ll be including will be insights from other producers about specific episodes they may have been involved in, behind-the-scenes creation stuff for certain videos, humorous summarizations of the comics, favorite jokes and lines, and various other boring minutiae that only the most hardcore fans will actually give a damn about.
Upcoming Conventions
I will definitely have stuff for sale at these conventions as well as performing a live show at each! Other panels that may be occurring at them tends to be up for the con to decide, but those are definites. Plushie cybermats are always up in the air about whether I’ll have them with me due to the amount of time it takes to produce them, but otherwise I’ll have badges, prints, and of course both DVDs for the foreseeable future. And while Kunaki sadly does not give me an option to create a bundle deal for buying both DVDs together, I WILL have a bundle deal for them together at these conventions ($30 instead of $35).
As always, just remember that if there’s a convention you want me to attend, you need to get the convention to invite me – I just don’t have the money or time to go to conventions simply for my own enjoyment (aside from a local one or two that are more business trips for me to find new material to review). There may be another convention or two to announce later, but here’s the definite list right now:
Anime Midwest
July 4-6
Rosemont, Illinois
ConBravo
July 18-20
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Mythicon
September 19-21
Orlando, FL
