Update on Things

Hi everyone.

So when I made the last patreon post Lili and I were looking at getting a rental in Toronto. That ended up being a huge waste of time because we refuse to give over our entire identities to whoever the hell could be a landlord. They want everything now! Social Insurance Number, tax returns, access to your bank account history, and the list goes on. Maybe we're the unreasonable ones here but I really don't think so. It's not worth the risk for an overpriced rental.

We almost gave up and went to Plan C (throwing out almost all of our stuff and turning our apartment living room into a bedroom and our current room into a full office) but we took a final look at how we could get out of here and went way outside the box. And outside of the province.

Long story short: we got pre-approved for a mortgage on a house outside of Ontario. I flew to New Brunswick last Monday. I was there for a day viewing properties. I flew back, reviewed a bunch of video clips I took of the houses with Lili, and we put an offer on one of them. Yesterday that offer was accepted by the sellers.

This does *not* guarantee that we will get this house or that this process is finally over. Financing might fall through. The house might fail drastically on a home inspection scheduled for next week, but it's looking likely. It's a really cheap but comfortable house. It's so much cheaper than houses in Toronto it makes staying in this city feel like a huge scam. Thankfully, I can work anywhere that has fast internet! Somehow this small city has better internet than our current apartment. Go figure that.

Obviously this has taken up a lot of our time. I've still put a ton of hours into the God of War video. I've included a screenshot of my recording folder below. There's over a terabyte of video there just on God of War. I'm almost finished writing the script but editing comes after that. My guess is that it's going to come in at around 2 hours, but I'd prefer it to be shorter. I won't be leaving anything out though if I think it's important for the sake of run time.

Unfortunately there's another problem: I have a fairly bad ear infection from the flight. If you've watched the streams you might remember I was complaining about ear problems before. Turns out I had an infection in both ears that the flight exacerbated. I'm almost entirely deaf in my right ear as I'm typing this. I went to the doctor today (my appointment was for tomorrow but it got so bad I went to a walk-in clinic this morning) and got some drops and pills for it. So far it hasn't improved.

Of course an ear infection isn't that high up on the list of debilitating conditions but it does make it hard to concentrate, and I cannot record like this. Every time I speak I hear my own voice echoing from the right side of my head. I wanted to get a few streams in this week because I know people are missing them and it's just not possible.

I know this isn't ideal but there's nothing more I can do. The script is usually the last part of a project before I enter dragon-mode work state and churn it all out, especially the video editing. I don't have an ETA for this. When the infection clears I'll tweet it out and probably do a stream, then that late stage will start. I'm very sorry.

As for moving, we might have the house as soon as the first week of June. Then we'll have to go through moving our kids and dogs and cat to another province. It'll be a rough few days but then I'll have my own office on the second floor away from the kid's playroom on the first. I will finish up all current projects and then begin The Witcher. Is this post the kind of weekly updates you'd like to see during that time? Let me know. I'm not sure if I can keep it interesting but I think I might go dark a bit too often outside of Discord.

In the event that this house falls through and we cannot move then we will be giving up on it for the rest of the year. We'll activate Plan C after all and save up enough money to get something in 2019. It's going to be really bad if that happens but at some point you have to throw in the towel. We've spent so much time on this process already. We'll be fucking devastated if this falls apart.

I think that's everything. Hope you're all doing well. I think God of War will be a good video. I'm excited to get it done. I wish I could hear properly.

- Joe