2023.07.03

No video yet, but I just wanted to keep everyone in this club informed on progress and status on things. 

My most recent video was a game analysis from AlphaZero vs Stockfish and although it is a video I liked, I think it was a bit long and a bit advanced in subject matter for my core audience. For my next video, I want to make a video which beginner to intermediate players may benefit from. 

Maybe I shouldn't share this yet, but treat it as a reward for being in this club and keeping up to date with my YouTube channel My next video planned is about how to choose your chess opening; in this video, I especially had the beginner target audience in mind. In the last 2 weeks, I've probably posted in like 5 or 6 different forum threads on the topic of what chess opening to play, or which opening is "best." I figure that a video like mine can help them answer those questions (and save me time from re-typing more or less the same things and sharing the same resources). 

For this video on openings, I just recorded the main portion now. It is already after 5 am here and I've been up all night (chess analysis with a chess.com friend, then two discord voice calls with two other chess friends and then finally the recording I just now completed), so I should be going to sleep soon. Tomorrow (well, technically today, since it is 5am Monday) I plan to create my video thumbnail, create the YouTube chapters in my video and then make my few finishing touches before publishing. 

For the thumbnail in my last video, I experimented with having myself in the thumbnail. My hope was that I might have more of a consistent branding with my own face in each thumbnail, since that is unique to me. However, I don't think my channel is ready for thumbnails like this. I love how that picture and thumbnail came out, but it was a lot of work to create and photos would really look better with proper lighting such as a ring light. Even sunlight didn't look good for thumbnail photos, so I think I'll keep this idea stored away for when I might invest into better lighting as my channel naturally upgrades. For this video, I'll probably just create a thumbnail similar in style to my last 4 videos, but without myself in it.

All right, so that is the current information. Comment down below if you like these announcements to keep everyone informed on events.