Restarting projects and Pickles

Last Friday, I set three goals: script, record, and release my Linux follow-up video. I did that. The second goal was to make a large batch of spicy pickles and can my remaining tomatoes. I have almost completed these two goals. Saturday morning, I started working on the third goal: starting work on the "10 Years of Following One Dwarf" video, featuring the fortress "Paddleboats" and our lovely main character, Cog.

Initially, editing was going well. I had recorded a 5-minute intro that had an interesting style, starting with some history and then moving into talking about Cog and the beginnings of the fortress. I put about 8 hours of work into trimming VODs and editing. Re-watching the parts I had put together, I realized that the work I had done felt like a totally different video. This was reinforced by my feedback crew in my hidden Discord channel. Last night, I decided to do a save-as and start a new project. There was a reality where perhaps the video could have been done today or tomorrow, but this is simply not possible anymore. I will put more work in next weekend, starting Friday. I do have some art from GoblinKing I can share as a tease, though!

It was starting to look a bit unlikely that I'd have it done this week anyway, due to the amount of time I have spent pickling and canning this weekend. I have packed 8 1L jars with tomatoes, and at the time of writing, I'm about to pack five 500ml jars with spicy pickles. If anyone is interested, the recipes are quite simple. I've been reading the Bernardin "Complete Book of Home Preserving" to get these recipes. No, this is not an ad, and I did pay for it. I am preserving the tomatoes by filling 1L jars with blanched, peeled, sliced tomatoes, 1 teaspoon of pickling salt, 2 tablespoons of bottled lemon juice, water, and a basil leaf.

Here's a link if you'd like to look into it for yourself: Bernardin Complete Book on Preserving

Additionally, I am also working on drying the remaining green tomatoes and the blighted, partially ripe tomatoes. Those will either go into recipes at home or be taken camping.

The recipe I am using for pickles has a bit more going on. It is lightly modified from the original to be spicy. The recipe is called "Lemon Cucumber Pickles." I am using lemon cucumbers and hot peppers instead of green cucumbers and red peppers. It calls for 14 cups of cucumbers, peeled and sliced, 4 large peppers, 2 tablespoons of pickling salt, 7 bay leaves, 1 tablespoon of peppercorns, and 1 teaspoon of whole allspice. Additionally, it requires 1 1/3 cups of white vinegar, 1 1/4 cups of granulated sugar, and 3/4 cup of bottled lemon juice. You’ll also need 1 large lemon, sliced, and 6 cloves of garlic! At the time of writing, the cucumbers and hot peppers are sitting in an ice bath with salt. I'll post the result next week!

I still have to start some dilled beans, a green bean pickle with dill. I also have about 20 kg worth of beets that need pickling, so I'll be at this for a bit. If it was not obvious, this is part of the reason why the video got restarted. I'm heavily distracted by the extremely time-sensitive project known as "DON'T LET THE FOOD ROT." It's been keeping me busy.

Have you ever done any sort of food preserving? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

YouTube has done something strange this week. Shorts have taken a nosedive off the map into the unknown void of irrelevancy. Most of my shorts until this point would normally gain anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 views in a week. The last batch of uploads made by both me and TheSuitedGiraffe has struggled to hit 2,000. The last one I uploaded did not even clear 1,000. It is puzzling, to say the least, but not really life-destroying. It mostly feels like I just need to upload at a different time of day or flip some setting I don't know about.

Overall, stats are good, though. The channel got 89,149 views in the last 7 days, down from last week, as we slowly slip away from the last few big uploads. Still within normal grounds, though. Twitch averages are up this week! Likely because of the new fort interest. We sat at 185 average viewers this week, much better than last week's 150 average. Something kind of exciting has happened as well: the average views on both "Godlytombs Worst Biome" and "Goretusk Cult Fort" have gone up recently! "Godlytombs" is also closing in on 300,000 total views and should land that at some point later today.

As for the schedule, I'll be streaming Tuesday to Friday this week. I'll restart the 10 Years POV video after I finish writing this blog post.