Ryan Bloom

Strange Encounters: Part One (Podcast)

As I often say: this was a long time coming. And this time, it's a little bit different.

If you listen to the podcast in question, a lot of it is self explanatory, but this is a one-off (technically two-off) podcast of... spooky stories, I guess? My mom had stories of things she saw and experienced growing up, and and they were always incredibly fascinating. So, for a lot of reasons, I wa...

The Video That Never Was: "Sonic & The Fear of Speed"

If it sucks, hit the bricks.

That's the mantra behind the PDF I'm releasing here. My original plan for this document was to provide a complete picture on this video, start to completion, but as you'll quickly learn, getting this to fruition was a long, arduous struggle. Some benefit did com...

BLTN Podcast: Listening for the Voices of the Void

About This Podcast

Among a subset of streamers, the indie horror game "Voices of the Void" provides nearly endless entertainment. But is there anything substantial to sink your teeth into, or is it just more "streamer bait"?

Why A Podcast?

The long and short of it is that I don't think everything has to be a full video. I still want to write articles, and sometimes I play ...

What am I streaming tomorrow? 4/17/2025

As always I have some choice paralysis. I come to you with seven options. Choose wisely. Or don't choose wisely. But do at least choose something, please.

EARLY ACCESS: So It's Your First Time Playing Sonic Unleashed... (Recompiled)

Formerly known as "10 Tips for Unleashed Recompiled." Never played Sonic Unleashed before? Playing it for the first time thanks to the Recompile for PC? Here's things that will make the game play a little more smoothly, bookended with some ruminations on the Recompilation project itself.

This version is about 95% of the way there. There's a few elements I need to tighten up, as well as ma...

Very Early Access: 10 Tips for Sonic Unleashed Recompiled

So like I say in the intro, I'm trying to strike while the iron is hot for this one, but with the way my situation is right now, that's a little easier said than done. I'm trying to get this out as fast as possible, though, but we'll see how fast that ends up being. The Shadow and Sonic Adventure 2 videos are still coming, too, I'm just trying to balance a lot of things, still trying to get com...

What am I streaming on 3/5/2025?

So I'm streaming tomorrow and several options are laid before me. I've started Crash Bandicoot 4 and do intend to finish that game on stream. We could go back to that.

A friend has requested she wants to see me do another run at Undertale and try to get the true ending (the true pacifist route, I guess). I'm not against that, and I'd planned on doing that on my own time eventually. I'm j...

Very Early Access: Is Shadow Generations the Best 3D Sonic?

So rather than slowly chip away at getting the SA2 Part 2 video up, I decided to act on getting this written while my feelings were still fresh. Most of what I want to say to set this up is included in the intro segment here... which, hey! New to Patreon: these intro segments. Basically, to diversify potential sources of income, I turned on Youtube Memberships, which are like their version of P...

Weird Patreon Shop Thing

Some of you may have gotten a second notification about getting access to the Mother 3 podcast twice. That's due to my decision to use Patreon's new shop tab to sell things like that individually. If you got two not...

BLTN Podcast: I Have Complicated Thoughts About Mother 3

About This Podcast Follow me on a three-year journey to unpack why I didn't really vibe with a lot of Mother 3. Is the game cynical? Am I viewing it from the wrong perspective? Have I run out of time to enjoy RPGs? Or did I just wake up on the wrong side of the bed? Why A Podcast? One thing I think could be interesting to do would be to write long-form content for bltn.net , but provide it for Pa...

BLTN Podcast: I Have Complicated Thoughts About Mother 3

About This Podcast

Follow me on a three-year journey to unpack why I didn't really vibe with a lot of Mother 3. Is the game cynical? Am I viewing it from the wrong perspective? Have I run out of time to enjoy RPGs? Or did I just wake up on the wrong side of the bed?

Why A Podcast?

One thing I think could be interesting to do would be to write long-form content for <...

Early Access: Gut Check: Sonic x Shadow Generations

Well, I didn't think I'd have an early access video for this one. I'm in a hurry to get this out fast, so before turning in for the night, I set this to do the final render first thing... which was an obvious rookie mistake. So here you folks go: while the actual final version of the video renders, you get to see the version with a handful of tiny mistakes as per usual.

The biggest one: ...

Very Early Access: This Painkiller Video Was Dead On Arrival

So nobody really seemed to be clamoring for this based on the last post, but it's also hard to tell what people do and don't want on the internet, given only maybe 10% of an audience actually engages with liking and commenting on things. So you're getting it anyway.

It also turns out that as far as unfinished scripts go, this is the last thing I got for now. Everything else in the tank is...

Very Early Access: The Myth of Parappa the Rapper

Digging through my Google Docs, here's another first draft I wrote. This particular draft is from May 2021, which I think was the same month my Mom started getting sick. However, this is one of those ideas that had been rattling around in the back of my head in some form ever since my Parappa stream in 2017. 2024-04-20 23:14:08 +0000 UTC View Post

Very Early Access: Shenmue Redux

Here's the other "script I've been sitting on for a long time for one reason or another." This one has a bit of a story behind it.

Why this got written

Many years ago, friend and patron Setsune suggested I could go back over and freshen up some of my first Youtube video reviews. I think she initially was only suggesting I keep the content the same, but revoice the same scripts and...

Very Early Access Version 2.0: The NiGHTS Documentary

So talking about it with a friend, he mentioned that the screen reader TTS in Microsoft Edge is supposed to be "extremely good." Microsoft is currently burning the candle at both ends trying to establish themselves in the modern AI hellscape, but that does mean that as far as text-to-speech goes, Edge's screen reader is actually probably the single best free option available right now....

Let's Try Something New: Very Early Access

Something I like to do during my writing process now is once I get to a certain point in a script, I have a text-to-speech plugin for my browser called Read Aloud that I use to listen to my text in someone else's voice.

The funny thing about Read Aloud is that it actually lets you use Google's premium WaveNet TTS, which norma...

Let's Talk

Where Have I Been?

So the patreon's been quiet, the channel's been quiet, and so on.

Long time supporters know that sometimes happens after the holidays. I've wrestled with a work/life balance for years when it comes to video production, and unless I'm close to the finish line on something, I usually cool my jets sometime around December and there have been years where I don't get...

Early Askcess: It's Been a While

Haven't done one of these in a minute. That's down to a lot of factors. Holidays mean less energy to queue tons of posts, and I don't like making too many of these posts when all I've queued is one or two things. New life stresses have also been getting in the way, too, making me less inclined to chat it up with people in asks. I'm also not entirely sure if anyone likes having early access to t...

Early Askcess: Getting Back To It

Wow, it's almost been a whole month since I wrote one of these? The issue at hand is that I want to have enough posts to make one of these worth while, but I kind of got trapped in a cycle of only queuing up 1-2 posts at a time, and usually in the minutes before going to bed. Not really enough to write a post about, and when you queue a post about 4-6 hours before it goes up, not really enough ...

Gut Check Sonic Superstars Art

Featuring:

• A clean version of the "One Fear" thumbnail artwork
• The original (much worse) thumbnail before I got the "One Fear" idea
• Don't Let The Sun Laugh At You
• The alternate universe Balan WonderLand box art

Early Access: Gut Check Quickie: Sonic Superstars

Since we're so close to release I figured I'd just shelve the Gut Check I started a couple months ago, but somebody was asking about it on Youtube. It put a bug in my ear and I wondered if I could just crank out something short and fast. 

And you know what? Turning a video around like this in a week feels really good. It would have been less than a week, even, but both my nephews hav...

One Whole Year?

I know we all like to joke about Pandemic Time Compression and how something that feels like "only yesterday" was in fact years ago, but this is getting ridiculous

(from an email Patreon just sent me)

Let me ask you something

So over a year ago now when I decided to try focusing more on Youtube, one of the things I was weighing was revamping my old "Every Sonic Game Rated" list from Giantbomb. Since then, Tier videos have kind of become a hot commodity on top of that.

And I keep rolling it around in my brain, thinking about it from time to time, and I've even done some preliminary organizational work on it. Bu...

Early Askcess: The Final Horizon Is Coming

Lot of questions are starting to mount about the upcoming Frontiers DLC. I actually have another one I did not answer in this batch because it literally just came in ten minutes ago and it's 4:30am. 

Anonymous asked: I'm glad Evan got to draw for Frontiers...teaser. unfortunately it's not enough for me. Ever since the Storybook titles and Chronicles, I a...

2023-09-20 11:36:51 +0000 UTC View Post