Delayed Input 102 Post-Show Assessment

This was a weird episode. I knew coming into the weekend that I wanted to do something about Mortal Kombat, because I was really excited about that new movie. Honestly if I loved the movie I probably would have made a very different show. Instead I got to those credits and was like "oh okay. Now what do I do?"
I realize I give the impression that this week's premise was "Franchise Score" first and then I picked MK, but that's all Hollywood lies baby. Really how it worked out was I just started scribbling down a bunch of loose Mortal Kombat thoughts, unrelated paragraphs basically, and then I tried to come up with some entertaining format that would give it some structure. Incidentally I think Franchise Score is a pretty fun idea and something I definitely want to repeat in the future. Not until the next season though, we can't do it twice in 8 episodes.

- There was actually a fourth (technically third) category in the Franchise Score for Current Performance. I used it to talk a bit about MK's sales and esports presence. A nice thing about this current schedule (this might actually be bad, not sure) is I was up in bed thinking, "Wait, didn't Tekken 7 sell a lot?" and I check my phone and yes, they did 7 million copies. And I didn't really have any recent hard numbers for MK. For most cases, video game sales aren't specific enough for me to really present any interesting data, and also it's not really funny to make fun of esports. Anyway I woke up the next day thinking "Buddy, that whole section is an easy cut." It honestly feels very good to delete big unfunny chunks from your timeline.

- So to make the show more visually interesting I implemented some news-style over-the-shoulder images. I actually requested a template from ArseQueef when he made the title animation and logo. It's nice, it fills up the left third of the screen with smooth motion graphics like what John Oliver has on Last Week Tonight. This is very embarrassing, but my computer couldn't render the entire graphic on top of everything else. It was making editing impossible so I had to just go with the single glowing box.  Don't worry, a new PC is on top of my shopping list, but also I actually don't mind the floating glowing box too much. For now at least.
- In terms of graphical style, I used white letters on a black background only because you can't mess it up. I might play around with a more distinct visual style in the future, for now it plays well to my last-minute-change-loving nature.

- Someone here in the Patreon comments asked how scripted this actually is, since it doesn't look like I'm reading. Honestly, fair question that otherwise wouldn't have occurred to me. So the episodes are highly scripted but when recording I just read a few paragraphs ahead and do my best to remember what I wrote. I absolutely mess up a lot but I think it helps the delivery in the end.

- I see a lot of questions about the lack of background music. This is something I'll be thinking about a lot this week. Excluding music was one of the first things I was certain about when I was planning the new show. I realized the sports shows and talk shows I watch don't include any music, and really when I look back at my old stuff the musical backing feels so weird to me, cheap maybe. However, people are feeling like something's missing, right, and you can't say that's wrong. So I don't know, I'll think about. All I'll say for sure is there's no way I'm going back to the ukulele.

- For next week's ep, I'm probably going back to the lav mic. There are enough comments saying they don't like the big obstructive mic and not enough comments saying the new mic sounds good, so that's an easy call. This week's 20 min video is also at the longer end of where I'm willing to go (though I think the reptile story is like 6 minutes long itself) so I'd like to be more snappy next week. Also I would like to try having one good joke.