In this year's review, Baelnorn reflects on their content creation journey across YouTube, streaming, and writing, noting a surprising net positive outcome. They delve into specific goals and outcomes for each content type, including increased YouTube consistency, challenges with Let's LARP videos, and the decision to revive short-form content. Baelnorn also candidly discusses their personal life, highlighting significant mental and physical health improvements, including overcoming housing instability, embracing physical activity, and progress in managing anxiety and depression. The review concludes with a comparative analysis of content performance, excluding misleading short-form video statistics, to reveal genuine growth in viewership and engagement.

Now that 2024 is nearly over, I’m excited to bring you my Year in Review. It’s been a tradition going back to 2019 (I did miss one year). I have been looking forward to working on this blog over the past month; reviewing my goals for the past year few years and comparing it to where I’ve found myself at the end of this year.

I’ll be looking at the core of my content, YouTube Videos, Streaming and Writing in individual sections. I have to say I was surprised by what I found. It was a net positive. I’ll be mention trends, but few numbers. If you want to see some number breakdowns you can look at the Year’s Analytics at the end of the blog.

Additionally, I’ve added a large section about my personal life. It was suggested I write down my successes by my therapist, so I figured why not include it in the blog! Unlike with my content, I’m not writing any personal goals for the next year.

YouTube

2024’s Goals

I had a lot of momentum into 2023 but by the end it had mostly vanished and I was struggling going into 2024. I set some soft goals for 2024, mostly increasing my video cadence, making sure I got back on track with posting weekly videos. At the end of 2023 I was faulting a little bit.

In addition to making sure I posted once a week, I wanted to focus on creating more Let’s LARP and LARP Chats videos. I also wanted to get back into making shorts, as I saw that as away to increase my channels stats.

How It Turned Out

2024 turned out alright, I managed to post every week without much issue, but I did not get back to creating shorts. My consistency did pay off though as I saw increased views and watch time for my normal video content. I mostly felt like I was in a holding pattern for most of the year.

I did manage to do more LARP Chats than 2023 but only by one. I did a total of five, which is fewer than I had hoped for. When it came to Lets LARP videos, I didn’t manage to stay as consistent, having only made one early in 2024. I’m more upset that I let the Let’s LARP videos fall by the wayside than I am with the Shorts.

Goals For 2025

I am in a better place, mentally, at the end of 2024 than I was at 2023, although I did have some worries about burnout in the fall. Going forward I don’t think I have to worry about not posting on a weekly cadence. If all I post is foam fighting content, I can maintain consistency without much issue. I didn’t have that confidence going into 2024.

I would like to make sure I have at least six LARP Chats in 2025. That is one more than in 2024. It should be pretty easy to achieve. For Let’s LARP videos, I am going to aim for at least three in 2025.I would like to do more, but it is the hardest thing to produce. I only managed one in 2024 so I think three is a reasonable increase.

Shorts, I need to do them, they would help with increasing my watch time and my sub numbers, which I need both to get to the point of monetization. The problem is, for the most part, videos and shorts operate on different algorithms and it’s like playing two content games. Getting back to posting two shorts a week isn’t reasonable for 2025 but I will make a goal to make at least two shorts for each LARP Chats videos.

Streaming

2024’s Goals

My goal for streaming in 2024 was very simple; stream more Baelnorn and Friends. I switched from Twitch to YouTube in 2023 and it was a net positive. I also started making clips from my live streams in 2023 and while I didn’t explicitly state it in my End of Year Blog, I wanted to continue to make clips.

How It Turned Out

Technically, in 2024 I streamed more Baelnorn and Friends, but only by one, for a total of six. It became pretty difficult to schedule my usual people and I had to branch out. I also started doing themed Baelnorn and Friends. It was no longer just shooting the shit about random stuff. I had plans.

Additionally, in August, I started live streaming fighter practices. I streamed a total of 14 Dodo’s Dojo Streams in 2024 and it would have been more if my car didn’t die in November. I’m sure it had some impact on my stats, but viewership was low compared to Baelnorn and Friends. Half the reason I live streamed fighter practice was to allow me the chance to analyze my own fights.

Goals For 2025

My goals for next year mirror the goals I had for 2024, stream more Baelnorn and Friends! I’m going to set the goal of at least six streams. That is only one more, but it also hits the threshold of at least every two months. Additionally I will continue to have themes and make clips out of the streams. I will also continue to go to fighter practice, when I can and stream those.

I want to set the goal of streaming at least one Dungeons and Dragons campaign on Twitch. It’s something I’ve been trying to put into motion for the last few months and it looks like it may actually happen. I’m aiming for a season containing eight to ten streams.

Writing

2024’s Goals

Out of the three pillars of my content creation, YouTube, Streaming and Writing, writing is the one that has taken the backseat. This has been fairly self evident for the past few years. At the end of 2023 I talked about setting the goal of finishing my novel’s rough draft in 2024 but even at the time I wrote about how doubtful I was I’d do that.

I also wanted to continue to write my Dungeons and Dragons content. There was a soft goal of publishing some content, but I also sounded doubtful I would accomplish that.

How It Turned Out

I did not finish the rough draft of my novel, although I did manage to make two edit passes on what I did write and I had a lot of fun doing that. I also worked a little bit on a short story I had started in 2023. I even worked on editing an old high fantasy novel’s draft that I had finished many years go.

I did continue to create Dungeons and Dragons content, mostly because I continued to run games. Due to this I have several good starts on supplements and some that are even complete rough drafts. However, I did not post any supplements. The most I posted was two D&D Character Write U p Packets.

Something I didn’t talk about going into 2024 was my blog. In 2023 I used it but I had long since stopped doing my semi-weekly blogs. The website was mostly a way to centralize my content and I’d occasionally make posts. In 2024 I doubled the amount of blogs I wrote compared to 2024 and set a mid year goal of posting once a month and I pretty much achieved that.

Goals For 2025

I feel about as hopeful about my writing content in 2025 as I did for my writing in 2024, which is to say, not very. I, of course, would like to finish my novel’s draft but I’m still unable to figure out how to fill in the gabs that are missing. Part of overcoming that is to just sit down and force myself to write. I do see myself doing some editing though.

I will set a hard goal of seeing my high fantasy novel see the light of day. I had been planning on posting it on Kindle Vella, but as Amazon is discontinuing it, that is no longer an option. Luckily, Puck saw my post on FB, lamenting the demise of the platform and he pointed me towards a new site to sue, Royal Road.

I have already started posting on website. If you want to start reading the Baelath Chronicles, you can do so HERE. I hope to post about once a week, I already have a good backlog of posts ready to go, so I hope I’ll be able to keep up with that goal. I’m excited to make inroads into a new community, they even have an old school forum! You should join me, it’s free!

As to my blog, I want to continue doing that but I don’t want to set a hard number of blogs. I want to continue to share my foam fighting journey and when I’m able to continue that I will further write about it. I’d like to post every month or two.

Personal Life

This is a new section for my yearly review. It was suggested by my therapist that I write down my achievements and progress over the last year so I thought I’d do it in this blog. Unlike the other sections I won’t be setting any specific goals for the coming year. I just want to talk about the positive mental health things that have happened the past year.

Setting the Stage

I want to talk about an event that happened earlier in the year that really helped set the stage for the improvements I’ve had. The first one, and probably the most important one is that I got onto Section 8, a government program that pays a certain amount of the rent based on your income. This is the first time since my mother’s passing that I have had any stable housing.

Not having to worry every month if I’ll be homeless has been a lot of weight off my shoulders. Until I didn’t have to worry about it, I didn’t realize just how much it affected me. With that worry gone it’s really freed up my mind to focus on other, less immediate issues, particularly those surrounding my health, both physically and mentally.

Forced Physical Fun

Earlier this year I was blessed with the chance to once again journey to London. The trip turned out to be a turning point for my physical health. Before the trip I lived a very sedentary life. I didn’t go for walks, I didn’t participate in any physical activities at LARP and it had been like that for years. Just walking around my apartment I felt physically weak. It wasn’t good. The London trip changed all this.

In London we didn’t have a car, we had to walk everywhere! Just in the first day I walked over 13k steps and we did the same the second day. It was hell. Don’t get me wrong, the trip was amazingly fun. We spent two weeks in London, with a few trips out of town and I got to see some friends I hadn’t seen since my last Europe trip 5 years ago. But I was in my own personal hell, physically speaking, when it came to walking for that first week.

By the second week I was feeling much better about all the walking and in fact, when I got home I realized I was feeling, physically, pretty good. The trip inspired me to continue that progress. I started walking more at home and most importantly it got me to pick up the sword once again.

If I didn’t go on that trip I don’t think I’d be on the foam fighting journey I’ve found myself on this past year. When I started going to fighter practice, it was rough, I couldn’t fight long, both because my cardio wasn’t there and my arms were to weak to swing the sword for very long.

To combat this I started lifting dumbbells to strengthen my arms, stretching daily to improve my back health so I was less stiff when I moved and when walking I made a point to increase my gate so I could have better movement when fighting. Then in the last month I’ve started doing crunches on a daily basis. Small things, but after doing them for so long I can feel the difference from before my trip to London.

Mental Health Stigmas

There is something of a stigma surrounding mental health. I think the only way to remove that stigma is to talk about the struggles and highlight the impact it can have on a person. I have tried my best to not shy away from talking about my own struggles, but even then I don’t talk about it nearly as much as I talk about my content and physical health. With that in mind I wanted to spend a good amount of time talking about my struggles and the successes I’ve had this past year.

Anxiety

Anxiety is a weird weird one for me. While I have known the definition for a long time, I didn’t know what anxiety, as a mental health issue was till about 10 years ago. I didn’t realize the thoughts I was having in my head weren’t normal. I took a long time to get a handle on my anxiety issues, especially with it being compounded by bouts of depression.

Hell, until about that same time I hadn’t had anyone really explain panic attacks.. When I did, I realized I had had several panics attack throughout my life. A few of those times I even thought I’d been having a heart attack I had gone as far as seeking out medical help. (I was fine, no heart attacks).

Through medications and therapy the last few years I’ve made improvements on the anxiety front. This year is especially notable when it comes to overcoming this. I no longer have nights where I lay awake in bed with racing thoughts about some random argument from years ago and over anglicizing it to death.. I can, with comparable ease, get my mind to move on from casual, but terribly anxious thoughts.

Most notably, this has shown itself when dealing with my broken down car (I have a GoFundMe to get my car back in working order, if you’re interested). I hate phone calls. I won’t answer a call unless I know the person and to be honest even that’s new. For years I wouldn’t even answer calls from people I knew. I wouldn’t call it a phobia, but I do fear the experience. I think it has something to do with worrying about not being able to express myself well. There are physical cues you can’t see or use when over a phone and to add further issues I don’t always do well at orally communicating.

There is certainly a time, not that long ago, where I wouldn’t have been able to make the call to get my car towed, or to arrange for my car to be worked on. I still prefer to go into the mechanics when I can, but I’ve been able to communicate using the phone and within a reasonable time from. That’s a huge improvement!

Emotional Understanding

Emotions are a weird thing for me, I cognitively understand them and I know the various verbiages well enough, but connection the names of emotions to the emotions I’m feeling has been a long time issue. Some of this has to do with my ADHD. For some people it cause an issue with recalling the feeling of emotions. For example, when I have a happy moment, I can feel happy, but later, after that feeling passes, it can be difficulty, if not impossible for me to recall what that felt like. I didn’t know that wasn’t normal till a few years ago.

Additionally I spent a life time repressing my anger. As a child I didn’t have a handle on my anger and I chose to deal with that by repression. That coping mechanism is so ingrained that I could no longer really identified when I got angry. I would naturally suppress my anger without thinking and this often caused me to shut down. The long term affect of this, combined with the mentioned ADHD issue has made me feel emotionally muted if not emotionally dead.

With the help of my therapist we’ve been tackling this issue this year. We’ve spent time talking about how to properly identify my emotions and doing so with some breadth. I even have an emotional wheel with dozens of words to properly express my emotions. It’s a slow process, but I think there has been progress.

This is exemplified with a recent example. When I was putting together my GoFundMe campaign I decided to do a video for it. In that video I talked about my depression and how being able to use my car to reach my support network has probably saved my life more than once. After I recorded it and it was ready to be published I found I had hard time pressing the live button.

I’ve shared my struggles, here, on this blog, but I’ve never done so on YouTube, where I have a much larger audience. An audience which may not know of my issues. At first I thought it was anxiety causing me to hesitate, and I’m sure that is part of it, but there was another feeling I was having trouble identifying. Instead of ignoring it, I embraced it and did my best to figure out what it was. Turns out it was vulnerability.

It’s not a feeling I often have, I am naturally cautious when it comes to putting myself in a position of vulnerability. I was particularly pleased with myself with being able to identify this emotion, rather ignoring it and paying it no mind. I think it was a big step in my journey of understanding my emotions and dealing with them in a healthy way.

The Big D, Depression

I left this one to tackle last, as it is the big overreaching problem that I’ve had to deal with all my life; the other issues only compound it. It’s easier to identify negative instances in ones life than it is to recognize positive ones, so my memory of my depression might be skewed, but it certainly seems that, I’ve been dealing with depression the vast majority of my adult life. It started in high school and it feels like it has never completely gone away.

I’ve come to realize that my base line for if I’m feeling depressed or not, is lower than the average person. I can identify a few phases in my life where I would say I didn’t feel depressed, the most notable one is when I attended Portland State University. It’s probably how I managed to finally graduate, yet even then, the last year of school was a struggle and I almost didn’t make it.

After I graduated I slipped into a further depression, to the point that I was classified as disabled by the government. Honestly, given my history, I probably should have been given that classification much earlier in my life. These days my depression is much more managed but I still fear having something happen that would wreck the status quo, causing me to go into a deeper depressive spiral.

One such incident did happen this year, my car. Experience has taught me, something as devastating as facing the prospect of never having a car again could easily cause me to spiral, but it didn’t. So what has changed? Well, as I mentioned earlier, my anxiety is better controlled, my living situation is much improved and my physical health has improved my wellbeing. That, combined with medication and therapy, I think, has allowed me to much better manage this situation.

I was able to find a possible solution with the car and move forward, I wasn’t paralyzed with overwhelming dread about what was going to happen with me and I didn’t find myself laying in bed all day, sleeping, so I could escape reality. Just last year I experienced a bad depression spike that caused me to spiral into a state of constant despair. It is rather refreshing not to be feeling this with the current situation.

That is not so say I’m not experiencing depression symptoms anymore. I still have days where my energy is nonexistent and I find myself spending to much time in bed, depression napping. I still go through bouts of extreme sleep or insomnia. My eating can be erratic and I find it hard to keep up with basic cleaning and hygiene, although there is improvement in that both those areas. I still fear that any moment of adversity could trigger a big spiral, but given my success at handling my car issue, it gives me some hope that I might be able to better deal with future issues.

This Year’s Analytics

If you look at the end of the year stats for 2023 and compare it to 2024’s year-end stats you would think that my channel has taken a pretty big decrease across the board. The view discrepancy is huge, in 2023 it was at 190k views and 1.8k watch time. By the end of 2024 I only had 40k views and 1.4k watch time. The big discrepancy is due to shorts. In 2023 I made a lot of shorts, while in 2024 I did very few. Breaking the content down by the various types of content is worth doing in this instance.

2023 Video and Live Stream Analytics

In 2023, if we take out shorts and only focus on videos, it changes the stats a lot. The views in 2023 were only 18k and the watch time was 800 hours. For Live Stream the views were only 330 and watch time was 140 hours.

2024 Video and Live Stream Analytics

If we take out the few shorts of 2024 we get 23k views and 1k hours watch time, just for videos. Live streams accounted for 1k views and 220 hours watch time.

Comparing 2023 To 2024

Excluding the shorts from both years gives us a better metric to compare. The amount of videos and live streams is much more comparable. There were about the same amount of videos created from both years, but in 2024 there was 5k more views and 275 mere watch hours than in 2023. An overall positive.

Streaming also increased between the two years. There were 700 more views and 80 more watch hours. This could be due to the addition of the Dojo Streams, but I know the Baelnorn and Friends Streams did well this year too.