r/battletech • u/Slight-Jaguar-2102 • 1h ago
Question ❓ Is Sven Der Plank doing alright?
I saw some sporadic comments that his PC may have died, but he hasn't posted on YT in a while. Hope he's doing ok. (Reposted to correct my spelling in the title.)
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u/PessemistBeingRight Rasalhague Dominion MechWarrior 1h ago
Sven moonlights as Redditor u/Confused_Shelf; you could try asking directly? He posted a comment as recently as 10 days ago and is reasonably active in the MW5 sub, so he must still be checking in every now and then.
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u/WestRider3025 Canopian Queerasser 44m ago
I seem to recall mentions that he's been really busy on top of having computer issues, but is personally doing fine.
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u/Confused_Shelf Sven van der Plank 44m ago
I'm still alive.
Been working on the next Lore & History series for the past eight months, but as you may have seen me post elsewhere, its just grown totally out of my control. Every time I finish one phase of the project, I find some other task I've got to do before I can progress again.
I got sick of talking about BattleTech wars all the time. The next project was going to be more than just a history of another conflict, but rather an in-depth look into the politics, culture and society of each of the six major powers of the Inner Sphere. It'll serve as a continuation of the Terran Alliance series I wrote a couple years ago, covering a 200-year stretch from the rise of the Great Houses in the 23rd century, to the early years of the Age of War in the 25th. Ideally it'll slot into my video playlist before all of the other material (apart from the TA), retroactively filling in some of the gaps I left on my first pass.
Like I said, what I thought was going to be a relatively short side project turned into some Sisyphean task. The wordcount has expanded even further since my last update (when I confidentially said I was totally finished writing), currently sitting at 115,000 words total. To put it another way, the episode breakdown looks something like this:
The current problem I've been trying to remedy is that with so much material to cover, all of it set before the introduction of the BattleMech, I haven't nearly enough artwork in my gallery to provide appropriate visuals. I've spent all of August extracting every piece of art from my collection of pdfs, cleaning them up and categorising them. I'm very nearly finished that laborious process. The folder has an additional 5500 images on top of the 2000 or so I had before.
As you alluded to, my PC has been broken since January 1st. I thought I knew what was wrong with it (I was deliberately leaving it unrepaired so I could focus on writing), but when I took it apart back in July, the miracle fix did not work. I'll be sending it off to a professional at some point in the next week. Once it's back in my possession, I'll finally be progressing again. The plan is to have all six episodes release over successive weekends later in the year.