Health Update & Operation: Lightning Fish

Attention Institute Personnel!

Over the last year I’ve needed to take a break from the Templin Institute to focus on my physical and mental health. It’s been a very difficult time, and I deeply appreciate your patience and understanding while our release schedule has been more unpredictable. I’m happy to report though, that this last month I crossed a few important milestones, and after some “test weeks” I’m ready to get back to work full-time.

This doesn’t mean however the Templin Institute will immediately be returning to our typical release schedule, in fact the content drought will continue for a while longer. That’s because the channel will be undergoing a top to bottom refresh/reboot codenamed Operation: Lightning Fish, launching on September 4th, 2024. 

Longtime members of the Templin Institute might recall this isn’t the first time the channel has been rebooted. In 2019, we launched Operation Thundershark with the aim of making our videos easier to edit while also updating their visuals. It was a significant update, but mostly on the backend.

Operation: Lightning Fish will be much more ambitious.

(mockup of new hud)

It has to be, because our videos have become much more complex since 2019, and while series like “Ranking the Galactic Powers of X” and “Building Your Battlegroup” have proven popular, they are very difficult to produce. So rather than just updating our visuals, and cleaning up our After Effects projects, Lightning Fish is a total redesign, incorporating everything we’ve learned since we started this channel to make more complex videos easier to produce. 

But our Mainline, Atlas, Arsenal, etc investigations, will also be redesigned. One of the few benefits to being sick all day, is that it gave me some time to think about how we produce our videos, and where there might be room for improvement. Perhaps it was a fever induced nightmare, but I believe I had a vision (possibly divine) for how the whole genre of lore videos might be pushed forward a bit. It probably won’t change the course of civilization, but I do think it presents a really unique opportunity for how we can make our videos more engaging and detailed. 

(mockup of Ranking the Galactic Powers of Star Trek)

Our investigations are famous for their distinctive hud/interface and one of the main goals of Lightning Fish is to make it more functional. The Templin Institute consists of many divisions, and in post-Lightning fish videos, we want them to be able to chime in with any additional relevant information, supplementing the main topic or providing some context. For an idea how this might work in practice, check out “Fleet Action Off Vega'', a video from our worldbuilding series in which we implemented a prototype of this new system.

But Lightning Fish won’t stop there. Every aspect of the Templin Institute will be getting a refresh, including Patreon rewards/tiers. We’ll have more to say about this in the future, but we’ve learned a lot over the last 7 years, not just in how to edit videos, but in how to run a channel, and we’ll be using this as an opportunity to implement some long overdue changes. 

Finally, I also want to use this next month to make sure that anyone missing rewards can get that sorted. You can always contact me here on Patreon, or at info@templin.institute. If all else fails, I am “swissknight” on Discord.

(very rough mockup of Building The Perfect Imperial Task Force)

Thank you again, and my apologies if communications this last year ever felt confusing or sporadic. Had I known how long my recovery would be, I definitely would have acted differently, but unfortunately I repeatedly thought I was through the worst of things, only to be proven wrong.

 So I couldn’t be more excited for the launch of Lightning Fish, it’s a chance to start fresh, while also advancing what the Templin Institute is, and what it can be. 

Marc