The End of CAC

Hello everyone! This is RainbowPlasma the organizer, host and former editor of the Cutie Art Crusaders podcast. Today I am announcing the upcoming end to the podcast we've been a part of for almost 4 years.

It's been a long time since we've done any sort of announcement through DeviantArt, but given the nature of this week's episode I wanted to write something up so the details are out there in such a way that people don't miss it just because they miss an episode. A journal also gives me some time to talk in detail without hijacking the entire podcast for 10-15 minutes.

Around October of last year, there were some conversations that were had amongst the four of us running the CAC to the tune of "the podcast is getting a bit stale". Admittedly, I'd been thinking similarly at the time. We'd been working on something for 3.5 years, in an area that we've all but completely explored. The CAC started as not only an art appreciation podcast, but also an educational one. In the first few years, we learned with our audience and shared our own opinions mixed with some more academically accepted ideas that we incorporated along the way. After years of doing this, we've hit a wall. The remaining artistic concepts to explore just aren't something we're very interested in exploring, and they're also concepts that don't translate as well to the casual yet educational vibe we've built with the show.

Additionally, editing has become an absolute chore. When we started, I was the sole editor and it would take me about 4-6 hours to edit one episode of CAC. Shortly after I started, Bernd was an absolute darling and asked me to teach him how to edit so he could help me out. He started swapping off with me, something he's maintained to this day. In the start of 2015, when I was moving, starting a new job, and to be honest completely burned out, Ted voluntarily stepped up and took over my half of the editing load. We've gotten much better over time and editing time/effort has shrunk to be much less than when it's started... But it's still a strain. Especially when we have to handle everything ourselves ever since EFN went under.

Finally, sometimes passions just fade away. When we started the podcast, it was new and fresh and exciting. Our fans did a great job of constantly giving us amazing feedback and we gave our 100% each week, for better or for worse. Lately it's been harder and harder to do. None of us started out as artistic people, which makes it all the more amazing and flattering when I hear people bring up our names in artistic conversations. However, it makes it hard to make content every single week when this isn't our first priority or passion. The podcast gives us huge restrictions as well. A month or so ago, Ted and I had a podcast where we spent a full 20 minutes chatting and that was the most fun I've had on the podcast in probably a year. Sometimes we want to relax and not plan something. Sometimes we want to swear or talk about inappropriate things. Sometimes we don't want to talk about art, but rather games, news, tv shows, or just our own lives. We can't really do that with CAC. We already have a relatively small audience, and we spent years building our podcast "brand". We're incredibly proud of that... But also constricted by it.

I'm going to stop here because this is already getting a bit longer than I planned, and we still have more that we each want to say about the podcast ending. This is not the final journal we'll be writing about this, and so I'll cut myself off and just answer the biggest question:

When is your final episode?

The answer is we don't quite know at this point in time. But best guess is mid-late March. Yes, that means that we won't hit 200 episodes, and there's only a handful of episodes left. We apologize if this is very sudden, relatively speaking. Trust me when I say that the decision is anything but that.

Thank you all for your support. If you're still with us, we're more appreciative than you can ever imagine. Stayed tuned for more info, and we hope you enjoy the last few episodes of our little pet podcast.

<3

-RainbowPlasma, on behalf of the rest of the Cutie Art Crusaders

P.S. No, we're not ending because of any group drama. The four of us are still great friends and made this decision as a group. Just shutting this down before the Internet speculates