Some Days Are Not Like Others

These naps have got to stop.   My daughter even can tell when I'm flagging and I'm heading up to lie down for a "bit".   The problem is, sometimes, like today, she got on the bed with me and was chatting to me and the next thing I know, it's after nine o'clock, I've missed dinner and even worse, I fell asleep with my purse beside me and never took the nerve medication I should have taken around lunch that would have made me feel a whole lot better. 

My husband tried to wake me up but I have no recollection of that.  I missed our neighbor's new dog, something he's been excited about for months that came to fruition today after many attempts that didn't quite work out.  

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Pet Assistants:  Our neighbor works during the day and wanted to know if we could help with their new dog.  He was originally going to get a puppy, but decided the puppy stage was going to be too difficult with his work schedule and being a single parent, even with their nanny.   He decided to get an eight-month-old dog and wanted to know if we could help if needed.  The children are very excited about helping with a puppy, even if it's a dog taller than our dog is full grown.  Hopefully we'll get to help out a lot.  The one that was by far the most excited about the new puppy was our dog, who was mad with excitement and wanted to play when she met the new, "Roxi" next door. 

Two Livestreams at Once

Am I crazy?  Two different livestreams on two different platforms in two different rooms using two different printers and a complex add-on product?  I think my husband thinks I am.  I might be.  It's close to 3AM and I'm beat. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter appeared at 12:30AM and wanted chocolate.  We sent her to bed. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son was allowed to buy *another* mouse for his computer, what with it being the best mouse ever, again, he said.   He promised to go straight to bed after we let him spend his money on another gaming mouse.  He uses them all, too.   They each do something different, he says. 

Monetized and 50K

Today was an interesting day for Filament Stories on YouTube.  My husband wanted to monetize from the start as a goal, but by putting out Shorts format videos, we weren't going to get credit towards watch hours, and we knew it would take a long time.   Things ramped up at different times, but mostly in the last month things have gone a little crazy, for reasons we're not sure of, which is the YouTube algorithm for you. 

I did some livestream videos which counted for watch time and we put some other long format videos that, with the added subscribers and newly suggesting that YouTube was doing, suddenly got us over fifty percent of the watch hours we needed to be able to monetize.    Two days ago we were eligible to apply for the program, which takes a month for a reply to be sent back as YouTube has a real person review your content.  

Only in less than forty-eight hours we were approved.  Which took us completely by surprise.  Then, to add on to that, we hit fifty-thousand subscribers while my daughter was at choir tonight.   I was watching the number tick up and got a screen shot when it happened.  

I've been moving over all the subscriptions I have for different YouTube Content Creators in the 3D Printing space (my word, am I subscribed to a lot) and what surprised me even more is that a good number of the people I've been watching and respect for a good while now, have not that many more subscribers than we have and in many cases have half to a quarter of our numbers.   

So I'm a little gobsmacked.   We're just these two people making content in the basement on 3D printing.  I know most of the other folks are doing the same thing, but it feels different.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is sad he can't take his PC to visit Nana and Papa in Florida.  We talked about maybe being able to put Minecraft on the laptop for the trip.   That cheered him up a lot.  He was going to miss his friends over the break. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter loves to climb in the big Magnolia trees in front of the college administration building before going in to choir.   Those two large trees were ones I climbed myself when I was a young girl.  I'm sure they're larger, but they seem just the same now as they did over forty years ago.

The Fibonacci House

We went to go see a house today that our architect spent the last three years working on.  The focus of the house was all about the Fibonacci sequence.  Every single thing in this house was thought out in detail.  It was one of those houses that should really be in a magazine.  Multiple magazines.   It was so impressive.  

Keith had so much to tell us, we went around and the simplest thing that seemed like a wall, turned out to be a door.  There was purpose and design in every aspect of everything.  The artwork in the house was the windows, which were looking outward towards a lake.  Here, let me show you one picture of the deck.   

There are no supports underneath the deck, it is fully supported with one major steel beam that runs diagonally across the space.   There are about ten more things I could tell you about this deck, all of them impressive, and all well-thought out.  

We're excited to have an architect and to be thinking about a house we'll put on the land we bought last year, but we're not going to be this fancy.   It was a real pleasure to be there and to see their home.  We were there on a 3D printing related task, helping the architect finish one final piece for his client, a Fibonacci sequence fountain for the entrance to the home.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son wanted to "snuggle" tonight.   I didn't argue.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I had to talk to my daughter about going ahead and putting me out of my misery in the game of Monopoly we were playing, so that we could start a new game that might have more interesting gameplay as the current one was me barely not going bankrupt every other turn.

My Sweet Little Girl

My daughter can be the orneriest person when she's not wanting something or wanting something or angry about something.   But she is also the sweetest person.   Sometimes I feel like I've done a terrible job being her mother.  I worry I'm not there enough for her and that I don't play Monopoly enough or read to her enough and I'm so busy that even though other parents have jobs and are away from their children, that I should be there for her more, all the time, I don't know.   

Maybe I worry about her because she's blind.  I'm not sure what it is, but today she was just so kind and understanding and then she crawled onto the bed, asked if she could have a blanket and fell asleep.   I am going to miss her so when she's grown and gone to build a life of her own. 

The Big Boy Update:  Today my son tried very hard not to have his anger flare when I told him he had to do fifteen minutes of typing work on the typing program.   Insisted, he knew how to type.  He did the fifteen minutes.   I'm going to challenge him to a typing duel.   Or some competition that will be somewhat fair.   

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has a bandage over her eyebrow from the cut yesterday.   It doesn't look too bad, but her eyebrows are almost white, so any scar won't be hidden.  I hope it doesn't scar too badly, she has enough going on that looks different with her eyes and She's so pretty otherwise. 

Numbers That I Can't Comprehend

YouTube has finally figured out what types of people are interested in our content.   And they're recommending our videos at a pace I can't quite wrap my head around.  At the point of this writing, we have over forty-seven thousand subscribers.   We've had a huge surge in the past month of both views and subscribers.  

We have some videos that are getting suggested a lot.  One video has over 3.7 million views.  It's a fifty-six-second video that has over forty-two thousand watch hours of time.  There's a realtime update of what's happening on your channel that I looked at yesterday and realized it was updating every ten seconds.  

In that time, YouTube is suggesting the video I'm not sure how many times.  Those are called "Impressions" It's where you see something over on the side or bottom that YouTube thinks you'd like.  If you click on it, it's considered one view of the video.   Every ten seconds the number of views is updating by twenty to one hundred.  It's hard to tell, because the current views is for the last forty-eight hours, so if it goes up by fifty, there are a number of views that are dropping off from the oldest ten seconds.  

That one video has been seen 430K times in the last two days.   These are numbers I just can't wrap my head around.   I don't know ten thousand people, let alone millions of people that have seen the videos.  It's mind-boggling. 

We wanted to share information about filaments from around the world, and we're being successful in that endeavor.  There are other statistics that are interesting, but for now, I'm just trying to understand that we're more of a success than I ever thought we'd be.   I've been in communication with filament manufacturers who want to work with us.  I've had to create a document stating what we are willing to do and what we make no commitments to do.   

Mostly, it's in the vein of what we won't do.  Companies will ask you to do lots of things, but in this case, we're being solicited by them.  So we're calling the shots.   We're offering sponsorships to the channel, in which they would pay us to feature their product (typically a spool of filament).  Not everyone is going to take us up on this, but some will.   If we continue to do what we're doing, we'll hopefully have more subscribers and therefore reach.   We've been told we have something companies can't buy, and we should charge for what we're doing.   With the uptick in our reach, I'm starting to act on that.  I'm interested in how things will change in the future as a result 

The Big Boy Update:  My son is so happy after school some days.  He goes on about how he loves me and what a good mom I am.   I'm glad he's happy after school.  Even today, he had had a bad day, but he was just happy to be heading home in the car with me. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter smashed heads together in the trampoline today.  My husband and she were heading out to get some stitches at urgent care when they ran into Matt on the way out of the neighborhood.  Matt thought the cut was superficial and didn't need stitches.  My daughter was very relieved. 

Messages I Don't Want To Send

I worked for a good while today crafting a message to someone who is trying to start a business in the 3D printing space.  I could go into details, but I did eventually agree to help out by showing model of theirs on our social media after he got enough up to show that he had something people could actually purchase and use.   He's been a bit of a pest, is the best way I can put it, imposing in places in a way that was more pushy than anything, even though he had a lot of enthusiasm with his requests. 

For some reason, a friend and I just got a slimy feeling, which is not very kind to say about someone, I know.   He's doing something hard, starting a business and going up against larger competitors, trying to vie for the dollars from 3D printing people around the world.   But something was off.  

It was two days ago that I noticed another model on his site that was very clearly one from a known designer.   I messaged the designer, with a sinking feeling that I knew the answer.   It was not his design.   Can you take a model, make a few changes and sell it or publish it as your own?  It's not good practice and you'll get a negative response from a lot of the community.  But these models aren't worth dramatic amounts of money and protecting them isn't feasible with a worldwide population across country lines. 

So I had to collect evidence today, working with two of the designers, and write up what I was seeing and that I can no longer publish a video with his model in it given what I'm seeing.  I'm taking the tact that he needs to be careful what he publishes from his designers, acting like I don't think he's involved.   But the evidence shows that he knows exactly who the designers are and is a paid member of one of the creators Patreon so has access to all his models. 

I don't want to send it to him, because I don't like this kind of negativity.  But it has to be done because as it stands, I've committed to showing his model in a video and I don't want to renege on that without an explanation.  

I'm not looking forward to the resulting conversation.   I would rather I didn't agree to post a design at all, but I do like helping people out and he was trying to do something positive for the community.  That is until other creator's models started showing up on their site. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son went to see my daughter at her concert tonight.  He looked reproachfully at us and said, "I'm just her brother and I'm clapping a lot louder than you all are."  He was in his most protective mood tonight.   It was quite sweet to see him so.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter stood on stage after not eating a lot today because she said she was nervous about the two school concerts and the family concert tonight.   I thought she was hot in her sweater.   I asked her about it afterwards and she said she got sweaty when she was nervous.   She sang just beautifully.