I'm sorry (Patreon)

Hey, I've got an apology to make. I've not been great about staying on schedule with the Patreon Hangouts, answering messages, including the Patreon Shoutouts in every other video or following through with bigger projects that I promised like relaunching Filaween or rebranding the channel. Mostly, though, I'm sorry for not communicating better with all of you. Here's what's up:

The last couple of years have been full of setbacks. Sure, that's to be expected with any project of this scale. But what sticks are the ones that keep me from moving out of the rut I've been in ever since I made the YouTube channel my main job.

I tried to hire an employee - turns out I hired the wrong person. I've since hired my mom part-time to do many of the behind-the-scenes tasks and I have an editor doing large parts of the editing work, but I, personally, am still the bottleneck for actual video/content production.

I tried to move to a larger studio - turned out I was getting respiratory problems in the new space. I'm back in the old basement studio and it's inefficient to work in there and limiting what I can do.

I tried to streamline video publishing, and I've been on a spotless two-week routine for the last couple of months, but guess what: Long-term damage from a 10-year-old shoulder injury is now making it utterly painful for me to use a computer for more than half an hour a day. After months of cramps and pain, I've finally found a decent orthopedic and am able to do physiotherapy to get the shoulder usable again. But as you might imagine, doing anything 3D-printing related is kinda hard when you can't use a computer.

I've already cut gaming on mouse and keyboard out of my life because it would eat into the computer time allowance my shoulder was granting me, but it's now at a point where I'm having to avoid any sort of computer work for fear or being in pain the rest of the day.

I don't know how this entire shoulder thing is going to develop, but one way or another it's going to and is already cutting into my productivity when producing videos. So the next couple of videos may be on a less tight schedule, and they most likely won't be topics like big printing projects where I have to spend tons of time doing CAD or other mouse-heavy tasks. Testing out soldering stations was quite a lot of fun, though!

If tech plays along (thanks YouTube), there will at least be a couple of livestreams next week. As long as I don't stress my shoulder and arm with computer work, physically doing stuff is (mostly) fine (right now), so unboxing printers should be ok.

Repeatedly running into roadblocks like the ones above, that keep me from (efficiently) working and producing content is draining for me because I do want to make content for all of you and I also want it to be good. Still, the alternative of having to struggle for content ideas because I'm unable to cover the topics I actually want to cover probably isn't great, either.

I hope the content I do manange to produce over the next weeks (months?) will be somewhat decent and that I'll be able to produce stuff at all. I don't know at this point.

Anyway, thank you for your support! And since I can't right now, please make sure that at least you keep on making.

-Tom