I Hope It Works Out

Over three days I made a short two-minute video introducing Patternflow. It's a video I'll use for the Crowd Supply launch too, and I made it hoping the views would come in on YouTube. Looking at where things stand a day after posting, that hope has collapsed miserably. The view count isn't even in the hundreds. Is it the thumbnail, or the title? Still, the saving grace is that the Instagram version, which I uploaded as-is thinking of it as a bonus, is doing decently. Thanks to that, I dodged the absolute worst.

Today the GitHub stars passed 200. Later than I'd expected. As far as I could feel, the star growth had stopped entirely this past week. It felt like hitting some kind of wall, and the same went for the Crowd Supply pre-launch. Right now, thanks to the new video, it's climbed a bit to 93. Of the 150 needed to prepare for the next stage, the launch, about a third is left. Whether I can fill it fast is anyone's guess. My wish is to fill it within a month, but I can see the growth stalling, so I have no confidence.

Still, I'm doing what I can. Making the video was part of that effort, and I also tweaked the CTA on mobile. I wondered whether a mechanism I'd added in the past to drive funding sign-ups was actually backfiring, so I removed it. Normally you shouldn't go on gut like this; you should test everything and work from data, I know, but it's too much of a pain. No, it isn't that it's a pain, it's that I can't. I don't have the energy for it. I barely have enough for the other worries and the flailing to make them go away.

Once I'd made the project video, I ended up starting the documentation I'd been putting off. Honestly it's less that I'd been putting it off and more that I wasn't sure. Testing, fixing, failing, improving again, over and over, and all I can see is what still needs fixing. Doing a bit of the documentation, I got the feeling that even this much is enough. No. It isn't enough. But I'm doing it anyway.

I feel like Patternflow is functioning as open source, to some degree. For one, quite a few people are building it themselves, and it's become the spark for entirely new projects, not just the device. Since I started it wanting other people to create their own things, the projects with the most variation are the ones that encourage me most. It's good. I hope everyone makes their own like that and tells me about it. That's when I get the reassurance that I'm doing okay after all.

Someone asked whether they could commercialize Patternflow and sell it. Of course they can. At this stage, of course, building it exactly from the materials I've shared and selling it isn't allowed. That's because my contract with Crowd Supply has a no-pre-sale clause, and once a batch is done, even that becomes possible. For large-scale sales, naturally, they'd talk with me and, if needed, do something like a license agreement. And even for small runs, telling me in advance like this is just good manners. That said, I have no intention of enforcing it or blocking anyone from selling. No, honestly, I'd rather like it. It means more Patternflow users. In the end my goal isn't to sell devices but to build an ecosystem, so someone is doing my job for me. And the profit that comes from it is, of course, the reward for their effort.

A few museums have reached out wanting to buy a Patternflow. They're all the same. They won't tell me their budget or their purchase price, and insist I be the only one to name a figure. Then they knock it down, saying they don't have that kind of money. Seriously, it pisses me off. It doesn't feel like negotiation, it feels like being assessed, and the email exchanges drag on so long that the uncertainty over that stretch dries me out. I need to make a few things definite. First, the one that can represent Patternflow, the very first model I built, which by now is a keepsake. If you want to buy it, it's one million dollars. Which is to say I'm not selling. And for editions, if they don't name a price up front, I should just ignore it.

Annoying. There's a lot of stress in my relationships lately too. I can't understand other people's behavior at all. If there'd been no contact between us at all, I wouldn't have cared this much. I know it shouldn't be this way, but getting close to people is starting to scare me. Ah, I don't know. It just feels like some kind of mental illness.

Keep going, I guess. Whatever comes of it, I have to do it first. Whether the outcome is good or bad, I don't know. All I can do is pray it's good. Should I look into religion? I've been an atheist my whole life, but I feel like if I had a religion, life might be easier. If I made something bigger than myself and believed in it, wouldn't about half the pointless worrying disappear? I want to live long and healthy. Physically, I just have to exercise steadily, eat well, and sleep well. Ah, I haven't been sleeping well, actually. Anyway, that's something I can control. Mentally, on the other hand, there's no controlling it. They say stress is the root of all illness, and living like this, it feels like I'll die young. Thinking that way, I feel like I have to take some measure just to stay alive. As for therapy, I've done it several times without much improvement. People say to just date someone, and that looks hard too. What's left, in the end, seems to be religion. But personally religion doesn't sit well with me, so I don't know. Ah, maybe I should try meditation again.