Hello gamers. Behold.

This is the last piece of equipment I need before my special video for Locals: a server chassis for my computer. I want to move the guts from my broken chassis over to it. Trust me, my home project is cool and rewarding to work on.

After that, I would like to return to normal content. I have been diligently trying to assemble my life back in the US. After the better half of a year I have almost finished setting up what is going to be my workstation moving forward. Once I have the last thing I need (a 30 amp electrical receptacle inside my bedroom) I'm all set.

Just on a personal level, I've been feeling particularly overwhelmed. What is frustrating about my life is that, generally speaking, as a person puts work into what they're doing, they start building a stronger foundation that they can assemble more on top of. This is not really the case for me. I feel like I'm building sandcastles. There's a whiny song I sometimes I listen to that captures the feeling - been a fan of it for a very, very long time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwbxgLUg3T0

My podcast hovers at around 3000 live viewers, a bit lower recently, I'm sure in part because I suffer technical issues every episode, but also in part because I have no reach outside of Rumble and Kick. Even when I tried assembling a clip channel, that was brutally demotized for "unoriginal content" despite the content being 100% my own fucking work.

I can't really do much with USIPS because the first thing we'd have to do is develop our own income revenues, because we were denied payment processing by the most common non-profit platforms due to my background. The easy subscription management stuff you see with 501c4s like the GOA has to be hand-written by us.

The Kiwi Farms also hovers at around 4000 active users mid-day. It hasn't fully recovered to pre-DKF levels. At DKF it was mid-covid and we were close to 18,000 daily logins, now we're at about 13,000. That's really rough.

I pour all that effort into keeping the site up, just to sustain it, and that work doesn't really put us in a place that thousands of hours of work would have for any other service. It's really frustrating. You'd have hoped that 13 years into it that you'd not just be treading water and keeping your head above it.

Sorry to whine, I know I have it better than most people right now. What I hope to do moving forward is to delegate more. My head is so scattered and my immediate priority becomes whatever comes in by email, so there are some emails marked unread in my inbox that are 3 months old and I need to get back to.

What I'd like to do is get some volunteers on board for helping the stream by finding funny things to talk about and organizing them. However, despite my role as a forum admin for over a decade, I am an abysmal delegator and I really don't know how to productively incorporate other people into anything I do. Right now I basically have to spend my entire Thursday work day putting together the streams so that by Friday morning I have enough time to get the tabs set up and break the audio again.

Same with the Kiwi Farms. I have a bunch of volunteer applications from December I never went through. Eventually I need someone who can just handle the mundane things I do every morning. A not-insignificant amount of my daily life is spent handling reports and the moderation queue. However, I'm afraid of losing this touchpoint. I end up seeing a lot of new users first posts and sometimes I respond after I approve them, meaning a lot of new users first reply on the site will be from me. I think people like that. It also lets me know what kind of things are driving new registrations to the site, which is useful.

For USIPS we really do need a dev who can progress the financial side of things, but that's hard to do when you can't pay people. I have been waiting for literal weeks for KF check processing. I can't get signed onto that platform because their tech guy is literally Indian and he swears I'm doing something wrong but I have recorded video proving it's a server error. It's very, very frustrating. The owner really wants to help but the Indian can't get me onboarded. If I made enough money to actually compensate people for their time - even if it was an arrangement like 4 people for 1 week of work per month - would be amazing, and that sort of arrangement would also ensure I am only babysitting one person at a time.

On that note I'm very grateful for the Locals people who moved over from Gumroad, and the Rumble team in general, bceause with my basic expenses covered I'm not panicking trying to figure out just my own needs.

I feel like I owe people a lot more improvement in every facet of what I do but at the same time I feel extremely disorganized. There's so much I want to do that it just kind of wears me down. 2025 was supposed to be my year and it's not as much of my year as I hoped for because I'm honestly just not doing enough every day to accomplish what I want to.