Update 5.26.1 A little peek at the work that's still going into Luke's costume. Goal one: Comfort. Goal two: Uh ... green? Costuming is an entire industry and art form, and while I have friends who know about making costumes, what I wear is part character and part functional. This isn't a show piece. It's the clothes I'll be in wherever we go and whatever we do on this crazy adventure. We spent weeks kicking around ideas and suggestions before we started paying for pieces to show up to try on. And since my family almost exclusively wears clothes from the thrift store or as Christmas gifts (we appreciate generous grandparents!), the price tags were devastating to me. Kids that go to the mall to buy clothes for fun boggle my mind. They must be doing pretty well babysitting. Speaking of that: Also in this video, an update on a prayer request from the last video. While this is unlikely meet all our financial needs, I have a new weekend-only "b...

Update 4.26.1 Money. I hate dealing with it, but here we are. A broken furnace, replacing a water heater, and many other expensive expenses (e.g. oral surgery for a child) has me spiraling. Because any personal financial thing is connected to all the business financial things, like income streams, I'm also thinking about those. To sell videos, we have to make videos. The shows that inspired us, like Mister Rogers and Reading Rainbow, cost a lot of money to make. While I'm confident we can make ours for less than half of what they spent (when we start paying ourselves in the future), I have to spend money today. And tomorrow. And a year from now. I have certain values that conflict with making money. I don't want children watching ads. I don't want to add another subscription for families. I don't feel good about taking money from people today (it's complicated). On top of all that, getting videos to people is a financial-technological challeng...

Update 3.26.1 What's taking so long? All of it. But let's consider scripts today. Writing is extremely difficult and we're still trying to lock down the vision for this project. Currently, we are exploring two potential shows: The first, codenamed "The Heart Show", where we use a well-loved public domain story as a framework for the events in our script. (No, we are not using Moby Dick for our first season; I used it in the video for the easy imagery.) The second, "Explorations", where we start with something as simple as a toilet and end up at water towers. I like this for a lot of reasons I'm sure we'll discuss in the future, should we get it off the ground. Personally, I am discouraged by how slow this is going because I'm such an achievement-oriented person. Not that I'm the least bit surprised. With our last project, it took two years from an already established idea to get a product out the door ... and that ...