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Want to Make It as a Creator? Be Famous, Go Viral or Go Fuck Yourself.

www.joanwestenberg.com

  JA Westenberg

Here’s the brutal truth about mainstream success: You either need to be famous already, or you need to be willing to light yourself on fire for attention.

That’s it. Those are your options. Yes, there are exceptions, but it largely comes down to those two.

This isn’t


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by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

When I started Blender Dumbass back in 2016 as a YouTube channel where I was mockingly teaching people Blender in an idiotic style where tutorials were things like Making Shit in Blender, I though that this was surely a way to finally become famous. I mean, some of those videos did well. As in they have been watched by a few thousand people. But you can hardly call this a success by any metric.

Doing those Dumbass Blender tutorials was supposed be a way for me to get noticed. But no matter how utterly insane my ideas were, I just fell deeper and deeper into despair. At one point I challenged myself to release a video every day, resulting in stupidity such as Making ___ in Blender. I used a very questionable logo, specifically to arouse some people to notice my controversionality. I swore a lot. I pointed the camera multiple times at obnoxious things. I made a short film, with a huge pile a trash near me. But at some point I just gave up trying to be controversial. Nothing worked. So I started doing less and less exciting stuff, until when I was doing Moria's Race I was making rather chill informational videos, basically talking about the process and not much else.

As you can see all those links I gave are not even going to YouTube. They are going to an archive of the channel that no longer exists ( apart of like 3 videos where I tell people that I left YouTube ). I got to a thousand subscribers at some point, but then I finally decided that YouTube wasn't a good idea after all.

My first few YouTube channels

Originally I was trying to establish myself as a filmmaker on YouTube. Trying to borrow a formula from somebody like FilmRiot, where I seriously talk about film-making stuff, but occasionally spice it up with jokes. As always, these few attempts failed to generate any engagement, until I started doing questionable videos that were specifically produced to enrage people. This was going on well, for a bit, until one day I woke up to Google banning my entire account, for apparently enraging too many people. When your strategy is to make it so people are angry, it could work, but it also produces those people who press the damn report button.

Blender Dumbass was a safer bet, where the videos were obviously designed to be comedic. But even there I had to go an extra mile sometimes to say a quote or do a thing specifically outrageous enough, that hopefully would produce some eyeballs. And then the stupid thing happened, some videos where I simply talk about a shot of a movie did better than videos where I do shit in blender. And then I try to replicate it, by making more videos where I talk about a shot in a movie and it fails to generate a single view. My mental health was declining from these games on the algorithm. So I decided I needed a better place.

LBRY and Odysee

I remember thinking that it would be brilliant to have a platform where a poster is un-delete-able so I could enrage people and build audience, but they could not press the damn report button, because there isn't any. Or at the very least, because it would not do nothing, because the platform would be built in such a way somehow which makes deleting stuff from it impossible. I thought that it should be Tor-Based. But then LBRY came in and promised just about the kind of thing I wanted to have.

I started on LBRY with a blank slate, but then I realized that it was a better platform than a video platform. It was a platform for anything. I could publish articles, or .blend files or anything I wanted to really. This is how I started writing articles. And it grew into something people were seemingly interested in, and in shorter time than on YouTube, I got the same thousand subscribers, but this time as readers of things I had to say. And I had thoughts. Enough thoughts to apparently entertain a thousand or so people.

Unfortunately thought the developers of LBRY were dumbasses and it succumb to enshitification for it was replaced with the much shittier Odysee, which was a very bad idea to begin with, but probably would have happened in one way or another anyway.

Today I use my Odysee channel simply as a link hub to blenderdumbass . org. With this website I still sort of rely upon somebody else to keep it alive. But it is only on the clearnet side of things.

The dull reality of a personal blog

For some time, this website was living on a badly written server code which counted views based on how many times a certain page was requested from the server. This gave me some level of satisfaction with this website, when I forgot about the very obvious fact that most of those requests happened by bots and stuff. One of my articles even got a thousand or so views, but that was just because a few people shared it on Mastodon, and every single instance downloaded the page, to view the meta tags. Now the same article shows only a couple of hundred views, which is very good, actually, for a personal blog like this.

The current way the views are counted is quite horrible, this page has an embed of a graph, showing the analytics of the page views over time, which is accessible if you click on the views button in the very top of the article. That page is a separate request to the web-server, which does a few checks, making sure that this request is probably somebody loading the page in a browser before updating the count.

I mean there is the code, it happens when a graph is requested:

# First it is invalidating old types of graph requests from the old code.
# Some scraper-bots still request those.
if "?" in server.path:
    AccessDenied(server)
    return

# Then it checks if the article itself was loaded before the graph
# If the article wasn't loaded, and just the graph, what the hell?
if time.time()-20 > RecentArticles.get(url, 0):
    AccessDenied(server)
    return
	
# Then it is making sure the request has a cookie with it and if not,
# prompting it to be refreshed once, just to make sure that the
# browser wasn't too fast or something.
if not server.cookie and server.headers.get("user-agent", "") not in ProblematicRefreshes:
    Redirect(server, server.path)
    ProblematicRefreshes.append(server.headers.get("user-agent", ""))
    return

if server.headers.get("user-agent", "") in ProblematicRefreshes:
    ProblematicRefreshes.remove(server.headers.get("user-agent", ""))

# And finally it checks if that cookie wasn't already recorded as
# somebody who loaded that page.
if cookie and cookie not in article.get("views", {}).get("viewers", []):
   
   # And only then it adds a view...

This made such a significant difference in my perceived readership that it was almost overwhelmingly depressing. But then I thought about the perspective of a new blank slate where some articles already get hundreds of views. And it started to make me actually kind of inspired. I mean obviously there will be some time until this website grows its readership base. But with such a not a terrible start, I'm feeling good about this.

Yesterday I published an article about the stupidity of the code in my game and it already got more than a hundred views. An article with source code in it, on a website people don't really know much about, about a game that has maybe 5 players max. That is not bad.

Yes, on the same day I published another article of a similar nature, which was viewed only by a shy below 20 people. This still has this random chance game that I frankly don't like. But I think if I learn to play it, like poker, I might get good at this and start actually attracting some attention, which will not require much controversy.

Though I don't know about it. I have acquired a large world-view since the times of the Blender Dumbass YouTube channel, some of which is frankly uncomfortable to a lot of people. I have strong beliefs about this or that thing now. And those are no longer views I have because they attract attention, but rather because I truly stand by them. And so there is this engaging quality to my articles still, though now it comes with this new level, which I am yet to understand fully.

My answer to Joan Westenberg

I think the best formula is to be truthful, be real in your thinking, but be an-apologetic enough about standing for what you believe that will cause this slight uncomfortable Norepineuphoria in your readers. But not because you wanted it to be enraging, but because you dared to say something that they might not want to hear.

My support for Richard Stallman's ideas for example equally enrages both left and right leaning people. And I believe this is one of the reasons Richard Stallman himself became such an iconic person. He is saying what he beliefs no matter how uncomfortable it might sound. I'm trying to learn from him. And it seems like when I do it right people react, people engage.

Still it is yet the beginning. I'm yet to weaponize the petitions for an active positive feedback loop of increased engagement. I'm yet to start turning this, what ever this is into some sort of way to make a living. It is not easy. I really don't want to do some bullshit paypal or stripe thingie. If I make a way for people to give me money, I make it in a way that doesn't take their freedom away.

People suggest all kinds of bullshit. Crypto, shmipto... All of them as far as I know still require running not good Propietary JavaScript code to move money in or out of bank accounts. And while some people think about it as a me issue. As in I don't want to use anything proprietary. I think of it more as a reader issue. I don't want any of you to run proprietary software to support me. I want Richard Stallman to be able to buy something on my website. And it seems, at least for now, as an unobtainable goal.

The petitions for release of big things I do, like the game releases, or film releases or stuff, is my way to maybe in future, if I figure out moving money around, to make something that will make money without needing copyright or anything. All of the things people will "buy" will still be as libre as today. It's just I will get something in return. It is like a reverse-crowd-funding thing.

But it is still just a thought for now. I need to get enough people engaging with the petitions in their current form to make me even start trying to do something. At the moment, the active Dani's Race Version 25-09-24 petition still lacks 7 signatures. And it didn't update for a few days, maybe a week, already. This is not a stage at which I can introduce paid petitions.

And then with the law in my country having a website the source code of which is under AGPL might not even be compatible with the available to me payment processing solutions. I may call all of the companies, everyone may say that it is impossible and I may keep working in the bloody supermarket.

But enough ranting... I need to finish moving code out of main. I did most of the racing code. But there is a lot of do still. So... ah...

Happy Hacking!!!


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