Last week was productive.
I wrote a little piece about it being the third anniversary of Keith Flint’s death. I had been sitting on it for a while, juggling it around in my head until it made sense, then when I realised the anniversary was a couple of days away, I wrote it up. The timing was perfect as it has a mental health slant, so it was the first essay I’ve put up on my therapy website, which is the other website I’ve been working on for the past month or so, ObeliskTherapy.net.
I think MarbleGear.net has quietly launched in the background – it’s ready enough to go as it needs to be. First, let me explain something: Jake’s love of marble racing and Algodoo videos. There are many, many channels on YouTube devoted to making marble races in the Algodoo physics simulator, and it’s not just limited to races, some people make full-on Olympic-style competitions for different coloured stick-men to compete in, while others make mini-games where the objective is to take out the other simulacrum by destroying their core. I’m not sure calling them simulacrum is actually very accurate to be quite honest, as the entities in the games are not very representative of anything. They are just colours, mapped onto balls or turrets or basic wireframe people…
But this is where we come in.
Jake and I have made some accounts on YouTube to drop comments “in character”. For example, Orange is my favourite colour and I always root for him to win – he very rarely does though. So I’ve made a character called “Orange, the Algodoo Champion”, and “he” comments on the latest marble races that he’s involved in, usually some kind of excuse about why he didn’t win. I figure if people see him around a lot then they’ll build a relationship in their head with him and eventually visit his profile where they’ll find a link to the MarbleGear shop where they can buy merchandise of their favourite colour marble or athlete. The beautiful thing is, we’re not affiliated to any one channel, all we’re doing is leaving comments on content that is already there, and the idea of coloured circles are so universal means we (hopefully) won’t get hit with any copyright claims with our designs.
We’ve got three designs up there right now, with more in the works, and one day we might even branch out into mugs or posters, who knows. It depends how artistic I’m feeling.
And I’m definitely feeling the benefits of holding myself accountable on here. Recounting my wins makes me more aware of them, and analysing things that didn’t go so well helps when they crop up in the future.
Plans for next week then? I’ve got Wednesday and Thursday off work, so I have extra time to spend on things. I have some artwork to do for the rest of the marble-guys, and I’d like to get what I think will be the best selling marble race t-shirt in the shop. Once the artwork is done then I can finalise the links to all the channels in the footer of MarbleGear, and when the t-shirt is done I can put that in it’s own “featured” box in the footer – yes, I think this shirt will be popular. I think I’ll tinker with some themes this week as well, nothing too strenuous. I have a list of pages and posts to make and update, but there’s no rush for them, especially not the ones for this site. I do need to crack on with the coaching course as well, that’s a puzzle piece that unlocks a lot of others when it is completed. I work best on that kind of stuff in the daytime, so it’s good I have some extra time to do that this week.
I’d also like to look into driving lessons, as well as setting myself up as a sole trader/entrepreneur with a business name and a dedicated bank account – just two test transactions with the MarbleGear shop have given me a taste of what it would be like to have multiple things being sold a day – better to have all that separate to my personal finances I think!
