Having Fun

Groaner Dad has been growing slowly, but organically. Each week it seems our “viewers in the last 4 weeks” increases. It’s not enough to start earning that sweet YouTube money, but I’ve gone from 0% of the way there to over 3% of the way there. If the current organic growth rates can sustain, I should be earning money by next February.

If I haven’t said it before, I stop and examine my progress at the end of October in 2026. If I haven’t made sufficient progress to this being self-sustaining and earning at least beer money in profits, then it’s either pivot back into the job market, or seriously evaluate my promotion and monetization strategies.

I know, that’s a lot of left brain analysis for a right brain creative. The problem with being a creative who is not yet successful enough to have a team is that you have to be that team for yourself. It ain’t easy. There are a lot of decisions you find emotional on your creative side that have to be looked at through the more dispassionate lens of being your own agent, manager, publicist, and BI guy.

For all the fun of writing/collecting/performing the Groaner Dad shorts, I also have to make all the cards, edit them together with the audio, post them to YouTube with all the hashtags, titles, etc., then plug the youtube link into a form on my social media scheduling took. And unlike the 80s and 90s when I’d go test out new material in clubs or have fun improvising gags with the university improv troupe, I’m not getting real time feedback and then hanging out with friends as we cheered on other friends who were performing.

Local AI Experiments

In my post about the curse of the early adopter, I noted that PyTorch had CUDA 12.8 in nightlies, but not in release. It’s been released with PyTorch 2.7. I’m still waiting for a couple of tools to incorporate it, but one has a reasonable workaround. The clown above was made with Invoke Community Edition. I’ve also been collecting Loras for period looks (40s, noire, WWII) to do some experimenting with Alain and Marie (from Hell on $5 A Day.

In the voice arena, I’m just dipping my toe. Getting the hang of creating a custom voice model and “re-casting” a voice performance with it is a project for this month. I’m still hoping to launch the Hell on $5 A Day podcast at the beginning of July, but may push it out until August to build up the backlog I wanted before I started publishing. Doing this locally is important because I’m bootstrapped and doing everything on the cheap, so $50 a month subscriptions to cloud services to do different things adds up to unsustainable.

That’s all, folks!

Just wanted to give you an update before I plugged a few more weeks worth of Groaner Dad into YouTube.