I want to build an empire.
That's what I keep telling myself when things get boring, or hard or stressful. I told myself that a lot yesterday while I was at work. Yesterday was a bad day, I'll leave it at that.
It's true though; I want to build an empire.
I want to build this company into an equal to Rooster Teeth or Nerdist. A powerhouse that allows me and everyone else here to do what they love for a living instead of working for shit money at a shit job they hate. I want to be able to put actual funding into projects, help publish others' work, develop new things for us to do.
I want to look back at this in 5 years and see the beginnings of something great. I want to look back at it in 10 years and see the beginnings of something amazing.
But most of all I want to do something I love doing and be able to live off doing it. I want the same thing for my friend who're here with me. I want this silly little company, named after a throwaway robotic monster from Sagie and I's first actual joint project, to be able to fund getting NTR published when Sagie is ready. I want it to be able to fund publishing the first book of Dead. Or the first book of Amelia & Charlene for Amanda. Or fund starting a video side of the site doing sketches and shorts. Or a publishing side to help out kids who want to do the same thing with their lives.
I don't care about fame or fortune for myself, really. I just want enough to get by and not have to worry about if I have enough to eat and pay for the bus to work and still make rent for the month. But I do wish for a community. I wish for a group of people that bond over the things we make, who interact with us and each other.
I have a feeling this post will be quite long, so I'll sum it up right now so you can stop reading if you get bored or don't want to continue; I want to build something that will maybe make some people happy.
Alright, and now for story time kids. Just a warning though to some people, if there are any reading this, I'm going to be talking about suicide so stop here if that's something that'll set you off, okay?
The thing that started me on this whole train of thought was attempting for the umpteenth time to write an email to Geoff of Rooster Teeth.
I wanted to tell him how he saved my life a while back without ever knowing it or having met me at all.
I don't always do so well emotionally. Sometimes things happen in life and I take them pretty hard. A bit too hard. It was one of those times. I'll spare you the details of it all but I can say that I was at a pretty damn low point mentally and emotionally. I had decided that enough was enough and that I was finally going to go through with killing myself. It's something I'd attempted before but had either failed (yeah, I know...I even screw that up) or had been stopped/stopped myself. But that time I decided I was going to go through with it for sure.
I left my house as if I was going to work, went to the train tracks that weren't too far away and sat down on the tracks. The thing is, whenever I leave the house I have to have something playing in my ears. The sounds of the outside really just cause me an incredible amount of anxiety so I drown things out with podcasts and music. That day was a podcast day; early episodes of the RT podcast from when Geoff was still on it. I sat on the tracks, waiting for a train to come and listened to the episode (I really need to find exactly which it was) and eventually I go to a point that Geoff started laughing really hard.
Anyone who knows who Geoff is and has heard his laugh will be able to tell you it's one of the most joyful, infectious things you will ever hear. You can't help but laugh with him; and laugh I did. I laughed and laughed and laughed for probably about 10 minutes straight and without thinking about it I got up and started walking back home. I got home, went to youtube and started watching Fails of the Weak from the first episode and found more of Geoff's laugh. I called in sick for 3 days and I spent that time watching or listening to everything I could fit into that time that Rooster Teeth and Achievement Hunter had produced. I talked to friends, I got out of that dark place and started working on things again. That's around when I started Sky up, when I started drawing more, when I started writing more. (There's a lot of things I've done that I haven't posted, but might eventually) I started living and being okay. Not better, because untreated mental illness doesn't get magically better, but I was okay. I found a way to cope.
I still have that way of coping. I don't think I've missed a single RT or AH video in almost a year. I happily consume everything they produce and will continue to until they either shutter the company or I die.
That's why I want to build SSP into something. Why I've got so many things in my head that I want to make and do. Because if there's even one person out there who listens to us be assholes on the Progress Bar, or for some reason can't wait to hear what's going to happen next in Sky, or (when it's started) absolutely adores Dead, or any of the other things that'll be on this website (and the others I have planned) and it ends up making them rethink something, or keeps them company or get's them through a tough time, then any amount of time, effort or money I put into this is worth it. And it helps me as well. It helps keep me focused (one of the things at least) on what I want to do and how I want to go about doing it.
Nothing much left to say except that this may not seem like much now, but just wait. I'm going to make it into something.
