Hello lovely people! I don’t know if there will be episodes this coming week, as we are still pretty sick. This flu has kicked our behinds pretty thoroughly.

FLU & HEALTH

After a few days of the flu, we were slowly getting better. But then I woke up to one of the worst days of my life. I am not scared of many things. I have no phobias. But threaten me with the possibility of a hospital visit, and I’ll go into a full-blown panic attack–something that’s not very helpful when you can’t breathe to begin with. My husband (who hates phone calls about as much as I hate hospitals) had to call the medical hotline to figure out how to get a doctor to see me on a Sunday. They actually found an on-call doctor who did home visits, and the woman came a few hours later. I have to admit I judged her the moment she walked in, because her mask was under her nose. My first impression was right, unfortunately, as everything went wrong. She gave me pills without telling me what I was taking. She messed up the prescription. And then what she prescribed was no longer available. So, that afternoon, my husband had to drive a car for the first time in years (and while sick himself) to get me to a second doctor. There, I was treated very kindly and professionally. I got antibiotics for pneumonia, and took the first pill as soon as we got home. Unfortunately, the antibiotics were pretty rough. I played side effect bingo and felt worse from the pills than the flu. But I could slowly breathe again without focusing on every gasp.

We are still very weak. I have to take breaks after every floor when walking up the stairs. I have to ration even just standing up. I can’t cook. I can’t clean. I can’t do anything that requires focusing on a screen. This text here is being written in very short segments.

We’ve made it through two seasons of Friends. I’ve made it through two audiobooks. But we are still pretty sick. It’s getting better but very, very slowly.

Yesterday, I was able to eat something for the first time since this started without throwing it up. I call that a win. One of the main issues is that I can’t use my regular medication while I’m coughing my lungs out, so all the benefits I usually get from my pain management fall away until I’m over the flu.

THIS CHANNEL & YOU AMAZING PEOPLE

Okay, enough complaining. Let’s talk about my previous post and your lovely, lovely responses. You are amazing. Every single one of you! I knew from comments under the videos that I had wonderful viewers but I had no idea that I’d built such a wonderful little community here. I was overwhelmed by your support. It means the world to me.

Once we’re recovered, my husband and I will be working on hosting my videos on my own website. That way, you’ll be able to watch them without the ads whenever you want. They will also be on something called Peertube, a Youtube alternative without a corporation behind it.

I’ll upload here on YouTube in addition for the time being, but will continually work on building this up with your support instead. In a dream world, you’d all sign up to my newsletter, watch my videos every week, and I’d get donations from a few of you to even out the (very low) ad revenue. I am really bad at asking for money. Heck, I can’t even make myself link the page here right now. I will have to get over that.

Some of you have suggested alternatives to Youtube but they were all commercial alternatives that are either already as bad as Youtube or on their way there. One German platform even added greenwashing to the mix. I can’t support any of that. I want to tell my story. I want to share my journey, but I don’t want to do it by selling my soul. I fight for a better society with everything I do. It goes against every single one of my values to help greedy corporations grow using my stories. I’d rather fail than do that.

ENSHITIFICATION

It’s similar to the struggles I went through with my children’s book and novels. I had published them through Kindle Direct Publishing, so Amazon, a company that I have done everything in my power to interact with as little as possible. Over the last weeks, I’ve started moving my books out of the Amazon exclusivity contracts, so I can sell them myself give them away for free if I feel like it, and in general have the rights to my own works. I’m pretty sure I’ll never sell another copy of any of my books once I delete the on Amazon. But I’m okay with that if it the alternative is working with Amazon.

We’ve been watching company after company go downhill recently. Free tiers were removed. Fees were added. Sneaky clauses were sneaked in. Prices were quietly raised. Privacy was thrown out the window. We see it everywhere. I recently learned the term enshitification, and unfortunately it seems to infect everything. Enshitification is the process where a company starts out with a good idea, cares for its customers, but then slowly goes from there to only caring about shareholders through a very predictable downward spiral. We can’t accept that as the norm.

For me, that means that I have to change how I work. I’m working on that. For you, it hopefully means that you’ll boycott a few pages that are getting too greedy, that you’ll not just accept cookie banners without thought, and that you speak up for yourselves. As long as we consumers let the corporations do whatever they want and get away with it, nothing will change. Vote with your feet, your mouse buttons, and your voice. We can do better 🙂

WHAT’S CHANGING?

So, for now, nothing will really change. I’ll upload here while we work on the alternatives. That will take a few weeks.

In the meantime, you can already sign up to the newsletter here:

I have only just signed up. I will probably switch to a different tool, but this will do for now.

And because I can hear some of your comments already, here’s also the link to donate to this channel:

My brain is giving up, so I will stop babbling here. I hope I’m even making sense. I’ll be back as soon as possible with another video. I won’t make Monday. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make Wednesday. But I’ll just release when I’m ready–even if it’s not one of the usual days 🙂

Thank you all again for being here! Your support means the world to me! That some of you would follow me elsewhere is unbelievable. Thank you! Thank you!

So long!

Kate