http://youtube.com/watch?v=nSiDZli0a9I
Denise printed a Han Solo blaster, and then a bunch of Scouts dropped it.
It was one of the first fancy prints she ever did. In third grade she desperately wanted one. A friend had one, and she never got it. So when she finally had a printer, she printed one, and she said it was just the coolest thing. Later she brought it to a Scouts demo along with some other cool prints, to show what 3D printing can do. It got dropped so many times that they threw it out. That was before she used Gloop. So now she has to make another one.
Denise and I have been running in the same circles for a really long time. We know a lot of the same people. We'd just never sat down and talked, so on The Padded Room we fixed that.
A lot of you know her from her printer reviews at Tom's Hardware. I wanted to know how she got there, and it goes back a long way. She always wanted to be a writer. Her dad was an early adopter, and when he decided he wanted to learn more about photography, he built a darkroom in the basement. So by the time she was about ten she had a black and white darkroom, and she could shoot a roll of film, develop it and get it onto paper. She took little pictures of her action figures. She was the youngest kid on the yearbook staff, and at a small high school she ended up editor of both the newspaper and the yearbook her senior year, back when you pasted things down with wax.
Her dad is an Eagle Scout. When the Girl Scout troop he found for her in another town didn't have enough leaders, he became one, and she says he was the only man who was a Girl Scout leader in their district. People were freaking out. They camped old school, with canvas tents. Then in high school he found her a mounted troop, where the girls rode horses and the dads drove the tractors.
She went to a small state school for journalism and minored in photography. She worked in print shops, and her first job was typesetting business cards. She freelanced as a stringer, one of the people a newspaper sends out to the meetings to cover the boring stuff and turn in three paragraphs that night. Then came a mom blog, and popsicle-stick crafts with her kid. One of those videos, a popsicle-stick catapult, still brings in views, and she figured out who was watching when she saw, "thanks, I got an A on my science fair project."
The first 3D printer she ever saw was at a makerspace for kids run by a children's museum. You'd give them five dollars and they'd print something tiny for you. Her first print was a baby Yoda cookie cutter she set up in Tinkercad. Her mom was a school teacher and their district was very poor, so she figured a printer the schools were using had to be pretty cheap. Then she looked it up and saw $5,000. A while later her husband was at Micro Center shopping for computer parts, her birthday was coming up, and he just picked up a printer and threw it in the cart. That was her first printer, a Creality CR-10S, and it became her grown-up craft. Then Tom's Hardware came along, looking for someone who could write.
What I liked most was why the mom blog never quite fit her. "I'm not narcissistic enough," she said. Everybody else was saying come listen to my story, and she wanted to tell other people's stories. I think it's the same instinct that has her calling herself a tech journalist and not a YouTuber yet. Tom's Hardware pays her the same flat fee whether the printer is a $5,000 Formlabs or an Ender. And on the YouTube side, she said, you can't hire someone to do a review, because then it's not really a review.
The stage didn't come easy either. When Creality asked her to come up and talk at one of their get-togethers, she said no, no, can't do it, and Courtney went up and took her spot. She told me she could do it now. She's made enough goofy videos that she thinks she got over the fear.
Her advice for anyone who wants to start making content was simple. Just start doing it. There's a saying that your first so many videos are all going to stink anyway, so get them over with. The more you do it, the better you get.
So what did you want as a kid that you never got? Have you printed it yet?
Live life to the fullest. Grow in wisdom. Show what you've learned generously.
Find Denise: https://stldenise3d.com
Watch The Padded Room live Tuesday nights at 7pm ET: https://twitch.tv/asylumlifemakes