Hi, I’m Emily Young, an independent YouTuber known for retro tech, tech-tech, and Linux content. You can find me here if you’re curious.

I’m also a former member of a large tech YouTube channel. You might notice I haven’t posted anything in a while, and yeah, things have been difficult on my end for reasons that aren’t relevant right now. But now, I’m in a position where I need help. Let me explain.

My partner and I have lived in this basement apartment since we both arrived in British Columbia nearly 10 years ago. Last week, a plumbing leak began that has flooded us out of our already cramped living space, and the smell is unbearable.

Our landlord did not shut off the water for more than 24 hours after being notified, and the leak rate was around 15 litres / 4 gallons per hour, though that’s an estimate. I’m mostly basing that off eyeballing a water cooler jug and how quickly it filled the similarly sized bin we put under it. It’s just a shocking amount of water. Like hundreds of litres.

The landlord was originally only going to have someone pull up the carpets, so we reached into soggy drywall and pulled the tubing out ourselves to try and stop the flow. Here’s what it looked like with genuine Flex Tape® on it (it wasn’t enough, the memes were a lie):

This forced us to camp out in our car or sleep on the couch for a week, and we’ve had to throw out our bed due to the moisture. We may lose more furniture yet. The water is mostly gone now, but the smell of mildew and old carpet, not to mention risk of mould, is not. We can’t live like this, and importantly for me, I can’t work like this.

We need to move.

I’m only looking for enough to make this work. Currently, rents for a 2-bedroom apartment are around $1,600-2,000 CAD per month, with damage deposits running half that again. I’ve never used movers before, but we won’t have much choice; ballpark estimates in local online spaces seem to run from $1k to over $2k CAD. Our current rent is $1,600 CAD and we’ve spent much of this month’s allocation for it on fuel, laundromats, cleaning supplies, a shop vac, eating out, etc.

So here’s the breakdown:

That puts the total cost of moving to around $5,000 at minimum, and up to $8,600 on the high side if we also want to replace the furniture that was ruined. We unfortunately don’t have tenant’s insurance because we had nothing to insure when we got here, and when we did, no one would sell it to us because we’d been there for too long without it. Believe me, we tried.

I’m willing to sleep on the couch or the floor for as long as it takes if it means clean air and more space to work with. Space has been the primary constraint with shooting video in this apartment, so if I can seize this opportunity to find somewhere with an area I could at least partially dedicate for a set, I should be able to get back into the swing of things and be self-sufficient.

I’ve spent days writing this because I’m acutely aware that I’ve relied on the kindness of strangers for so much already. It’s thanks to my Patreon supporters, YouTube members, and Ko-Fi supporters that we’ve been relatively okay until now, and their patience and generosity has been beyond expectation. I hesitate to ask for more. They politely told me to stop worrying so much and ask. So here we are.

I want to make it all worthwhile and make something positive out of this mess. I want to get things back to normal. I want to work on content creation, to share cool things with you. Your support can help me finally get there.

What happens if I don’t hit the goal? We’ll find a way to make it work, because we have to. But it’ll take longer to get situated, and it’ll be a lot messier than it could be.

If I somehow exceed the high-end goal, then I’ll put whatever excess I receive into production, such as a copy of DaVinci Resolve Studio. That way, I can stop transcoding everything I shoot because the free version doesn’t support H.264/H.265 on Linux. Or it could just go to finding neat things to put on camera and gawk at.

And no matter what, I’ll be sure to show you what it looks like when we get back up and running.

One last thing:

Please only donate if you are able. Our lives are on hold, but we’re not in immediate danger. Take care of yourself.