Good morning John!

This morning I got up, checked twitter, tweeted about my halitosis, kissed my cat, brushed my teeth, got in my car, filmed some SciShow, got some P4A perks ready to ship, went back home, tumbled, made a video for hankschannel, molested the kitty, went out to the warehouse with Katherine, folded mug boxes, because I love folding mug boxes, made a video for the DFTBA Records channel, then came home, edited an episode of hankgames live, tumbled some more, loaned some money through Kiva, and then I made a vlogbrothers video. I haven't actually made the vlogbrothers video yet; that last part was a lie.

The video that I made for hankschannel was sort of like a walk-through of all of the vlogbrothers designs since late 2007; Internet Archives' first archive of the vlogbrothers YouTube channel was December 1st, 2007, eleven months after we started making videos, and we had just under 10,000 subscribers. And that was a huge deal; we'd been making videos for a long time, and we were very proud of that number. It was really amazing.

And yes, this is what that looked like. Four by three! Actually... yeah, that's it. This is... this is more...

On the day that we hit 10,000 subscribers, we also launched the first Project for Awesome. We thought that our community was so big on YouTube that it was a shame that we were not using it to do some good in the world.

People do not feel that way about 10,000 subscribers anymore. The Project for Awesome, however, was a huge success that year, and it has been a huge success every year since. This year, we raised over $400,000, and finally, I get to tell you who's going to get that money!

I'm sorry this took so long, but it turns out that when you're giving a lot of money away, it gets complicated legally. It's dumb.

We have...
The Office of Letters and Light,
Not Forgotten,
The Wildlife Waystation,
The Alzheimer's Society,
The Harry Potter Alliance,
Save the Children,
The BGSU Dance Marathon,
Uncultured Project,
Techo, and
Love 146 Dayton Task Force.
Thank you to all those charities for doing such great work; thank you to those people who made videos to support them.

Obviously for me, the big thing hanging over this video is that we got a million subscribers this week. And we also got 300 million video views on vlogbrothers. And with help of... you, if you would like to help, we would also like to hit a third milestone this week, and that is reaching $2 million loaned through kiva.org's nerdfighter group. We're very close; we're at like $1.976 million.

If you have a current account, you may have $25 or even more than that just sitting there, ready to loan. And if you don't have a current account, there's a link in the description; probably the first $25 loaned will be free, donated for you to loan out.

Now, somehow, despite the fact that having a million subscribers is obviously a huge deal, and is very important to me, and it feels totally impossible, at the same time, when I think back to what our channel was, when we had 10,000 subscribers, I feel about the same about this project now as I did then.

Maybe that's because, to some extent, these videos have always been, and remain, just videos that I'm making for my big brother; maybe it's because we've always been open about who we are and how we live our lives, while still being entertaining, so people don't get the wrong idea about us being more than we are; maybe because this community is just a one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-seen-again kind of thing, and... in any case, I'm happy that that's how I feel.

So thank you to everyone who's been a part of this over the years; whether you started watching when I was giving away Peeps on the street in 2007, or when I was translating dance songs in 2013, thanks for watching.

And finally, a little bit of research I want to do in the comments - please, I'm curious, what was the first vlogbrothers video you watched, and when was that? I understand if you don't remember; I remember what my first vlogbrothers videos I watched was; it was the first one, before anyone else saw it, 'cause I made it.

I was the first person to watch a vlogbrothers video! Hipster! I was watching vlogbrothers videos before it was cool! Also, so are you. You are right now watching vlogbrothers videos before it's cool. Hopefully it will never be cool.

John, I will see you on Tuesday.