(1) EVERYBODY’S TALKIN’. Fleen continues its epic roundups about the Patreon controversy and lists the alternatives:
The logic of the decision is, if not in my opinion sound, at least defensible, but Patreon didn’t trust its users enough to defend it. The (best reading) incompetent or (worst reading) dishonest way they treated their user base is a mark that will persist. Kickstarter is smart enough to keep to their plans for Drip, maybe speed things up by 10%, but they won’t rush to open the gates to all; they know that as the invites go ever wider (and when they’re ready, invites are no longer needed), creators that don’t trust Patreon any more will be waiting to shift. Ko-Fi, Venmo, Paypal, Tippeee, Flattr, Google Wallet, and other means of cash transfer are suddenly burning up the search engines.
(2) BOTTOM LINE. Three-time Hugo-winning professional artist Julie Dillon tweeted daggers at Patreon management. Jump onto the thread here:
From Patreon: "We'd rather have our GMV be made up of fewer, but truly life-changed creators rather than a lot of creators making a few dollars." Well that tells me all I need to know about how much they actually care abt creators. https://t.co/Nusuwd7hRE
— Julie Dillon (@juliedillon) December 8, 2017
(3) WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. Rose Lemberg compares the Patreon fee rollout with another fiasco:
https://twitter.com/RoseLemberg/status/939188688399020033
(4) WHO VIEW. Here’s the newest Doctor Who Christmas Special trailer.
(5) BRAVE NEW WORDS AWARD CREATED. “Starburst Launches Brave New Words Book Prize”. Nominations are being accepted through the end of the year. Submission guidelines at the link.
STARBURST Magazine, the world’s premier platform for new and exciting genre media, is pleased to announce that it will now have a prize for genre-related writing. The award ceremony will be part of The STARBURST Media City Festival.
The Brave New Words award is for someone who produces break-out literature that is new and bold. We are looking to highlight exciting work that breaks new ground in the field of Cult Entertainment. Editors, writers, publishers, and bloggers can be nominated. We are looking for works produced in 2017. A shortlist will be announced early 2018 and the winner will be announced at The STARBURST Media City Festival, at Salford Media City 16th – 18th March 2018.
The panel of judges will be announced soon.
(6) ECLECTIC WORKS. The Economist has posted a wide-ranging list of the “Books of the Year 2017” – two fiction titles are of genre interest.
Fiction
Lincoln in the Bardo. By George Saunders. Random House; 368 pages; $28. Bloomsbury; £18.99
Abraham Lincoln’s son dies young and enters a multi-chorus Buddhistic underworld. One of the year’s most original and electrifying novels.Austral. By Paul McAuley. Gollancz; 288 pages; £14.99
A chase thriller set in late 21st-century Antarctica that combines elements of Jack London, J.G. Ballard and William Gibson. A significant contribution to writing about the anthropocene.
(7) MORE ON COMIC CON LITIGATION. Rob Salkowitz gives Forbes readers a pro-San-Diego spin on the verdict in “Jury Decides For San Diego Comic-Con In Trademark Suit”.
‘David vs. Goliath?’ Farr and Brandenburg also saw advantages in taking their case public, rallying fans to the idea that “comic con” belongs to everyone, not one particular institution. They ran a coordinated campaign on social media including promoted Facebook posts, marshalling an online army of supporters to comment, upvote and retweet their position and paint themselves as altruistic “Davids” standing up to the “Goliath” of SDCC, which is seen by some as the embodiment of commercialism and Hollywood hype.
It was disclosed in court proceedings that the two organizers voted themselves bonuses of $225,000 each as they were mounting a crowdfunding campaign to get fans to pony up for their legal defense. However, the comment threads on SLCC’s posted content indicated that the tactics were effective in mobilizing fan anger.
…“Comic-Con is a Brand.” CCI, meanwhile, saved its best lines for the court. They asserted that Comic-Con was a brand recognized to apply exclusively to the San Diego show, and offered in evidence a survey showing that more than 70% of respondents agreed. The validity of the survey was called into question by SLCC attorneys during the trial but the jury appeared to accept it as proof.
“This is a brand that we must protect from these defendants and anyone else who seeks to exploit or hijack it,” Bjurstrom said.
SDCC’s lawyers also asserted the defendants knew this to be the case when they launched their own event, an assertion the jury apparently rejected in their deliberations regarding damages. In filings seeking summary judgment, Comic-Con produced emails and public statements by Farr and Brandenburg boasting of how they sought to “hijack” the media notoriety of SDCC to boost their own event, and settled on the name “comic con” expressly to leverage fan enthusiasm around the festival that draws upwards of 140,000 to San Diego each July and generates billions of media impressions and coverage during its 4-day run.
(8) PAUL WEIMER. Book Smugglers continue their own unique holiday season with “50th Anniversary of The Prisoner – Paul Weimer’s Smugglivus Celebration”.
The Prisoner is the story of an nameless British secret service agent, played by Patrick McGoohan. McGoohan was no stranger to playing spies and secret agents. McGoohan had previously played a British secret service agent, John Drake, in Danger Man. Patrick McGoohan, based on the strength of his performance in that show, had been offered the role of James Bond in Dr. No, but had turned it down. That would have been a rather strange thing if he had accepted, because the no-nonsense John Drake is erudite, thoughtful, not much of a lady chaser and quite different than James Bond in other aspects as well. Whilst filming The Prisoner, McGoohan would also get the role of a British secret agent in the Cold War spy thriller Ice Station Zebra. He also would be asked again, and to turn down again, James Bond, for Live and Let Die.
(9) MOSAIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY. The University of Oregon Libraries’ magazine Building Knowledge has compiled a first-person Ursula K. Le Guin biography [page 20, PDF file] “illustrated with her personal keepsakes, told (mostly) in her own, inimitable words” all drawn from the collections of the UO Libraries.
“If I can draw on the springs of ‘magic,’ it’s because I grew up in a good place, in a good time even though it was the Depression, with parents and siblings who didn’t put me down, who encouraged me to drink from the springs. I was encouraged by my father, by my mother. I was encouraged to be a woman, to be a writer, to be any damn thing I wanted to be.”
Jeffrey Smith sent a note with the link:
It’s a snowy day here in the east, so I’ve been going through the week’s mail. I just received the Fall 2017 issue of the University of Oregon Libraries’ magazine Building Knowledge, and started flipping through it before throwing it out, and found myself reading quite a bit of it. After enjoying the article on the book about Oregon’s marine invertebrates, I continued paging through and was surprised to see an article on Ursula Le Guin (page 20), with some great old family photos (many of which I had seen the last time I was out at UO) — there’s also one on the inside back cover. Then I turned the page and saw my own picture (bottom of page 24).
Guess I won’t be tossing this out after all.
(10) IAN WATSON. An Ian Watson interview at The Bloghole: “Space Marine! And an Interview with a Legend”.
Firstly, Space Marine, and the Inquisition trilogy which started with Draco, were the first “proper” novels set in the Warhammer 40k universe. I know it was a little while ago, but was there much input from Games Workshop at the time, or were you left to your own devices in terms of how you chose to interpret the setting?
[IAN WATSON] Go back quarter of a century and Mr Big was Bryan Ansell, Managing Director/Owner of GW who wanted to read “real” novels by “real” novelists set in his beloved Warhammer domains. As intermediary Bryan hired David Pringle, editor of Britain’s leading SF magazine Interzone, operating from Brighton as GW books. David had already recruited half a dozen authors who regularly contributed stories to Interzone, but no one would touch Warhammer 40K with a bargepole. So it fell to me to read Rogue Trader and many other encyclopedic publications which Nottingham HQ proceeded to send me, including printouts of nonfiction work-in-progress such as the manual of Necromunda, and much else. Bryan Ansell did send me quite a long letter lovingly detailing the sounds which 40K weaponry should make, so that I should be geared up sensually to describe combat. As far as I’m aware (though beware of false memory!) I was given no instructions at all regarding plot or characters and I simply made up the story, within the constraints of what I knew about the 40K universe. I toured the 40K universe, and after a few years the GW games designers decided that they disapproved of a broad approach, compared with single-action novels set on single worlds. (Those are more compatible with games, of course.)
(11) NEW LEADERSHIP FOR WADE CENTER. The Marion E. Wade Center of Wheaton College, Illinois is a major research collection of materials by and about seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. The college has announced who the new directors of the Center will be: “Introducing Newly Named Wade Co-Directors Crystal and David C. Downing”.
Dr. Crystal Downing is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies at Messiah College, PA. She has published on a variety of topics, with much of her recent scholarship focused on the relationship between cultural theory and religious faith. Her first book, Writing Performances: The Stages of Dorothy L. Sayers (Palgrave Macmillan 2004) received an international award from the Dorothy L. Sayers Society in Cambridge, England in 2009. The thought of Sayers and C.S. Lewis is evident in Crystal’s next two books, How Postmodernism Serves (My) Faith (IVP Academic 2006) and Changing Signs of Truth (IVP Academic 2012). The success of her fourth book, Salvation from Cinema (Routledge 2016) has led to her current book project, The Wages of Cinema: Looking through the Lens of Dorothy L. Sayers. Crystal has received a number of teaching awards and was the recipient of the Clyde S. Kilby Research Grant for 2001 from the Wade Center.
Dr. David Downing currently serves as the R.W. Schlosser Professor of English at Elizabethtown College, PA. He has published widely on C.S. Lewis, including Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy (UMass 1992), The Most Reluctant Convert: C.S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith (IVP 2002), which was awarded the Clyde S. Kilby Research Grant for 2000, Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C.S. Lewis (IVP 2005), and Into the Wardrobe: C.S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles (Jossey-Bass 2005)….
They follow Wade founder and first director Clyde S. Kilby (1965–1980), director Lyle W. Dorsett (1983–1990), and director Christopher W. Mitchell (1994–2013).
(12) TODAY IN HISTORY
- December 9, 1983 — John Carpenter’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Christine premieres.
(13) MAKE THE KESSEL RUN IN 13 STEPS. You could make this. Disney Family has the recipe: “Nothing Says the Holidays Like a Millennium Falcon Gingerbread Starship”. The final step is —
Attach the cockpit (piece #3). Then start decorating the Millennium Falcon! Use frosting to outline the ship, add details, and attach cookies, chocolate wafers, peppermints, chocolates, and candies.
(14) THE GAME IS SLOW AFOOT. The Hollywood Reporter knows “Why ‘Game of Thrones’ Won’t Return Until 2019”.
At least one more full winter will pass until the winter of Westeros arrives one last time, as the final season of Thrones will not arrive until 2019. Production on the eighth and final season began in October and will reportedly run through August 2018 — a full year following the season seven finale, all but dashing any prospects for Thrones‘ arrival in the next calendar year.
“Our production people are trying to figure out a timeline for the shoot and how much time the special effects take,” HBO programming president Casey Bloys told The Hollywood Reporter over the summer about the long wait between seasons of Thrones. “The shooting is complicated enough — on different continents, with all the technical aspects — and the special effects are a whole other production period that we’re trying to figure out. That is a big factor in all of this.”
(15) VERSE ON THE WEB. Here’s the teaser trailer for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Enter a universe where more than one wears the mask. Watch the Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse trailer now, in theaters next Christmas
(16) DEL TORO DEL MAR. Now that it’s officially out, NPR’s Chris Klimek says “The Shape of Water is An Elegant Fable Of Starfish-Crossed Lubbers”.
The Shape of Water, the latest R-rated fairy tale from Mexican auteur Guillermo del Toro, offers a sense of what might spawn if those two Rimbaldi feature-creatures were to mate. The Spielbergian gentleness wins out, by a lot, making for a hybrid that’s just a little too cuddly to rate with The Devil’s Backbone or Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro’s twin masterpieces. I wish his new film had spent at least a little time being frightening before it phased into aching and swooning; with its lush evocation of longing amid gleaming midcentury diners and cinemas and Cadillacs, SoW sometimes feels like The Carol of the Black Lagoon. But it’s a transporting, lovingly made specimen of escapism — if it’s possible for a movie that depicts a powerful creep blithely abusing women in the workplace to count as escapism — and easily the strongest of del Toro’s seven English-language features, though it spin-kicks less vampire butt than Blade II did. To place yourself in GDT’s hands, as he tells the type of story he tells better than anyone else, is a rich pleasure.
(17) BOUNCING MATILDA. Can you hear this GIF? BBC explores “Why some people can hear this silent gif”. “An optical illusion for the ears” –apparently not new, but it’s news again.
Dr DeBruine received more then 245,000 responses from people claiming to hear a sound accompanying the animation, with 70 per cent of respondents saying they could hear a thudding sound.
Does anyone in visual perception know why you can hear this gif? pic.twitter.com/mcT22Lzfkp
— @debruine@tech????lgbt (@LisaDeBruine) December 2, 2017
(18) DISSECTING ANOTHER HOLIDAY. Having vented about Thanksgiving in the first, John C. Wright’s second Dangeous column is: “It’s Not Just the Décor. Why the Left Truly Hates Christmas”.
In the culture of life, life is a gift from the hand of the Creator. It is not ours to decide to keep or to destroy. In the culture of life, your life is not your own.
This means your unborn daughter or your grandmother in the terminal ward can live, despite any pragmatic, dead-eyed, empty-hearted, cost-cutting reason to murder her.
That is the end goal of all of this. The end goal is a black mass where innocent life is sacrificed. Nothing is sacred but the whim of Caesar. No one prospers, but Moloch feeds.
Yes, strange as it sounds, that is what is at stake.
The War on Christmas is a war by the unhuman against the human.
(19) END GAME. Bob Byrne tells “the story of how TSR destroyed one of the greatest wargaming companies in history” in “Simulations Publications Inc: The TSR Incursion” at Black Gate.
The death blow came in 1982 and it would be delivered by Brian Blume, who initially looked like a white knight. Well, at least a moderately gray one. Wagner and SPI secured a $425,000 loan from TSR, secured by its assets and intellectual properties (uh oh!).
The majority of the loan was used to repay the venture capitalists, which eliminated that problem, but it was the modern day equivalent of getting an advance on your credit card to pay down the existing balance on another credit card. You still have to pay off that second credit card advance.
Only two weeks later, TSR called in the loan, which SPI had absolutely zero ability to pay back. TSR announced in March that it had “initiated a legal and economic chain of events” to buy SPI. Once it realized the company’s debt situation, it backed off of that and stated that TSR had acquired the company’s assets, but not its debts. I’m still not sure how TSR got away with that.
WOW! How can you look at it in any other light than that TSR lent the money so it could immediately foreclose on SPI and acquire all its games? I mean, yeesh.
(20) NEW ART EXHIBIT. Tove Jansson is profiled by Dominic Green in The New Criterion. “Adventures in Moominland”. “Tove Jansson” opened at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, on October 25, 2017 and remains on view through January 28, 2018.
It was a Swedish actress, Greta Garbo, who said she wanted to be alone, and a Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman, who documented what it felt like. It was, however, Tove Jansson (1914–2001), a Swedish-speaking Finn, who may have produced the most truthful record of the inner life of postwar Scandinavia. Best known in the English-speaking world as the illustrator of the Moomintroll comic strips, Jansson was also a painter, cartoonist, and writer of stories for children and adults. In Scandinavia, the breadth of her work is common knowledge. The Helsinki Art Museum contains a permanent Jansson gallery, and sends visitors out on a “Life Path of Tove” sculpture trail around her hometown. There is even a Moomin Museum in nearby Tampere, featuring the Moominhouse, a five-story doll’s house that Jansson built. And posthumously, the Moominlegend has incorporated Jansson’s complex and often unhappy private life.
“Tove Jansson,” now at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, is a comprehensive survey, and the first Jansson exhibition designed for a foreign audience
(21) LATE NIGHT LAST NIGHT. Lost ‘Star Wars’ Footage Of Luke Skywalker At The Cantina.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Diana Glyer, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Ed Fortune, Jeff Smith, Chip Hitchcock, Stephen Burridge, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
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17
I wouldn’t call it “hearing” the GIF, but the visual cues sure produce something like a thudding effect. (I keep the speakers turned off, so definitely nothing audible.)
“In the not-too-Pixeled future, next Scrollday, AD”
(17) BOUNCING MATILDA.
I mentally both hear and feel a “thud”. It’s really quite bizarre and intriguing.
17) That jumping jack gif is trending on tumblr, also, and most tumblr people claim to ‘hear’ it. I don’t, but then, well, me…
18) JCWrong is 100% correct that the bean counters want to kill granny in the end-of-life ward, and the newborn in NICU, and anyone else who isn’t rich. But that pretty much describes the GOP and the zombie-eyed-granny-starver named Paul Ryan. (name given to him by Charlie P. Pierce)
Ryan and the rest of the amoral GOP is so busy pushing money upwards to the rich donor class that they don’t care what happens to the rest of us. Ryan has already said that the next order of business is fixing the deficit they just created by whacking ‘entitlements’ like Social Security and Medicare.
Ryan is a particular hypocrite in a mob of them: his father died when Paul was in high school, so he collected Social Security survivors’ benefits. His family was/is well-to-do, so it’s not like that money kept food on their table.
Yet he is determined to destroy that program and others.
But yeah, it’s the SJW’s that are anti-life.
Bah, humbug, JCW
(18) DISSECTING ANOTHER HOLIDAY.
I can’t be bothered to go read a post by someone who continually rails about the “sanctity of human life” whilst simultaneously arguing that LGBTQ people should be killed, that socialized healthcare which ensures that the poor and the ill can survive should be axed, and that women should be forced to stay home and procreate (while slavishly serving and obeying their husbands, of course). 🙄
17) Yep, I hear it too.
Hey I’m a scroll item!
Yep, the Booksmugglers invited me to contribute an item this year, and I figured given we’re in the 50th anniversary year, I’d tackle The Prisoner. Neither Thea nor Ana have ever seen or really even heard of it, so I consider my work done there, alone. 🙂
SCROLLUS CONTRA PIXELUM DIABOLUS EST
(18) I don’t have the intestinal fortitude tonight to read one of his spittle-flecked tirades, so I can’t speak specifically to what he’s freaking out about this time, but I do have to say that I find it…
Interesting?
Hilarious?
Well, I find it something that “Tire-iron” Wright is now churning out material for Milo, whom he should, if he has the courage of his convictions, consider an unapologetic degenerate.
(18) Mr. Wright must live in a very sad world. Thank goodness the rest of us don’t have to share it with him.
(20) Tove Jansson! I love her adult fiction but still haven’t read anything Moomin. Any case, the article is excellent.
Not the slightest hint of an imagined sound with the gif. But I’m imagining John C. Wright as one of the Goth Kids from South Park.
Hopefully some decent people will create a new patreon-ish site to fill the void left by Patreon’s departure. That may reek of “let’s you and him fight” but I don’t have the time, contacts, or resources to do such a thing.
17) I don’t hear the GIF, but I feel the vibrations.
18) It’s quite rich of JCW to rail about supposedly rude Leftists, while he himself harrasses editors, misgenders transpeople, verbally attacks Terry Pratchett and proclaims that it’s normal to want to beat gay men to death with tire irons. Considering how much he blathers about Christ, he doesn’t really seem to have understood His teachings at all.
JCW also seems to be harbouring under the mistaken impression that the Roman Empire still exists, since he constantly complains about Caesar and the people worshipping him. Though come to think of it, if he genuinely believes he’s living in the time of the Roman Empire, that would explain a lot.
I made a video 🙂
I didn’t see any bicycles. I feel like you didn’t really _get_ the novel, which I see as a sort of spiritual sequel to “The Third Policeman.” Otherwise, excellent book trailer! I see a future Number 1 in Fiction -> Science Fiction/Horror -> Hunky Nuggetmen -> Fighting Space Vampires -> Juvyfg Haorxabjafg gb Gurz Orvat Zneevrq gb gur Dhrra Fcnpr Inzcver.
@Jack Lint & @Mike Glyer in re. “All Pixels Great And Small”: Great title! 😀
(10) IAN WATSON. I remember “The Books of the Black Current” fondly (if a bit vaguely), though I have no idea how well they hold up. I haven’t thought of them in a long time.
(15) VERSE ON THE WEB. I’m mildly confused (I know who Miles Morales [sp?] is, don’t worry).
(18) DISSECTING ANOTHER HOLIDAY. What a fool.
(19) END GAME. SPI signed a contract with a rival company that allowed them to call in the debt at any time?! Gah.
Meredith Moment:
Unexpected Rain by Jason LaPier (The Dome Trilogy #1) is $1.99 from HarperVoyager (uses DRM). This SF novel takes place in a domed city orbiting another star and it sounds like sort of a mystery-thriller-buddy-book. A falsely-accused maintenance man goes on the run with a rogue police officer, trying to uncover the truth, etc.
I’d run across this quite a while back, but lost the info and forgot about it. It sounds like my kind of novel! Anyone read this book/series??? If so, please let me know what you thought of it. Time for me to load another sample into the hopper. . . .
BTW the concluding volume came out 5 months ago and prices are #1 $1.99, #2 $2.99, and #3 $4.99.
Darn! Next time…
(18) That’s not dangerous; it’s sad.
(18) Wright is going to be ever so surprised when he learns that his new sugar daddy’s conception of traditional values to be restored leans more toward Ancient Greece than Christianity.
@Cora Though come to think of it, if he genuinely believes he’s living in the time of the Roman Empire, that would explain a lot.
Which makes me think of Philip K Dick and “the empire never ended”. Combine that with the Darkest Timeline memes that have been going around since the US election and I think we can reach some disturbing conclusions about how real this all is.
(10) IAN WATSON
I have very fond memories of Space Marine and Inquisitor. They may not have stuck 100% to canon but they embodied 200% of the gonzo spirit of the setting.
I think that was the same period that GW had Kim Newman writing WFRP books as Jack Yeovil – I remember loving Beasts in Velvet, with its bad Dirty Harry joke (the character was nicknamed Filthy Harold)
1&2) The trust issue with Patreon trying to conceal the fee increase is real. But Patreon doesn’t care? You just now figured out Patreon is a business whose primary goal is to make money for itself?
18) It’s always projection with these people.
@bookworm1398: In the customer service sense of “care”. You see that construction all the time in complaints about bad customer service.
With that statement, Patreon has said that it doesn’t want the bulk of its customers – creatives AND patrons – as customers.
@bookworm1398
It’s also worth distinguishing between surprise and outrage. It’s possible to be cross that the cat made off with the chicken when you briefly left the kitchen even though you know what cats are like.
13: WARNING: Stormtroopers(TM) not intended for consumption. Manufacturer strongly suggests biting off the heads first in order to avoid additional injury.
18: Jeez. Where’s Robert M. Lindner when you need him?
19: I was working in gaming at the time and this was indeed a horrible event. It’s horribleness was confirmed not too much later when TSR began issuing its editions of some SPI games. And not to much later after that they were roundly excoriated for appropriating trademarks for things like NAZI….
21: earnest, but not all that funny.
@Camestros !!!!!!!!
Y’know, if you’re going to smoke funny stuff, don’t get your rolling papers by tearing a page out of the Book of Revelation. That’s a bad, bad combo.
Re:Patreon (1,2):
What’s absolutely bewildering to me is that this new fee scheme doesn’t seem to bring Patreon much new cash, or any at all. The extra money is because they’re bringing in a ton of new transactions; the price hike goes directly to covering service fees.
Was Patreon bought by PayPal or something? ::headscratch::
I follow a couple of Catholic-interest pages on FB (while it frequently thuds, Catholic Memes has points of epic hilarity) and I see that frequently in the comments threads. It makes me sad to know how seriously they Don’t Get It, and then it worries me about where my blind spots are.
Edit: typo
@Nancy, others: The problem of course is, at least in self-referential terms, those views of xtianity are as valid as any others.
There was a post on an FB thread related to The Orville complaining about the show “shoving atheism” down everyone’s throats.
We know, but frequently forget, that “religion” at its base is different from a science-based secularism in that religion is “revealed” and science is “observed”.
Far too many people in this world do not understand the difference.
(17) Definitely feel the thurs. Not hearing them, though.
I do think this conclusively proves that the human mind is weird, but I’m not sure I can convince anyone here that that’s a surprise.
(18) John C. Wright’s mind is its own punishment.
Re Patreon:
It seems obvious what Patreon is doing-they intend to drive down the small donations by increasing the relative cost to the donor instead of charging the creator. They want to reduce the number of individual transactions.
Failing that, this is structured so that the small donors cover their transaction’s costs.
@Robert: I don’t see why?
It seems like they can definitely drive away “small” donors and creators, but I don’t see how that benefits them.
It’s not like the step is moving small donors towards donating more; it’s just not getting their money anymore. Is processing a monthly $10 donation really not worth Patreon’s effort? Is the effort of processing small donations really not worth their value in onboarding and hooking people into new pledges? That just seems weird.
There was a post on an FB thread related to The Orville complaining about the show “shoving atheism” down everyone’s throats.
I assume these people have never watched Star Trek before.
@ Paul Weimer: WELL DONE, sir!
The Fifth! Scroël, the filers did say
To all the fans wherever they play
17. Squee! So much cuteness.
Null synesthesia, though.
@Standback: I think someone earlier had it right: this is about the migration of vidders from YouTube and discouraging the long tail from following them.
@Standback:
I suspect they’re aiming at donors giving less than $5/mo. Lots of $1 transactions are probably more trouble than they’re worth to Patreon. A creator getting lots of really small donations likely expects to bear a certain level of costs and won’t necessarily care as much. But someone giving $1-2 to lots of different creators is more likely to just cut back on the number of people they give to, which reduces the transaction load for Patreon without impacting the bottom line severely. If any percentage of donors bumps up donations to some creators at the cost of dropping others, that’s a bonus for Patreon.
2) Hm the great thing on Patreon was that it worked so well for small content creators. I imagine the big guns have better options. But I guess someone else will jump into the niche.
17) Hearing silent thumping is an odd experience.
18) I stopped reading anything that starts talking about “The left” long ago (except if its a song about two hands)
The greatest Scroll on Earth
17) Oh yeah, thuds and vibrations.
18) Dude, you do remember that Christmas was stolen from the pagans, right? Full of pagan symbolism celebrating life and rebirth? And that religions have been full of deities being reborn since loooooooooooong before Johnny-Come-Lately Christ came along?
I’m always having to shake my head at the ignorance of religious fanatics…..
“The practice of decorating Christmas trees dates from Eighteenth Century Germany, which had not been pagan for over a thousand years. ”
Yeah, no. The Germans adapted it to their purpose, but evergreens were a symbol for thousands of years before that.
From “The History of Christmas Trees”: “The evergreen fir tree has traditionally been used to celebrate winter festivals (pagan and Christian) for thousands of years. Pagans used branches of it to decorate their homes during the winter solstice, as it made them think of the spring to come. The Romans used Fir Trees to decorate their temples at the festival of Saturnalia.”
— similarly with holly (one of the few broadleaf evergreens) and mistletoe (not only evergreen, but not even needing dirt to survive)
“Horus’s birth was traditionally celebrated in August, not December, and he was born to avenge his father’s death, not to cure mankind of sin. Mithra was not born, he was carved out of a rock. ”
And Christ was probably not born in December either. But — oh, look! — the winter solstice does take place then, conveniently right at the end of the month. Gee, what a coincidence.
As for the various reborn deities (of which there are quite a few) — variations on a theme, big guy. You’re missing the forest for the (evergreen) trees.
“A despot worshipped as a god.”
Hmmm. Sounds like Wright is turning anti-Trump on us. 😉
“So the War on Christmas is waged to kill the fun of Christmas, to end the joy. ”
Ummm, seriously? You think those pagans weren’t plenty joyful every time the sun agreed to return for another year? You think those pagan solstice celebrations weren’t joyful?
Oh, this one really killed me: “Even your Leftist friends who claim to be good Christians, and who say they love Christ, do not. If they loved Him they would do what He said. ”
Gee golly gosh. Guess what Jesus said about homosexuality? Absolutely NOTHING. But he did say “love your neighbor as yourself.” Hmmmm.
And Jesus did speak against divorce. You know which group in the US has higher divorce rate? Conservatives. You know which group has lower rates? Liberals. Google the study “Red States, Blue States, and Divorce: Understanding the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Regional Variation in Divorce Rates”. Hmmmm.
“Even an atheist might want not to live where, once he falls ill, and over the objection of his relatives ready and able to pay for his recovery, a faceless bureaucrat may sentence him to death by the lingering torment of starvation and dehydration, while he weakly whispers and croaks for help to indifferent nurses and passing janitors. ”
You must be referring to Terrill Thomas, who died of dehydration in the Milwaukee Jail — you know, the jail run by Trump’s good buddy David Clarke. Thomas begged for help for DAYS as he lay dying.
Sorry, guys. I know it’s pointless to try to speak rationally to a fanatic like Wright. But this sort of claptrap really trips my trigger.
I definitely don’t hear anything. I can let myself feel a thud, but it’s purely voluntary–like suspending disbelief. I can tell there’s no actual thud, but it is surprisingly easy to allow myself to get sucked into the illusion.
Kendall on December 9, 2017 at 11:56 pm said:
They may not have seen them as rivals. SPI was wargames; TSR was (at the time) role-playing. And Avalon Hill (who were also wargames, and were doing quite well) was probably SPI’s main concern. And TSR was relatively new–SPI may have thought there’d be some “fellow plucky underdog” feelings between the two companies.
Of course, the final result was TSR getting bought by Wizards of the Coast, which got bought by Hasbro (who also acquired Avalon Hill).
Whoops, forgot to stalk the gods.
(17) I experienced a similar illusory noise during the eclipse last summer. I could have sworn the sun produced an odd buzzing sound when it “went out” during totality.
1) The infuriating thing about Patreon ISN’T that they’re trying to make money—honestly, if they’d said “You, we gotta take another ten percent, this is killing us,” I suspect there would have been a mix of grumbling and understanding. It’s who they’re taking it FROM.
If they had offered me a button to pay the fees instead of sticking it to my patrons, I’d have clicked with a glad heart! It’s the fact they outright said “No, nobody gets to do that,” and combined with the minimum pledge that makes me think they don’t understand how protective many of us creators feel about our patrons.
I mean, they made my people SAD. That is NOT OKAY.
18) Ok, so the war on Christmas is to prevent…fun? Because fun is the opposite of abortion and old age? Am I reading this right?
…wow, my holiday tequila must have saved uncounted lives, because it was a BLAST.
(18) Wright brings up Moloch. Jo Walton’s poem “Moloch” tells how it really is. The poem will be five years old next week.
@Robert Reynolds
I suspect they’re aiming at donors giving less than $5/mo
The _total_ amount given by a person is irrelevant – what used to be a single payment to process from them Patreon has decided to turn into multiple payments – if a significant share of the amount you donate is in small amounts to different receivers, then fees are now a noticeable proportion of your payment made. Their fee per payment is within reason, the issue for donors is changing a single payment into multiple ones.
They say they are doing this to address certain issues (that mainly impact a small proportion of receivers). Even if these issues are addressed by the change, Patreon have removed what made them different from multiple other services – so donors have no reason to continue using a service that clearly doesn’t care about their preferences or situation.
Errolwi: Patreon have removed what made them different from multiple other services – so donors have no reason to continue using a service that clearly doesn’t care about their preferences or situation.
Exactly. Patreon’s value to me was that I could give $1 or 2 each to 20-some different creators each month. A chunk of each dollar went to fees, but the amount of the fees was smaller because my payments were aggregated into one PayPal transaction with one fee. But now a bigger chunk of each of my dollars will be going to fees, and my creators will be getting less than they were. So Patreon has eliminated the value they had for me as a service.
While it will make it harder for my creators to do monthly budgeting, and more annoying and time-consuming for me to track and schedule payments, at least when I pay a creator $12 directly for a year up front, they will get the entire $12. I can make my monthly payments essentially the same as they have been for me, by paying 2 creators this way each month, on an annual cycle.
Unfortunately, a lot of patrons aren’t in a financial position to aggregate payments in that way, and Patreon’s changes mean that they will be paying 40% more, and that a third of what they pay will not go the creator. Why would people who have very little to donate be willing to have such a huge chunk of their donation go to a big corporation?
I hear that Kickstarter’s Drip may be positioning themselves as a replacement for Patreon. I’ve received e-mails from all of my creators saying that they will keep me posted if/when they go to a new platform. I’ll be changing how I pay them as that occurs.