Patreon milestone reached!

Just wanted to make a quick announcement: thanks to my first three Patreon supporters, we have reached our first (admittedly modest) funding goal: breaking even on the $5/month cost of hosting the blog on WordPress! Having apparently chosen just the right moment to jump ship from the godawful $#!tstorm that Tumblr, deep down, has really always been but has only now allowed itself to fully become, it’s fantastic to have secured the continued maintenance of the site for the future. It’s a great start for the first couple of weeks – so thank you to my patrons!

My next Patreon goal is to hit $10 per month. This is roughly the cost of a WordPress Premium plan, which (among other sundry minor features) will let me customise the site a bit more with CSS editing. Frankly I’m not sure why CSS editing is a premium feature, but it’s necessary for pretty much any meaningful deviation from the basic site themes offered by WordPress. There are loftier goals as well, but one thing at a time.

If this is something you might be interested in being a part of, then please consider becoming a Pokémaniacal Patreon supporter (see the site navigation links below the header). Patrons get special perks based on their level of contribution – from voting on my next projects to behind-the-scenes access to the work that Jim the Editor and I put into all my posts – and tiers start at just US$1 per month.

Anyway, that’s enough of that – we now return you to your regularly scheduled nonsense.

The Twitter’s Back

So, Jim the Editor has reminded me that I have a Twitter account, @pokemaniacal, which I was sort of hoping he would never do because I’m very bad at Twitter and I hate it. I tried to actually tweet things for a few months back in 2012, then gave up and just set it to tweet links whenever I posted something to Tumblr, and even that apparently stopped in early 2016 (presumably because Tumblr broke something, #fucktumblr). But I’m gonna give it another go, since I’m in a sort of rebranding phase with the new website and the Patreon page and everything, and maybe I can #engage my #followers by joining the #conversation (#hashtag #pleasekillme). So if you want to get notifications when I post something, or just hear whatever dumb brainfarts I decide to post there, go check it out.

Patreon launch!

I have a Patreon page now! So… that’s a thing!

Patreon, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is a platform that allows creative types (writers, artists, Youtubers, whatever) to accept regular donations from fans who think their work is worthy of financial support and want it to continue. In return, most people offer perks to their donors, usually in the form of public acknowledgements and shoutouts, or “backstage access” to some element of the creative process – I have plans for both of these, and you can see details on the page itself. A lot of Youtubers survive off Patreon money, especially since the “adpocalypse” that made it much harder to live on ad revenue alone without sacrificing creative freedom. I use Patreon to support a bunch of plucky Texan kids who make sketch comedy, because THAT IS WHAT I BELIEVE THE WORLD NEEDS RIGHT NOW, DAMN IT

For the moment this is very much a “give me a small tip if you think my work deserves it” thing – I’m not looking to make a living here (or at least, not yet?). Even if only five people give me $1/month each, well, that’s enough to pay WordPress for hosting the blog and being marginally less terrible than Tumblr. If we get to $10/month, I can upgrade to WordPress Premium, or even WordPress Business at $30/month, and get some meaningful customisation (why is CSS editing a premium feature? It’s not that complex!). Beyond that… well, beyond that I haven’t really figured it out yet, but if I’m going to discuss and review the next generation of Pokémon games then at some point I’ll need to buy a Nintendo Switch, and any contributions towards that, even if they don’t cover the full cost, will make the next year of my life a lot easier.

My continued work on this blog is not in any way contingent on getting Patreon money – I’ve been doing this for almost eight years with no financial incentives, and I am damn well going to continue lurching onward into Pokémon’s nightmarish dark future for as long as it takes to heal the insanity that these games have wrought upon my fractured soul (which might as well be forever). But it would certainly be nice to get something back; maybe knowing that I’m receiving support from readers will even make me more honest about posting regularly. And if this goes really well, who knows? Maybe I don’t want to be an academic forever. Maybe a humble(…ish) Pokémon blog is worth trying to build into something bigger. But we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Blog Status: Normal??

We haven’t talked in a while. We should do that.

I spent most of the last year in Greece, participating in an intensive study program for PhD students in classical studies that takes us to archaeological sites all over the country and gives us opportunities for “backstage access” that would be impossible for almost anyone else (culminating in the incredible opportunity to spend three nights on the holy island of Delos – since there’s no modern town on Delos, any normal group would have to take the afternoon ferry back to Mykonos every day). A priceless experience that I wouldn’t trade for almost anything, but… less than ideal for blog productivity, I have to admit. Continue reading “Blog Status: Normal??” →

Anonymous asks:

hi u ok

Yes! Uh, probably. Still living in Athens; for a little bit I was on Delos where no one actually lives and the internet is crap, and in a few weeks I’ll be going to Corinth for a dig (or, I mean, people will be digging; I’ve been promised a chance to sit in the museum and play with the Roman window glass from previous excavation seasons, so… yay!). Not super busy this month, so you should see some more stuff here for once! Want to try and do Mudsdale this week, and another one the week after. And I’ve been working on… another minor thing… Greece-related rather than Pokémon-related… that you may all be able to read in some form in the months to come (apologies for being mysterious but I don’t want to promise things before I know I can deliver them). Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Also, an announcement

Jim the Editor (originally so called because he proofreads all my writing for this blog, but now he’s also learning sound and video editing and is thus multiple kinds of editor at once) has just started a Youtube channel and begun a Let’s Play of Pokémon Fire Red version, run through a randomiser, using the bull$#!t drunken card game Nuzlocke-lite rules I posted a few weeks ago (which he has dubbed a “KingsLocke”). It promises to make about as much sense as everything else we do here at Pokémaniacal. Check out the channel here, and be sure to let him know if you like the first video!

oh hey, Tumblr changed the way its html editor works so that now, in every post I’ve ever written with a captioned image, the caption appears off to the side of the image instead of underneath and looks like it’s supposed to be part of the body text

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever liked a single change Tumblr has made to literally anything in the five years I’ve been using it; it just gets steadily clunkier and more opinionated about how it thinks my formatting should look. Like, you could honestly just fire/execute the entire development team and revert to the 2012 version of the platform and I think I would probably be happier with that. I mean, WHAT, in the name of all that is holy, was the feature that necessitated automatically translating copy-pasted text from Microsoft Word into an IMAGE OF THE TEXT, something that no one on earth has ever wanted for any purpose, and am I really the only person frustrated by having to work around it by copy-pasting twice via an e-mail program?

whaddya say we ditch this bull$#!t and migrate to WordPress or something; how does that sound

like, I don’t know what else is out there or what would be the best fit but it seems like Tumblr just gets harder to use every six months or so and I seriously cannot be fµ¢&ed anymore