Patreon tier changes

I’ve made some changes to my Patreon tier structure, which will hopefully make small donations a bit more worthwhile. New benefits are as follows:

The “minion” tier ($1+) lets you jump the queue for my Q&A box by sending me questions via Patreon DMs. Right now I have so many unanswered questions, most of which are complicated ones that I can’t easily knock out in half an hour, that there’s a sort of wishing-well quality to putting anything in the question box. It doesn’t cost me anything to rearrange the queue, so I think it’s reasonable to give that to anyone prepared to support me, even for only a small amount.

I’ve never had anyone sign up specifically for the $8/month tier that included access to behind-the-scenes material, so I’m moving that to $5 and getting rid of the $4 tier (which used to have the question priority benefit).

And lastly, it’s now $10/month (down from $12) for membership on the Dark Council, which gets to make suggestions for a longer discussion article every month, as well as a unique title on my acknowledgements page and a shout-out at the end of articles.

If you like my writing and would like me to be able to do more of it, check out https://www.patreon.com/pokemaniacal and consider a monthly donation – every little helps!

My “application” for a “job” on the Interwebs

So…

…how ’bout that devastating pandemic that has laid bare the callousness and cruelty of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on the planet, huh?

Just so no-one’s worried about me, I’m fine. I went home to New Zealand in March, and over the course of the last three months, New Zealand has become more or less the safest place in the world as we eliminated our COVID-19 outbreak through swift and strict lockdown measures, and we are continuing to impose quarantine on all visitors to the country to prevent reintroduction of the disease.

Meanwhile, the US is…

…fine.

So my situation is actually pretty peachy compared to what I assume the majority of my readers are looking at (my analytics page says the vast majority of my traffic comes from the US, which is not surprising since I write in English and the US makes up the majority of the English internet). However, I do have to… let’s say “reevaluate” a lot of my plans and priorities. I’m not going back to the United States in August to continue working on my PhD, because… well… on the one hand you have New Zealand, with its stable and fairly competent government, absence of deadly pandemics and relative lack of civil unrest, and on the other hand you have… Ohio. Er… no offence. In theory I could work on my PhD remotely and my department would almost certainly approve that plan under the circumstances, but I only have one more year of funding. Using that year to work from home, without access to my department’s resources or academic environment, would almost certainly be a waste; I would probably fail to complete my thesis within the time I have left and lose my chance. So, with my department’s support, I’m asking the university for a leave of absence. In theory, I’m going back in August 2021. In practice… well, I guess we’ll see what the state of the world is in August 2021. In the meantime, I’m applying for jobs in New Zealand. Maybe I’ll just have a job for the year and then go back; maybe I’ll find a job that I turn out to like and be good at, and just change over to that (hopefully getting a leave of absence from that job to finish my PhD later); maybe I’ll be part-time; maybe I’ll be full-time; maybe I won’t be able to find a job and I’ll just starve to death. Y’know, options.

But… another way of looking at it would be that we have a crisitunity on our hands.

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State of the Blog: 2019

sweet bird jesus christ, now what

oh, yeah, um… happy… new thing or whatever to all my readers who use the Gregorian calendar

So, we made it through 2019… seems like the world might end soon, so I’m looking forward to finding a new planet to terrorise and conquer… although frankly when I sold my soul to Dark Forces from Parts Unknown I was promised a much better return on investment than this. Still, I think it was a pretty good blog year, all things considered. We finished generation VII (…mostly… I think I actually will try to get some short pieces done on some of the major human characters I missed out – Hau, Lillie, Gladion – and I want to come back to Alolan forms when I do the Galarian ones), we saw and discussed Detective Pikachu, we started a new interactive/collaborative(?)/choose-your-own-adventure-ish story, A Pokémon Trainer Is You!, I started writing for fansite PokéJungle (and, by the way, if you don’t pay attention to my Twitter – well, first of-ly, good for you, Twitter is the path to hell, but secondwise, my latest piece there is up, looking at my favourite new Pokédex entries for pre-gen VIII Pokémon in Sword and Shield), I made this extremely ridiculous cake, we endured the hype period of the new games and even survived the games themselves, and I wrote my first big article on them – a character study of Marnie, Piers and Team Yell. The next one, on Chairman Rose, is finished and awaiting editorial approval, so it should be up later this week.

I also started a Patreon page! And people actually gave me money, which is bonkers; I mean, I’m not exactly going to become a full-time Internet Pokémon Personality any time soon, but I now get more than enough donations to cover the cost of hosting this thing on WordPress, so I’m not actively losing money out of it. Thank you, as always, to my mysterious benefactors, the patrons: Don’t Call Me Bradley, Leo M.R., James Crooks, hugh_donnetono, Esserise and Hamish Fyfe. If you want to support what I do (…whatever you think that is, exactly), consider joining their ranks for as little as a dollar per month. And even if you don’t, thank you for reading, commenting and submitting questions – this blog is an objectively terrible use of my time in several ways, but I kind of love that there seem to be hundreds of people all over the world who seem to enjoy it, which is honestly a bigger audience than I’m ever likely to get for anything I publish in my real-life academic career.

As for upcoming Things, let’s see… I think my next article is going to cover Hop, and hopefully be a bit shorter and less complex than what I’ve written for Team Yell and Chairman Rose (we’ll see how that turns out…). I probably need to skip this week’s episode of A Pokémon Trainer Is You, because I’m flying back to the US this weekend and… well, things are a bit hectic. It’ll be back next week, though (with the polls running on US Eastern time again). Topics of upcoming reader questions include rebalancing types to work more like the TCG, a new take on the Grass-Water-Fire starter triangle, how I would design a Pokémon gym, and how on earth Ghost Pokémon are supposed to work. For the whole year… well, I want to try to review all the Pokémon of generation VIII this year, but given how long and detailed my reviews are these days, I’d be satisfied with getting through, like, half of them; that should leave me with plenty of time to finish the lot before those BASTARDS who CONTROL MY LIFE announce generation IX.

well… here goes nothing

happy 2020, b!tches

State of the Blog

uh… nothing is on fire… none of the Pokémon are dead… the horrors of the space between the stars are quiet… I need to buy milk tomorrow but I can probably remember to do that… things are good! I think!

Y’know, there is something weirdly addictive about the WordPress stats page. Day by day, hour by hour, the figures go up, and some number of people are paying attention to my deranged claptrap, fuelling my long, slow and inevitable descent into crippling narcissism.

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Hello from Athens!

Don’t worry, I’m not vanishing into an archaeological dig for a month; I’m just here for a week to attend a top-secret cool-kids-only seminar on ancient glass, my speciality (and, uh, take some photos of the Arch of Hadrian to catch some angles I missed the last time I was here). It’ll be a bit of a slow week on account of the program being fairly intense, but I’m still aiming to get my next Pokémon review (Celesteela) written and posted in accordance with the 10-day schedule I seem to have adopted. So, speaking of that… it seems to be working well? I’m posting things consistently (3 Ultra Beast reviews in March), I’m answering questions (14 over the course of the month), I made a ridiculous cake that people seemed to like, and… well, to be honest I don’t really know what all the numbers on my stats page mean, but the ones for March are the biggest yet, by a fairly impressive margin (more than double those for January), and we seem to be getting more people coming in through links on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc – so, to anyone who’s shared any of my writing over the past month, thanks, and keep doing what you’re doing! And, y’know, keep the questions coming; I know I whine about the difficult ones sometimes but interesting questions are kinda this blog’s lifeblood in a lot of ways, and I literally couldn’t do this without you.

Special thanks are due as always to my Patreon supporters, James Crooks, hugh_donnetono and Esserise, whose contributions pay for the upkeep of this WordPress site. If you enjoy my writing, want to see more of it and have exactly $US 1 too much money per month, consider clicking that link at the top of the page to browse the perks I currently have on offer for my patrons. At the moment, all proceeds will go towards upgrading my WordPress plan so the site can do more interesting and flexible things. Anyway, I should get back to doing glass stuff – until next time!

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.

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??” →