T w e n t y S i d e d
Many people have noticed that despite being told we’d be uploading old content, and updating the site…nothing has really happened. We haven’t forgotten, but the transition from Dad doing everything, to unexpected family takeover, was (shocker!) not as smooth as we hoped.
The haphazardly decided upon system and attempted delegation of tasks looked like this:
Mom: Handles the Patreon, and does the site upkeep. She is the only competent programmer of the household, so the job automatically fell to her.
Bay(me): Writes articles on Fridays, and posts the DM of the Rings for Sunday mornings.
Peter: Writes articles when the mood takes him.
Issac: Puts together the remaster comic.
Elliot: Does editing for everyone.
This system has been flawed for many reasons. But the long and short of it is; Mom has no time or energy to actually work on the site or Patreon. It’s stressful to her, and not something she actually wants to be doing, but she just got put in that position because she was left with control of all the money to do with the site. Some people donate to support the family, and some donate to keep the site running, and everything was stressful and ambiguous.
The monthly budget looked something like this:
Mom: $400
Me:$400
Issac: $80
Domain and general upkeep costs: $20 ($250/yr)
The money to Mom went towards making sure she could still pay the bills, and the money to me and Issac was for content creation and keeping things running. The donations we received directly after paid for his funeral, and our move back to my hometown.
But now, a year later, Mom is on her feet enough to not need the passive income, and it’s not worth the stress of the things she’s supposed to be doing for it.
The Patreon is being moved fully to me, and the budget put in my hands to operate.
I want to hire someone to move the site to a more stable platform that will require less constant upkeep. WordPress just isn’t keeping up with this place anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time. I’m in contact with some Squarespace designers to get a quote for migration, although I shudder to think what it will look like.
I want to pay Issac way better for his work on the comic, he’s earned it, and $20 per strip doesn’t feel fair to me. I have a few people I’m speaking with on more content creation, my father-in-law is an old fan and commenter here, and I’d like to pull him on board if he’s willing. If not, I have other family available. We are a whole lot of nerds.
This isn’t going to be immediate, Patreon pays out next month for me, and we’re in the middle of getting a second car so we can stop turning down shifts at our various jobs because we don’t have a ride to them. I could potentially crowdfund it Something Dad would have never done, and I’m painfully aware would be a huge break from norm, or, much more likely, I’ll be saving everything I can of the Patreon income to migrate over as soon as we can.
You guys make saving this place possible, and I will be forever grateful for that. I’m hoping, either way, if we can be patient, I can pour a little more attention into this place, now that I have the long-term resources to do so.
My email is [email protected], and if anyone needs to contact someone about the site, they should send it there. I’d like to take full responsibility for this place and take it off my (very busy) mother’s plate.
Footnotes:
[1] Something Dad would have never done, and I’m painfully aware would be a huge break from norm
Why I Hated Resident Evil 4
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
The Mistakes DOOM Didn't Make
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Patreon!
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
I just wanted to say thank you for remastering the DM of the Rings comic. I like downloading short comic pages and strips and sharing them with my siblings or friends on occasion. I never did so with the first versions, because they were too blurry or I’d have to screenshot them.
Also, Wanted to give you and the family kudos for keeping the site up and running. I assume the whirlwind of mourning was bad enough, and keeping the site up will help keep Shamus’s legacy.
I do wonder though… if you were to take all of his blog posts over the 16 years he wrote here, how big of a book would that be? Seriously, how many words were written for the site by Shamus.
You can get an idea for how many words he wrote in the blue chart here. It’s roughly 200k/year. For context, The Fellowship of the Ring is 187k words :D
I just hope the old content will still be intact – along with the footnotes, good formatting, little jokes when you hover over the images, etc. Not all of it’s is available on archive.org and it would be a painstaking process to make sure that everything is (and trust me – I’ve tried).
Crowdfund it. We’re willing.
Honestly, that all sounds like a good way forward. Not much to say otherwise. I’m rooting for this place.
If I had better writing skills, I might volunteer to contribute the occasional article. I have ideas for articles sometimes but my writing isn’t up to snuff. I’m also intimidated by posting to this blog because my ideas are not Shamus-caliber. I’m not nearly as knowledgeable in the things I would want to talk about as he was with the subjects of his articles.
Also, I’m a little disconcerted by this “Epilogue” tag. I don’t know if you wrote a post explaining what you meant by it but it leaves me with the impression that this is all coming to an end. I suppose you can’t devote yourself to your dad’s blog forever, it has to end some time, but I’m not ready yet. I have to know that I can come back here every now and then for a dose of his sanity.
Epilogue isn’t really meant to mean it’s coming to an end. We just needed a tag to represent ‘after’ so that things could be semi-organized. It’s a work in progress.