{"id":27403,"date":"2015-06-28T05:56:49","date_gmt":"2015-06-28T10:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=27403"},"modified":"2017-05-01T11:58:46","modified_gmt":"2017-05-01T15:58:46","slug":"patreon-year-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=27403","title":{"rendered":"Patreon: Year One"},"content":{"rendered":"

A year ago<\/a> this month I launched a Patreon campaign<\/a>. At the time, Google Adsense had pissed me off (watch the original pitch video for the details) and I wanted to dump the ads. So I pulled down all advertising and launched the campaign in hopes you could make up the difference. It was a success, and changed my approach to how I make content and how I view my work. <\/p>\n

At the time I said that while talking about money is often a taboo, I think having a little transparency is good when you’re running an enterprise directly supported by the community. I don’t want to post my personal finances or anything, but I just want to give a basic idea of how things are going, what my goals are, and what I think of the work I’ve been doing.<\/p>\n

This is going to be extremely navel-gaze-y. Proceed with caution.<\/p>\n

The biggest change here is that the Patreon money enabled me to focus on this gig full time. Before, I supplemented my income with irregular jobs. Not fun jobs. More like, “Hey Shamus, I hear you’re a computer guy. My website is broken and would you mind crawling down into the thousands of lines of amateur ad-hocThis is redundant. Ad-hoc is the only kind of PHP you can write.<\/span> PHP and exorcise the demons?” That work wasn’t fun, it wasn’t reliable, and it didn’t turn into stories that could feed this blog. It also kind of felt like a waste of my time. There are a lot of people in the world that are looking for work and can un-screw your mySQL database, but I’m the only one who can run this blog. <\/p>\n

I was taking work from people who needed it, that I didn’t want to do, that I wasn’t really totally optimally qualified to do, that kept me from doing the blog-writing I love. I lost, you lost, the hypothetical other guy lost, and it sucked all around. <\/p>\n

The point is: Now I can spend more time on the site. <\/p>\n

So this is the first year where I could pour as much time into the site as I pleased. Looking back at what I’ve accomplished so far I have to say…<\/p>\n

I’m not happy with the result.<\/em> <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Where Did the Time Go?<\/h3>\n

Why is “four” represented by IIII instead of IV? THIS IS NOT HOW ROMAN NUMERALS WORK. If you’re going to use a confusing and archaic number system, at least get it RIGHT.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

I started thinking about where all the time was going a few weeks ago when I created those slides for the “From the Archives” thing you see at the bottom of every post. You know, these things:<\/p>\n