jducoeur

Time for a signal boost. tl;dr: my longtime friend siderea has set up a Patreon account to support her LJ. I think it's a fascinating experiment, well worth supporting, and you may want to check it out.

I've been intrigued by Patreon since I first heard about it, a month or two ago, and was wondering when someone I knew would try it out. Suffice it to say, it's kind of like Kickstarter but specifically for *ongoing* projects, especially creative ones. The notion is that you sign up as a "patron" of some project -- every time a new work gets created, you automatically toss a little into the jar. You decide how much to give each time, and can cap that at a certain amount per month (siderea very explicitly encourages setting a cap that you are comfortable with). It's intentionally a lot like the period concept of patronage of the arts, and IMO it's an idea whose time has very much come.

In this particular case, Siderea is a long-time blogger who I and a lot of my friends know personally. (Yes, it's a pseudonym, for professional reasons.) Her posts are frequently contentious and sometimes infuriating, but she's probably the most consistently thought-provoking blogger I know, and she has a lot of interesting stuff to say on a wide variety of topics. The linked Patreon page points to a bunch of her notable articles, which should give you a sense of where she's coming from.

Anyway, she's trying to make ends meet, and since she really enjoys writing, she's decided to go the Patreon route, marking some of her deeper posts specifically for this purpose. It seems well worthwhile to me, so I'm tossing a bit into the kitty. I commend it to your consideration: I honestly think the notion of Patreon-supported blogging is a good idea for the folks who are more serious about their blogs, and it's worth supporting...

ETA: while I was in there, I just noticed that alexx_kay has also set up a Patreon, to support his "parahistorical indexes".  (I knew he was thinking about it.)  Suffice it to say, Alexx is the Master of the Timeline: his indexes for the Steven Brust's Dragaera books and the comic book Cerebus are pretty much indispensible for really making sense of those worlds.  It's a much more occasional project, but a useful one, at least for those of us with the appropriately geeky frame of mind.  Check it out...