State of the Blogger

Ahoy hoy! Still alive back here behind the auto-posts. I hope you're all enjoying the random I dug up for the holidays.

Those of you who have funded me through Patreon, thank you! Patron works on a monthly cycle, so your cards will be first charged at the beginning of January, at which point the newsletters will be sent out. I'm distributing those through Google Groups, since Patreon is rudimentary at best and has no ability to schedule things for some point in the future. I do not have the kind of scheduling magic that allows me to reliably be in the same place at the same time every week, and Chrome has an extension that lets me "send later" from Gmail, so I have kludged up my own solution.

It looks as though the update schedule for 2016 will be newsletters for patrons out on Sundays, Monday Mystery columns on (obvs) Mondays, general articles on Wednesday and Friday, and then the Saturday Serial. Blogger does let me schedule things for arbitrary times in the future -- to a point; I know LiveJournal won't let you timestamp things before 1/1/1970, and I have yet to test whether Blogger fails for times after 03:14:08 1/19/2038 -- and I have already queued up the SatSer entries for all of 2016, so you will all be entertained once a week whether you like it or not.

If anybody wondered what the mysterious "kf" tag meant, those entries are kicked to my Kindle feed. If you own a Kindle, for 99¢ a month, you can free yourself of having to remember to look at my actual webpage -- Amazon will silently drop all of my shining pearls of wisdom onto your widget without any further action from you, like a skilled butler delivering your brandy unbidden and unnoticed. All of my drivel will be delivered as well. Once upon a time I filtered the video posts out of the Kindle feed, because they're useless on the e-ink models, but now everyone has Fire tablets, so I mostly don't bother.

I am still running the Un-F@$k My Life Campaign over on GoFundMe, as unfortunately my finances are still somewhat f@$ked. One of my persistent dreams is to be able to afford the right to goddamn exist on Earth, but until then, donations are much appreciated. If you're uncomfortable donating to private citizens, and would like to give to a charity that won't get you on a watchlist, the MSPCA Angell clinic provides veterinary care for my critters, and would love to have your money. Mainely Rat Rescue is the primary rescue organization for rats in the New England area; they accept donations, volunteers, items from their Amazon Wish List, and the occasional box of knit rat hammocks that I've shipped them in the past.

Comments

  1. I looked around for job boards specializing in remote work, and got pointed to ZipRecruiter. Thought I'd mention in case you hadn't found it already. It is heavy on programming, but this temporary descriptive-writing gig seemed more your style.

    Good luck.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I hadn't run into ZipRecruiter before, although I have accounts at a lot of similar services. Thank you! I'll check it out. I have discovered that I have to be careful about a lot of these services -- many of the gigs are so obscenely underpriced that if I take into account the work I'd have to turn down to finish them, they come out as a net loss.

      I am a rubbish programmer. Most of the time. I used to write fairly complicated batch files, and I'm all right with Inform7, but most programming languages have a mix of complexity and intolerance that trips me up. Either one is fine, but if the language is intolerant of alternate methods or syntax, I need it to be simple, and if it's complicated, I need it to tolerate me sort of talking around things I don't really know until I figure them out. IF scripting languages qualify as the former; natural languages are the latter. I can read C-family languages decently well, but I'll be damned if I can generate them.

      Delete
  2. Also, if you feel you could do editing/proofreading stuff, this blog post's comments suggest various places to find work.
    I seem to remember your work for Circlet has included writing marketing copy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I can edit/proofread. Actually, that's somewhat inaccurate. I HAVE to edit/proofread. Terrible grammar and diction for me is like nails on a chalkboard for most people. I am the person who takes a pen to bulletin board notices when they're too egregiously bad to stand.

      I'm signed up for loads of the freelancer board things, but none of them have coughed up anything useful. The ones that might make me decent money, like Taskrabbit, require you to use their mobile app to connect/accept work. My phone is not smart enough to run the app, and I'd have to turn on the data plan, which would take my phone bill from $15/mo to $50/mo -- which, without the extra work, I can in no way afford.

      Fiverr pops up a lot on these lists. Fiverr is useless. People want entire essays proofed for $5. Minimum wage in MA is $9/hr. Taking into account transit time and cost for meeting with clients, and eating into the time I could be doing other things, anything under $15/hr is essentially volunteer work, and anything under $10/hr is a money sink.

      People are cheap bastards when it comes to brain work.

      Delete

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