Where things stand with my Patreon

Folks may have noticed that there’s been no new content on my Patreon in the past couple of weeks. I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to try to lower my subscription prices before starting my next review series. The site has been losing patrons rapidly, and I’ve realized I’m just charging too much for the limited amount of content I’m able to offer. Lowering prices will hopefully make the site more accessible, since money is less of an issue for me now and I really just want more people to read my stuff.

But Patreon wouldn’t let me change the price of a tier that had active members. Since I had so few members left, I decided just to ask them to temporarily cancel or switch to the $1 tier. But it’s taking longer than expected for everyone to get the message, it seems. Also, apparently the two patrons who temporarily cancelled are still listed as active members until November 1, so I may not be able to change prices on those tiers until then. That was my mistake, for not knowing how the cancellations would work. I should’ve just asked everyone to switch to the $1 tier.

Hopefully this will all be worked out by the start of next month and I can resume posting, with lower prices that I hope will attract a larger audience. My next series in Reviews will be an exhaustive revisit of the Alien Nation franchise, including the original feature film, the TV series and movies,  and every novel and comic. I’m really proud of this one and I want a lot of people to read it — but, paradoxically, I need everyone to unsubscribe first (temporarily).

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In other news, I finally got all my printer and scanner software installed. I’d already downloaded the most current software from the manufacturer’s site months ago when I first tried installing the printer, but I hesitated to risk installing it, since I wasn’t sure how I’d finally gotten the printer working and didn’t want to risk messing it up. But I began to suspect that the problem was simply that I’d had the USB ports arranged the wrong way, with the printer plugged into a USB hub that was plugged in turn into the “in” port on the back of the plug of the cooling-fan platform that was plugged into the computer. Now, I have it switched around so the hub goes directly into the computer and the fan goes into the hub. I suspect that may be why the computer finally recognized and auto-installed the printer. So on that theory, I figured it was probably okay to try installing the software. And indeed, this time it installed pretty much instantly. Though to my surprise, the only thing that installed was scanner control software, instead of the combined printer/scanner thing I was expecting. But that’s okay, since the printer can be controlled from various programs, and the scanner software was the thing I was lacking. (The bare-bones generic scanner app I downloaded before only worked for scanning images, not documents.)

Also, I finally discovered that the grocery-store app on my phone lets me scan bar codes, which makes it way easier to reorder things when I run out. Neat!