I have a Patreon page

I created a Patreon page just before leaving for vacation on 2 Aug. The background to this is that while I’m now getting some regular bucks for working on NTPsec, it’s not a lot. Royalties from my books have been dwindling and my wife Cathy isn’t making all that much from legal contract gigs that are all she can get since Obamacare costs killed her full-time law job. Add the fact that our eight-year-old car has developed problems that would cost more to fix than its book value, and the house needs a new roof, and it’s looking pretty broke out.

(Yes, we do have some savings and stock. No, I don’t want to tap them, because thank you I do not want to be on the dole or dead of starvation and exposure when I’m really old. And, even if doing so weren’t in conflict with my values, counting on the U.S. government to be able to keep me in enough money for food and shelter in 2035 or so would be deeply stupid.)

Rather to my surprise, the page has attracted a whole 67 patrons and $409.17 in monthly pledges. I wasn’t actually expecting Patreon to yield that much, as it seems to be strongly oriented towards the beret-and-nose-ring crowd. It’ll help, some.

All this is by way of explaining why from now on my new-release announcements will probably be going to Patreon, mostly, rather than here on the blog. They’re the closest I have to the kind of artistic content releases the Patreon base seems to expect, and do seem to actually produce upticks in pledges.

My first month’s Patreon pledges will just about cover the additional 32GB of memory I dropped into the Great Beast in order to work on GCC’s Subversion-to-Git conversion. It’s not going to make much of a dent in (for example) medical insurance, thanks to the statist bastards who’ve driven health-care costs into the stratosphere through their incessant meddling. (They cost my wife her job, too – that’s been psychologically rough on her.)

If you enjoy this blog, please pledge generously. Whether you file the cost under “entertainment” or “keep an infrastructure gnome fed so your civilization will keep working”, a little help from each one of a lot of people can go a long way.