The State of the Garbage + other updates (Patreon)

Just wanted to post an update on Garbage of the Internet, as I'm very well aware that I haven't done an episode in several months! 

The show is, for all intents and purposes, still something I wish to do. The year has kind of gotten away from me in a sense, and I needed to obviously prioritize some things - new kittens, old cats with special needs, passing cats, March Madness, home cleanliness and other various house-related projects that have been sitting on the backburner for years - needless to say, Garbage of the Internet had to take a little bit of a backseat to all of this. I feel bad about it, but only because I know Garbage was something that was enjoyed by many.

I had an episode planned for March that never saw the light of day, so I may take the scraps of that and cobble together a new episode for the next week or two. I'll keep everybody posted. I just wanted to let everybody know!

I've also decided to pull the trigger on Ko-Fi, which is a service very similar to Patreon. What does that mean for the Patreon page, exactly? At this moment, nothing: if you wish to stay pledged here, please feel free to do so! Why did I create a Ko-Fi page if I already had Patreon? Initially, my thoughts lied within the space of Patreon's numerous problematic instances that have come up over the years for creators. Though those didn't necessarily apply to me, I knew they were things that made some people reluctant to support via this platform. However, I didn't want to really spread things between two similar services, so I just kept things to this page. It wasn't until I started to see more helpful integration with tools I use, and some better features overall, within the Ko-Fi platform that I decided I wanted to give it a go. Further down the road, I may discuss migrating everything from Patreon over there, but for now I would prefer to leave both open, and let you decide where you'd like to place your support. Either way, I'm grateful to all of you for it.

I'm also going to slowly get back into some YouTube reviews/videos, but it's going to take me a little bit to get things going on that front, as I've been putting a lot of weight behind getting the house cleaned up, and smashing out some projects for the house that I've been wanting to take care of for years. I've been in the midst of trying to renovate my office - a long-time project I've needed time and space to complete - and it's something that I've had to do in a piecemeal fashion. I'll do a photo dump post soon to show off some of my office renovation progress, and another one to share with you all some kitten videos and photos.

As always, thank you again for everything that you've done over the years. Twitch has become a scary landscape to be a part of in the last few years alone, and in the last two weeks it's become something entirely different in feel and vibe. When I say that I strictly mean as a creator who uses the platform - our community, what we do and what we stand for, I believe that transcends whatever platform we happen to be on - Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Discord - we will go wherever is best for us at the end of the day. Nothing has changed for us as a community in my eyes. Platforms like Patreon and Ko-Fi have helped create an extra stable footing for me to be able to continue streaming, writing, making videos, fostering a community, and doing my best to be as entertaining as possible, which is why I'm so grateful for the support on any of these alternate platforms outside of our mainstay. Twitch is trying its best to force people like me to use their tools to sustain, and the truth is that a lot of their tools not only end up being inferior, they end up taking more money out of both my pocket, and yours. Bits/cheer absolutely destroyed traditional tipping, which was a substantial portion of income for me up to that point. Creating the Patreon helped to rebuff that loss -things like Patreon, Ko-Fi, and tipping are always superior methods of support at the end of the day to bits/cheer and "hype chat" and will continue to be so, because they are not gouging either of us substantially. What made Twitch special for me is that I felt like I found something I'm very, weirdly, uniquely good at, and am capable of doing, and I found it on their platform. I've been doing it for nearly 10 years at this point, and I have no intention of stopping any time soon. I'm hurt by the kinds of decisions executives at Twitch seem to keep making, because it feels like they're taking something that was once very special, and they're destroying it irrevocably. They're making it harder for many to stream, they're trying to spin some very money-driven decisions into the fallacy of it being good for all of us when it's really just trying to recuperate the cost of running the service in the first place, and ultimately, it's starting to feel like I'm being punished for being a streamer on the mid-tier of their platform. It's a weird time, and while I'm not abandoning Twitch, I will be starting to play around with YouTube live streaming in the near future. I'll keep creating and doing what I feel I do pretty well, regardless of where that ends up being, and I hope you'll all join me on this journey... because at the end of the day, I've always felt like, no matter how bleak things might look in any given scenario, I'm like one of the Whos of Who-ville, and I never want to let The Grinch stop me from singing.

Sing with me.