Happy Hour #8 - Such Great Heights (Patreon)

Happy Friday, Naish! Another week in the books, and it was a great one. Coming off of that natural high of a live show is always fun and it turns out that it's far more productive when the show is in Brooklyn and you don't have to fly home. Traveling home after the live show (especially one on the West Coast) inevitably leaves us a bit jet-lagged, and getting back up to speed can be tough. I've got to wrap up the books on the show, which includes reviewing revenues from tickets sales, expenses incurred during the trip, costs of goods sold at the merch booth, and balancing resulting inventory with what the computer says we sold. Doing all of that right after landing is tough because, in the case of inventory, we are splitting up the merch in carry-on luggage and going immediately to our separate homes, so the inventory counts either get done piecemeal (less reliable), or have to wait until we're all scheduled to be back in the office for recording. In this case, though, all of the merch was back in the office Monday and all of this not-fun-but-totally-necessary work was done by Monday afternoon, making me feel like we got a jump-start on the week, which is always good. Especially with PaizoCon looming.

I haven't got a lot of time this week, so I've got to keep this one really short. It's fine though because the stuff that took up the most time this week (Emerald Spire, Androids & Aliens 56 & 57 editing, our $40k Patreon goal, PaizoCon Merchandise), I can't talk about anyway. You know I can talk about? The Postal Service. No, not the indie pop band that was killing it in 2003. The United States Postal Service. Did you know that the USPS is basically an organized crime syndicate with uniforms and without the murder? I almost said "without the murder and racketeering," but on second thought realized that they definitely have some experience with racketeering.

Going back three months we've been trying to schedule the USPS to come to our office to do routine mail pickups, which they advertise is a regular service for businesses. Four separate times we scheduled pickups for large deliveries (merch store orders, Patreon rewards, etc.) and they never showed up, even after we paid for the service! After the fourth time, I went to the Post Office in person and finally got a guy who didn't turn me away on the spot (others had told us that we had "too much mail for their office"). He listened and seemed to consider whether to help us or not.  After a moment, he pulled out his cell, called the local driver, told him we were "cool" and that he should come by for all future delivery requests. I found myself in that strange place between flabbergasted and completely unsurprised. Later that day, the driver came right to our door with a huge truck and a huge smile on his face. His name is Wallace, and he seems like a cool dude. A week later he came again and whisked all of our packages off to you guys, smiling as if soon he's going to tell me I "owe him a favor." I'd be worried, but when I got an email from one of our listeners telling me that he received the Dallas and Portland posters roughly 23 hours after he placed the order, I realized whatever horrible thing Wallace has me do will be worth it. The things we do for love.

This week was a lot like the above. A lot of boring office work stuff. Fulfilling orders, reconciling inventory, ordering office supplies, budgeting to upgrade office furniture, researching payroll taxes and insurance liabilities. Gross. I just want to play Pathfinder, man! If I was a better writer I might be able to make some of it interesting, but alas, I cannot think of how to do it today.

Actually, Patreon management is something I could discuss for a minute. It's really important to me that you guys feel like you are taken care of when join our Patreon. In fact, it's one of the main reasons that I wanted to go full time. Paying proper attention to our subscriber base is something that we didn't previously have the time to do. I came up through the customer service industry and it gives me heartburn to see a message about a missing bottlecap reward, or a busted RSS feed, or a crit/fumble submission go unanswered. As we continued to grow the subscriber base, there were times when people just didn't hear from us for a while. I've tried to improve that and I hope some of you have noticed the difference. If there's ever anything you guys need on the Patreon end of things, don't hesitate to email me at patreon@glasscannonpodcast.com. While we're on the topic, there has been an undeniable uptick in folks having problems with their RSS feeds. We do not handle the private RSS feeds and have no access to them. That's an issue with Patreon. They did reach out to us this week acknowledging the problem, though a solution was not part of the response. In the meantime, they included a link to this help article all about using and troubleshooting the private RSS feed. Hopefully if you're one of the people dealing with this problem, this article can help (or at least get you the proper support contact you need).

Before I go here, how about a quick "Joe's Gonna Roll" story from this week? 

After my Friday Morning Meeting stream last week, I realized that I really needed to address the issue of the dot that's been appearing on my webcam. Go ahead and checkout the beginning of my YouTube posts for Sekiro up through Episode 05 and you'll see the dot—smack in the middle of my face while I talk to the chat in the beginning. So last week I tried to clean the tiny lens with a cloth, and then with a toothpick, just gently trying to nudge whatever mote of dust was causing that maddening little dot, but nothing worked. Well, I thought, my webcam is about four years old and super cheap. Maybe it's time for an upgrade. So I treat myself to a nice new webcam. I figure, what the hell, I'll be streaming a lot, so it's worth it. I hook it all up last night and give it a test run before the Friday Morning stream today and guess what? That's right. The unthinkable. There's the dot. Right where it always was! Now I'm losing my mind. Is the dot in the USB line? Idiotic, but what else could it be? I double check the new camera on a different program (which I never did with the original because I'm stupid) and sure enough—no dot. So it's OBS I guess? I start poking around the software to see if it could cause some weird dot glitch, and there it is. Somehow—SOMEHOW—I had managed to get a full video input screen shrunk down to the size of a dot. I simply clicked on the dot in OBS and dragged it open to reveal a full video window with no source. Just a blank screen, that had been shrunk to the size of a grain of sand; like a friggin' black hole of irritating. Seriously, go check out the video, or look at the image above, and tell me it isn't incredible that that little dot is a shrunken video screen! I looked down at my old webcam, carelessly tossed aside, lying on the carpet like a forgotten piece of junk, and apologized.

Anybody need a cheap webcam from four year ago in perfect working condition? Sigh.

Sorry I don't have more juicy content this week, but as we edge ever closer to announcing the Emerald Spire release date, these posts are going to have much, much more interesting stuff for me to talk about. Until then, so long, my friends. :'(

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

-Joe

P.S. And Happy Star Wars Day to you hardcore nerds out there