Gumroad Woes (Read plz) (Patreon)

For those who don't know, Gumroad changed their policies on what content can be sold on their platform at the behest of their payment processors, so a lot of ... "alternative" art, artists, and all that are being taken down from the site. So anything specifically dealing with particular themes will be removed across gumroad. 

Does this affect Foamy? Current series/comics, no, older series/comics, maybe? Generally anytime there's some risqué stuff in the series, it's usually put there to depict Germaine's uphill struggle with society, trying to make a living as a poet and the lengths she was willing to go to fulfill that dream. Even if on the surface it seemed goofy or crass, there was an overall point to it, but I don't know if Gumroad is going to take the time to delve into that and give it a pass, so as it stands, Neurotically Yours #7,8,9 might be an issue along with the Web Comic collection with the extra large Germaine on the cover.

THEY WILL STILL BE AVAILABLE ON ITCH 

Also, if these items WERE purchased on Gumroad, they WILL STILL BE IN YOUR LIBRARY and will not be removed. (According to Gumroad)

Personally, I'm just disappointed with the platform for making this move, and even more disappointed with the payment platforms for supposedly pushing for it. 

Where once the internet was filled with possibilities for artists of all types, there's this fast shrinking circle of tos just burning away a vast amount of talent trying to make a livable wage from their craft. 

So personally, I'm in this odd state of "why", with everything. My personal perspective on the internet was that it was an incredible tool to get people to connect, understand, and share content of all types, but society has taken an amazing device for communication and turned it into a tool for censorship, hate or worse. It was a place for possibilities, now I see very few.

But whatever... same story right.

So what will happen to Gumroad? I have no idea, but the general consensus is that it'll probably go the Tumlr route as the majority of their sales were from particular types of content. 

So if you're into that type of thing, I guess make backups and support your content creators where you can. It's becoming impossible for anyone to do anything anymore, and if you look up the new Gumroad terms, you'll see it's an extremely broad "catch-all" for particular types of content.

Again, all content will still be available on Itch, who hopefully wont mess things up in the future. 

The thing that really bothers me about this, artists are already buried under a bunch of content to begin with and unlike most of that other content, artists have to put a ton of time into what they create. It's not like they can just hit record, point a camera at themselves and dance around for 3 minutes. They literally have to spend hours/days/weeks creating their content. Even if it's "weird", all that time invested just being ripped away is soul crushing. I've been through it numerous times on numerous platforms and it's such a demotivator. The desire to create anything has become an anxiety ridden journey of "will anyone even get to see this" for me, and every artist out there.

No idea what the future is gonna be like, but I know it just got a little less fun.

Anyway, I'm going back to work, doing what I do, 'cause it's what I do. 

New Foamy episode this week (Which will be an appropriate rant for the above situation) and I've reworked the "BiTs" series to the point where I'm kinda happy with it moving forward. Germaine will look a bit different, episodes a bit longer, but more fun with a dash of "thinky".

There's a few more "BiTs" episodes to be released before the change over, but I'll probably put those out weekly in April. (We'll see)

Again, Thank you, everyone for supporting! (Even if it's not me) You're helping keep things going when platforms just don't want to support it. 

Seems so weird that Gumroad or a payment processor would NOT want money... like... what?!? That's your WHOLE thing! Money! Bro!

J.