I talked about, not that long ago, withdrawing from crowdfunding. It’s been brewing. And, in the immortal words of DJ Khaled: there’s been another one.
Now, before I continue, I do want to say that I do not actually hold Renegade Studios culpable for [all of] this. In fact, without burying the lede, here is an extremely relevant screenshot of a pair of graphics still up on the Backerkit page that, as far as I know, has not been altered from the time period when I backed it:
Shipping is relatively high and relatively variable. And it tells you that taxes (VAT) will be applied at a later date. This was honest, upfront, and for shipping broadly accurate.
Here is where I do hold Renegade Studios more culpable: I got an email this weekend that said, “We have just now added the total of shipping and VAT to your pledge and you’ll be charged Sunday/Monday,” and if you glance across the Belgium line you can get an idea that we are talking about at least double digits. +VAT. Because there was a glitch that caused the prices to not show up until around 48 hours ago and shipping was charged, for me, around 8 hours ago.
The minimum time to prep should have been one week.
The screenshots at the top of the page show some of the responses to this. Thread is up to 285 messages. Some are repeats. Some are in support. BUT, the company has remained silent. That feels…odd. I get it, but still odd.
Folks were finding out they were going to be charged on Monday (message actually said Sunday but like…my bank was waiting until Monday) for an amount that we found out on Saturday (or Friday, depending on time zones).
That is a problem. Even if RS was very upfront about what it was — and shipping was technically cheaper than above though the VAT shipping got it rounded back up [and some people in the US might have gotten charged VAT?].
And for people in the US it almost sounds like they could have pre-ordered it from Amazon, gotten a fair number of the items at roughly the same price, and saved on shipping at least if they weren’t going all in. Even the Renegade Studios website might give free shipping over certain amounts.
I’ll let others do the math.
THIS IS ALL TO SAY that it just gets added to the stack of the many ways I’ve seen confusion, dismay, and issues crop up even with otherwise open and honest companies handling crowdfunding when said crowdfunding could have just been pre-orders through existing storefronts.
Renegade Studios told us about the shipping, told us about the VAT, absolutely fumbled the ball of giving a proper timeline with full transparency, and the end result is a product that just had a bit of its hyped snipped out.
The past couple of days, the Youtube Algorithm has been extremely insistent that I want to watch this specific video:
A quick-and-Dougly summation for those who can’t/won’t watch: Hidden Rabbits was trying to find out how to read more books and stumbled upon a discourse/debate about folks skipping most of the books [in this case, just reading dialogue but I have heard of other techniques] and uses that as a lever to pry open issues with reading goals. Ultimately, Hidden Rabbits takes the stance of reading goals are good, being too hard on yourself is bad, some people are just better readers, and only reading dialogue is objectively bad. A few other tidbits ramble here or there in his discourse.
Books and I
Now this is something that sparked a LOT of thoughts in my head because I have been part of the online-book-sphere before there was a -Tok or a -Tube to fast-track the labeling process.1 I have seen the same arguments repeat forever like the whole thing is just an expression of liminal horror.
Perhaps most germane to all this is I sold books for years before becoming a librarian for nearly two decades (and, initially, had planned to retire as one before the international move).
I have had somewhere in the easy triple digits of people (frankly, probably easy quadruple digits of people) come up to chat with me in person about books, have attended formal lectures. All that. And a topic which echoes from grad school to the book store to the informal gathering has been “the right way to read.”
Ebooks? Reading goals? Young adult fiction? Graphic novels? Books over certain reading levels? Is The Lord of the Rings a book for children?2 All variations of that theme. How do we judge the way some people read as being right or wrong while largely forgiving ourselves for our own reading sins?
I’m now a bit past those days but it is a good to refresh myself every now and then so I want to riff off some points but FIRST an absolute CAVEAT: I think Hidden Rabbits bounces back and forth a lot and ends up into some rough waters here or there which are sometimes at odds with other things he says. There’s bits about some people having more free time. About the pretention of certain books. About the comparative “weight” of chunky fantasy vs thin (?) non-fiction. Stuff about owning books and whatever. It feels a bit freeform.
I link not because I agree (or disagree) with it but because I always appreciate when people talk about stuff like this even if I come from a different place than them.
SECOND, a less-binding CAVEAT: I generally consider a lot of the machinations of Social Media + Books to be ultimately a problem rather than a solution.3 I am not here to condemn BookTok (-etc) and I am sure there are many people that have found a wonderful community but in my experience you cannot have a gathering of readers without paradoxically generating what is effectively an anti-intellectual/anti-literary discourse.
I cannot explain it it just seems to bend that way.
The [Not Precisely] Wrong Way to Read
There is a bit where he says he doesn’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but…
Frankly, I would have stopped my sentence before the but and not tried to buckle down with establishing an objective measure of any wrong way to read.
Reading is a conversation between content creator and content consumer and what makes it so interesting is there exists such a wide sea of possibility even for relatively plain reading. A person who comes across Lord of the Flies as a teen will likely be seeing, and should be seeing, a different novel than a person who reads it in old age. You start to understand it is barely a book about kids on an island at all.
That sea is real danged complicated. There is no precisely correct path to navigate it.
The only real problem I would have with “incorrect reading” — be it dialogue-only or only reading the first few sentences of each page/paragraph and all the other skimming methods — is when you are dishonest about this in order to try and hold some reading-superiority over others.
Beyond that, the notion of “the wrong way to read” ends up being a conversation stopper rather than starter. Like Hidden Rabbits says: some read slower or faster. To add to that, some read deeper or shallower. Some are unable to process fiction or non-fiction as well as the other. Et cetera.
By all means, make guidelines for what you do and do not want to do while reading. That is fine.
Just it was not too terribly long ago where people felt that audiobooks weren’t reading and by “too terribly long ago” I mean people still have this argument. See also ebooks. Certain genres. Certain print formats.
Extreme example but what about a person who reads classics by randomizing the order of chapters and livestreams the experience of re-interpreting the book?4 That seems…interesting. Maybe thought provoking. But it completely violates the standard shape of reading.
A more pervasive example might be all the ways book consumption has been turned into content creation.
Going back to dialogue-only reading [which I doubt is all that common despite seeing at least two videos decrying it], it makes me think of graphic novels. Graphic novels have LONG been established an effective way to reach reluctant readers. A coincidence? Maaaybe.
There is simply no good way to draw a line even if I think many readers feel like there should be a line. I have styles of reading that do not interest me. I’m sure most of us do.
The best I can say is let reading meet you where you are currently. Cast a wide net into that sea of possibility.
Let other people mind their own boats.
Reading Goals vs Reading Schedules
The other main point I want to talk about is reading goals. I’ve talked about them, before. I have my own reading tally here on this blog which is badly out of date. I guess I should fix that. Anyhow.
Reading goals can help certain people.
Like Hidden Rabbits says, though, it can be easy to slip out of alignment with them. Or to use various “tricks” to hit and exceed them.
My recommendation if you are struggling with reading goals is to instead try something like a “Reading Schedule”.
Rather than trying to read 30-50 books (whatever) per year, just make time on a daily basis to read. You can either set a length (e.g., one chapter) or time (e.g., 30 minutes) as a goal but the idea is to give yourself some flexibility and to just get used to daily reading as a habit.
I think annual reading goals almost encourages treat reading like an assignment and like an assignment we end up front loading a bit, taking a long gap, and then trying to rush at the end.
Reading schedules are more like a mental exercise.
The Truth about Reading More
I maybe should have started with this but here is a quick concept that explains the stupidly frustrating truth about reading more in a way that is almost definitely unhelpful to anyone finding this blog:
(A) The only way to read more is to actually spend time reading more
(B) Reading, like an activity, invokes an opportunity cost
Therefore, (C) Actually reading more is going to come at the cost of other activities you could be doing
I think this ends up being a big stumbling block. This is partially why I don’t care so much about “the right way to read.” It is much easier for people to want to hit that place where they felt like a Proper Reader than it is for them to put down everything else — phone, work, other hobbies, TV, computer, videogames, whatever — and make a space to just enjoy that reading. Maybe a person is trying to return to those days when they would read in their room back at their parents’ house and feel like the future was endless but now it’s hard to find a book that returns them to that.
They are a different person now. The conversation they are having with books is different.
Especially for us old fogeys who might have read a lot back in the era when there were fewer constant distractions in our pocket and fewer screens dinging away at us with fewer gamified daily tasks we are supposed to accomplish.
I am not saying you have to gamify your reading — I’d rather you not — but maybe give yourself grace because it is an absolute fight and the main prize is just…reading. The end.
There is a lot out there. A whole lot. However you navigate that sea, paddle safely.
AND, and I cannot stress this enough, mind your own boat.
It occurred to me while writing that that there must be a Facebook-centric BookBook but I refuse to confirm or deny or its existence. I’ll let it live as a beautiful thought in my head. ↩︎
I lie a bit. The person did not ask but instead furiously insisted that LotR was a book for children with her two criteria seemingly (a) it had no sex scenes [i.e., adult content] and (b) I think the fact that it was fantasy. ↩︎
A couple of years ago I clicked on a BookTube video about “reading lesser known works” and the criteria was something like “Less than 4k (2k?, whatever, too many) reviews on Goodreads” and I legit can’t imagine ever wanting something to be reviewed by thousands before I considered it viable. ↩︎
“But, Doug, being pedantic about what other people read is how I like to read…” la de da. Congrats. You have trapped and confused me. Can’t argue against that, can I? ↩︎
In case you have no interest in clicking that link or for some reason cannot, the choice is… WOULD YOU RATHER
Get $2 million USD (tax free) instantly OR
Go back to 10-years-of-age with your current knowledge and have to relive your life?
Pargin argues, as I would almost immediately, that you want to take the money and not look back.
In the comments, though, several people bring up some of the classic reasons why someone might want to live their life again:
…you have nothing you really care to hold on to…
…you lost someone important and want to see them again…
…there’s some deep trauma somewhere…
…you have lost so many important things that re-rolling the dice just makes sense because you might get another shot.
And even reading those I would say that unless you are talking about a single, specific trauma that you could truly impact by redoing something…most of the reasons don’t necessarily strike me as actually compelling.
This is based on a few assumptions by myself:
Since you are retaining all your memories, you are taking the lived trauma with you even if you “fix” it.
There is absolute NO reason to assume everyone around you would make the same choices. In other words, if you assume everyone will be beholden to your will while you fuddle in the wonderland of your own past mistakes, you are being far too self-centered and that’s me being polite.
e.g., your ex-wife you want to try again with might not even be there at the same bar and might have hooked up with her high school sweetheart.
Even something like your favorite park to stare into the distance as you hate yourself might not be built in this new timeline.
Children, jobs, and everything that requires a monumental amount of chance and random luck to make work well are all just gone as something like a continuation of above but a very important one.
If you have a lifetime of regrets and poor decisions, going back to “fix them” probably won’t work out in your favor any more so than just moving forward. You will still have to endure everything that led to those mistakes in the first place except now you are in the funhouse mirror version of them all.
And…finally, depending on a lot of factors, your life at 10-years-old is a fairly powerless one even with future knowledge.
You know what, no, fuck it. I’ll one up my second point. If you are going back in time and rewriting EVERYONE’S choices just so you can get dumped again for being a selfish bastard, you are a terrible person.
Today, 30 September 2026, was for some reason an absolute collision of several singles by bands which I either listen to on the regular or just generally appreciate.
We’ll start with the one mentioned in yesterday’s post, mM7th’s newly rerecorded and released ｢エメトワ｣ aka «Aime Toi» aka “Love Yourself” [and yes, all that was just so I could use all the different quotation marks]:
It’s a fun video and the re-recording of the song does a lot to help the parts that already shine shine just a bit brighter. Originally the vocal mix felt a bit off compared to their other tracks but now when the Bridge/Chorus hits and eventually band members are chanting “One Day!” it works quite well.
There was also a new song by Pami, “Loser,” which is the video used in the graphic at the top of this page. The lyrics are a bit obvious but the video is anything but. I assume it is a metaphor. For what? Like, look… that feels personal.
It might win for best new video for today which is apparently a stacked category.
THEN, there was Nanajuuhachi’s “Half & Half” which is good song but the video will introduce you to “bedazzled pizza” and I tell you… kids these days, amirite?
I saw that Sezko had a new single coming which turned out to be a whole EP and then a video drop for “Honestly” which means there is only one more song without a video from the EP [which I expect around November(?) when the rest of it hits].
Finally, from today’s drops, alone [but wait, there’s literally more as I found out before I could click submit, see below] we have Froukje’s “Geen Rem” which, if nothing else, can act as a warning as to why you don’t use an eating contest to flirt. Two reasons, really. This is from an album that comes out in about three or four days so look forward to me chatting more about it, then.
NOW, going back just a little bit we have…
[one day ago] Lee Emi’s “Destroy Everything” and like I told Kaz having someone sing about the Devil telling them to destroy everything is fun and all but it would be a much worse conversation to have on a bus.
[four days ago] Cephalo’s “Bougainvillea” which is a nice song with a video in the always venerable “Blue tinted scene of Japanese woman by body of water” camp and finally, speaking of blue…
[five days ago] Mulasaki Ima & muque’s “Blue Cheese” which, and I say this with zero irony, does not actually feature as much blue cheese as it could have featured. Thank you. Might have done me in.
The last one has a cute little green apple as you hover over the seek bar…
It’s only been one week since the new Brandy Senki song hit. Is this something to do with the new fiscal year? Prices of digital singles going up tomorrow?
Tomorrow (the exact +/- 24 hours I am not sure, but anywhere from around 6 hours to 26 hours I would guess), mM7th is going to release their 7th single and I have it pre-ordered.
Before it hits, though, let’s go back to their 6th single and jam out to nice city pop with a very slight touch of funk in the bassline with that slap of a voice, “Two of a Kind“:
I’m going to be honest, even knowing what this song is about I am not 100% sure what it is about? Met someone in the ER and then tried to hit it off during a moment of medical distress? Is Flower Shower Girl a person, a song, or the laundry detergent?
Eh, it’s all good. It’s a great single-take [probably with some trickery] video filmed right in a live street with a twee kidnapping plot and some awesome knit headware.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
Brandy Senki, a frequent feature on the Music Video Picks series, has returned with a new single, “Blood♡Sparks“:
Probably a full contender for2026’s catchiest song about flirtation through vehicular homicide. Let’s see what the last couple of months of the year might bring, though.
Really enjoy the aesthetic of the video and the song is a perfect continuation of the Brandy Senki style.
The one “downside” is that I have spent too long watching Backroooms/etc- style lore and hidden secrets videos this past couple of weeks so I found myself scanning all the various posters and pictures in the background to see if there were any hidden messages.
From around 1:29
Are those two maps down below? 7pm? Wednesday or October 24? What could it all mean!? [Doug’s Note: They do have a concert on 24 Oct coming up and nothing scheduled for Wednesday, 21 Oct…wink…]
Also, HUGE CAVEAT, I don’t care how cute they are…if the cute person asks you to run over somebody: deny absolutely everything. Even if they promise kissy time.
For real for real…
Good luck, Space Pilgrims.
EDIT: Oh, almost forgot. For some reason the song has two versions on iTunes with one marked “Explicit” and the other not. I got the uncensored version but I’m not sure what the difference is [if any]. Might take a day or two for it to filter up [no pun intended].
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
Last November, on my RPG/Solo-play blog, I posted about setting limits on my crowdfunding this year. I simultaneously spent too much on campaigns but also kind of hit the goal (backed fewer, paid more for the ones I did back). A partial success, in other words.
A few brought instant joy and have maintained that energy.
A few others: exact opposite.
Most campaigns I backed had very mixed results as to their delivery this year. Some of it was very much on them. Some of it was on the vast ocean of international shipping changes and charges (and the double whammy of changes to charges).
Some of it was obvious business strategies to treat Kickstarter and Backerkit as a lower responsibility store front to keep pushing hype.
The long and short of it can be summed up as:
I don’t need your extra crap designed to trigger FOMO
It is generally cheaper for me to buy it at full retail through a shipper who can handle international shipping
This past June had me me paying €30 in customs fees for a £12 deck of cards. Not like a fancy deck of cards with handwritten unique and bespoke fonts. Just…a deck of cards with some branding. Kind of stuff you’d expect to be for a tenner.
I had one book show up and thanks to the jackasses handling shipping (€40 I spent on it, including fees being supposedly pre-paid) writing it out as a “gift” worth only $0.01 I had to pay an additional €40. That’s €80 extra for a €40 book.
It sours things.
Many of the small projects I like to back are frankly economically untenable for me to get any physical tier in their current forms. Some creators are leaning hard on POD and I like that when I can print it either in country or through companies who will take the fees up front so I don’t have to pay extra fees later.
Shipping can still be steep, and quality takes a hit, but it’s doable.
There are also plenty of upper/mid-tier projects. Those can be nice because I know the product will be good, the shipping will be handled, the add-ons will be of quality….and I can buy everything I want from those campaigns from a store without going through crowdfunding tomfoolery. It’s ironic that those are the best ones to back for customer satisfaction.
Which brings me to a third bullet point which I held back, and it’s the most damning one for my own continued participation:
It is obvious that crowdfunding as a whole no longer aligns with my personal philosophy of what it means
This morning I got recommended a Youtube video with a name not quite but essentially: “Our Dream Is Dead.” I absolutely refuse to share any part of it [besides one graphic at the top of this post] but picture something like below for a thumbnail only he made himself up to look a bit like a clown (?) and slapped the word FAIL on it and you will get the point:
Over the video he goes on to explain a lot of things, mostly about how he is a great marketer for crowdfunding and how much he understands how to game Kickstarters and how, despite this, how much this dream campaign ultimately failed.
Dead, Space Pilgrims, dead in the water.
Screenshots of conversions and the lack thereof. Actively mentioning board game content creators for not being good marketing. Talking about Substacks and how to build marketing lists and, this cannot be stressed enough, how the man talking about a “failed” Kickstarter campaign knows how to market Kickstarter campaigns. All the while showing quality, PR-team-approved shots of the game in question.
wink, Space Pilgrims, wink
If you haven’t guessed the twist: the Kickstarter has actually fully funded within days of launching and still has 20+ days to go.
The video is marketing. How much is debatable. I feel like a lot but (see edit below) the creators are saying it was mostly accidental. There feels like some cynicism, here. It was not a “Day 3 and we are 70% there!” but “Day 3 and our studio is doomed.”
Marketing released before the campaign had succeeded but shown to me and many others after. Turning Kickstarter into GoFundMe but the thing on life support is the dream.
People trying to point this out in the comments are either being ignored or, in one case, having it explained to them how if a Kickstarter doesn’t fund in the first 24 hours it is a failure.
No matter how cynical this is, though, versus how honest: it really demonstrates how crowdfunding has long been digested and eaten by the exact same language it was meant to fix.
Pitting content creators against content enjoyers.
Thank you for helping to make it really clear to me how much I don’t care about participating in the guilting-customers into liking, sharing, subscribing, backing, and buying game.
Parasocial bullshit is destroying content creation more and more everyday.
To the rest of you, with only a couple of exceptions, I’ll see your stuff after it gets released and people come up with reviews that you didn’t pay them to write.
I hope it makes it. I truly do. I’m sure there is an audience out there somewhere for it.
Now I’m wondering how long until someone Kickstarts a campaign to market Kickstarter campaigns. Probably been done, hasn’t it?
EDIT/ADDITIONAL
Around the same time I was typing up my post someone else was calling them out for the “stunt” and the creator feedback actually makes the core issue sound much worse:
Third, we do not think we set [a dishonest] target; we set the minimum funding goal, which, of course, was expected to be surpassed quickly. If “funding goal” were the final objective for campaigns on Kickstarter these days, the campaigns would end once they reached it. But the algorithm here rewards those who raise 1000% of their minimum funding goal, ranking them higher. That explains why almost every campaign (regardless of their status and size) sets goals like this. Even in your list of backed projects, we can see many examples like these. They just succeeded in raising these “1000%,” so it is not presented to them as a sin. At least, we see it this way.
Even if this takes some disdain off the eyes of the creators, it just shows that this style of crowdfunding is a dead endeavor. Because people backing a project but not getting what they backed because the costs weren’t covered?
That’s a terrible practice.
I’m not giving the people who made the video a complete pass, though. I saw the video.
Sharing my own results today rather than a screenshot of anyone else’s material but in doing so realized I hit 777 Connections with a 44 streak and that seems fun.
I’ve thought about commenting on this topic for a while and today feels like as good as any for it but one of the fascinating things I have found as a longish-term player of NYTimes’ Connections puzzle is that there is a long-running community “hidden” in the comments section. A comment section I doubt many even really see.
Obviously, it’s not really hidden or I wouldn’t say jack about it. It’s just a group of folks who mostly share feedback on puzzles and the art given in the hints section but every once in a while it bubbles up into something interesting and unique.
Today is 11 September so quite a few of the posts are talking about 2001. In the past, though, I have seen a college student calling out for help due to homesickness and depression — with older folks giving actually helpful advice — and I have seen people talking news good and bad. There are some people who post stuff pretty much every day or weekly. Very nearly a blog with fans who follow and comment along.
Today I scrolled down and found there’s someone doing a kind of music puzzler thing with folks playing along. In a place “meant” to talk about solving a specific puzzle for a specific day.
It’s fascinating. And it takes me back to a period of time before we were all shunted into the Mass Approved Social Network Places™ and phrases like “subreddit” and “Facebook Community” became algorithmically controlled and billionaire spawning short-hand substitutes for events which have been happening since prior to the broad-release of the World Wide Web.
Back when you might hang out on an author’s website, a product forum, or a city page a few dozen people were active. Usenet groups, IRC channels, and mailing lists about all sorts of topics. Local BBSes about a music scene. The varieties were endless.
Never really private — though sometimes a bit invite-only (I was in some 90s RPG writer groups more locked down) — and how toxic vs nice they were was entirely down to whatever handful of members settled first. With plenty of members who hated the off-topic chatter while the boring silence without it was deafening.
These little fragile bespoke communities under constant assault from spambots, in-fighting, and the eventual heat-death of their tiny universe when whatever admin running it retired or had to retire the software due to security issues.
In that in-between living like dandelions growing out of sidewalk cracks: all down to the auspices of wind and rain.
Subreddits and Discord Servers try to emulate this but are something else. Built to allow it rather than simply watching it grow. With mods and multiple bullet-point lists for rules.
Flowers planted in a field rather than finding purchase in an empty lot.
