Month: September 2026

Current musical mood: Syayos’s Anthem 1.1.

*from photo by Madeline Liu on Unsplash*

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:

*Photo by Christian Buehner on Unsplash*

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.

NYTimes’ Connections’ “hidden” community

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-09-11

In Internet

Current musical mood: Cephalo.

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.

Today’s Conspiracy Theory: Election Years and “New Maps”

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-09-10

In Rants, The Algorithm

I’m going to not wade into the fact that you are almost definitely hearing about post-partum depression a lot because it is a mid-term election year in the United States (though you most likely are). In 2024, there was a certain track meet. 2020 I don’t even have to talk about.

Let’s just say certain patterns persist.

The less emotionally draining side of this same conspiratorial coin — though frustrations do run deep — is people trying their absolutely hardest to Both Sides™ the UN’s adoption of Equal Earth Projection maps.

Just today, this post popped up like so many others on Reddit as of late…

Obviously, I highlighted the text to bend it to my argument but the fact that the poster [whose name I kept in if you want to look some of their stuff, which does include some quite interesting map discussions besides this] felt to describe this in terms of victimhood just shows how people are baking the argument into the pretense of a statement. Begging the question or some such legal term. The mind boggles. Et cetera.

“Biggest victims…” Lord save us from Redditors. Could have just said something like “have the largest distortions in Atlantic centric versions of the maps” or whatever.

I legit feel that certain algorithmic forces are trying to poke this bear and ride the US-defaultism nature of sites like Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, etc to try and convince you that you should feel victimized by a map. Maybe I am just really unlucky. Who knows.

OP is also just wrong. Here’s what the above would look like if they had used the Pacific centered version of the map (which honestly gets more landmasses right so I don’t mind it, even as an Euro-located person, sorry Greenland/Iceland).

Heck, several places already use projections that are closer to to Equal Earth than Mercator. Go look at stuff like Winkel Tripel and Robinson Projections.

Good for all the people learning this past week that not everyone uses the same Atlantic-centered Mercator map (even if they end up preferring what they know). It is a nice moment to find out how other people do such things.

For the record, my favorite is probably something like Dymaxion or Hao’s Projection. Pole focused maps make the various landmasses much more interesting to me.

Also, we are now in the era where digital maps and the ability to have multiple projections at once makes this very, very moot. Different maps for different tasks.

Day in the Life #17996: Rainy & Sick in Grimbergen + Belated Return to School Days

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-09-05

In Daily Life, Grimbergen, Health

Today has been kind of sunny, here, but that’s a change.

The past couple of weeks have been quite rainy and gray in Grimbergen. Considering how drought-tastic July and August were, having it swing colder and wetter has been nice.

You just have to brace for the mostly unbroken gray and the scent of rain covering everything. Even when the sun managed to peak out from behind the clouds, it was through rain-drenched windows and drowning in the mud.

This is assuming it was not an outright downpour:

We had those, too.

The grass, though, the grass has grown quite green. That’s nice.

Unfortunately, we have also had quite a few sick days in the same time. Kaz got hit around 10-11 days ago. I had milder symptoms show up around a day later. Then B got sick a couple of days into it. This virus, Space Pilgrims, it persists…

B was supposed to start back to school this week but after one-and-half days had her throat swell up and become quite painful and her fever from last weekend returned. So we ended up keeping her out the next two days of school so she can heal up.

I did manage to get this quick photo of her making friends with a moth on her half day. I’ll take that as a good omen despite the illness. Note that there was actual sun at the time but I think it was raining by the time we got her home.

[Synced Lyrics for…] azure’s I Believe in Magic

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-09-05

In Music, Synced Lyrics

synced lyrics for azure’s I Believe in Magic EP (LRC format)

Last night the Osaka-based Alternative Folk Rock band azure dropped a video for their song, “That Day” [aka “その日”]. It had some fun color contrast stuff which patterned the album cover: deep red with washed out blues. I liked it and commented as such and woke up to find pretty much the entire video was gone.

I’m sure there’s a story but it IS a good song and hopefully the video returns so I can make that post but for now I can just share that I (again with help from LyricSynapse) have now synced the EP and included it in my folder, above.

As always, the lyrics belong to the creators and everything I did can be treated as CC-0.

In the “Everything will be alright!” section of the song “Everything will be alright!” my brain is slightly convinced there’s an “and Everything…” but after listening a dozen times I’m convinced my brain is hallucinating. Which means it is likely time to call it, there.

I am sharing lyrics when I have contributed significant amounts of time syncing them [and in some cases: translating]. These are mostly for a personal project and the original lyrics, timings, songs, and so forth are all property of the performer and songwriters. My personal contribution is being released CC-0 but this does not include the lyrics themselves OR their translations. I make no guarantee about the translations.

Lyrics can be found via Google Drive. They are almost always in LRC format and in a naming convention that matches my source {Bandcamp, Apple, etc}. You might need to change them to suit your naming scheme if it varies.