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Originally published 10/29/22
Hello, readers! Time for an update on the State of the Newsletter/Patreon!1 What’s that, you say? I did that two posts ago? Oh! Oh! Jail for reader! Jail for One Thousand Years!!!!
I’m going to present these updates in roughly chronological order, from what’s happening As We Speak to the near future, which in this case means around January. Please read through, because it’s going to end with a big announcement!
First: my productivity, as you’ve no doubt noticed, has plummeted. This is primarily because my twin boys do online school, which requires my participation, and we are in the middle of three major assignments that need to be completed. (Literally the middle: we just finished one, started one today, and we have a real big one next week.) This has eaten most of my time, and the time I’ve been left with hasn’t been conducive to writing. Also not helping: I’ve made a commitment to complete a “Hooptober” this month, which is a Letterboxd… game?… where you try to watch 31 movies in October based on the number of categories. Frankly, watching a movie is about all I’ve been good for lately, and based on my viewing diary, I haven’t even been good for that lately2.
Related to this productivity issue: you may have noticed that I haven’t charged for the Newsletter or the Patreon in some time. My policy is this: if I haven’t published two posts in a calendar month, I will not charge. If you’re payin’, and I’m not producin’, then you’re not payin’. (I genuinely thought I was going to be charging in September after posting my Smokey and the Bandit review, but you can see how that went.) I just can’t bring myself to charge you for empty warehouse space.
Now, that should be changing soon. To repeat what I said two posts ago, I currently owe you readers a post on Avanti! (1972, Billy Wilder)3, the second part to my Deep Red (1975, Dario Argento) review, and the second part to Adventuring Against the ’70s4. My goal is to have these up before the end of the year, ideally sooner than that. (I actually had a week where I made significant progress on all three of these, then the online school projects hit. Still, I’m not starting with a blank page with any of them.) It’s frustrating not having posts up for a lot of reasons, but the most frustrating is that I likely won’t have have anything for November 5th, which will be Against the ’70s’ first birthday. Happy Birthday, Against the ’70s!
However, once those posts are up, things are going to change around here. (This is that big announcement I alluded to earlier.) Around January 2023 or so, I’m going to do a soft reboot of Against the ’70s. What does that mean? Well, I want to keep that a bit of a surprise right now, but it’s a number of things, some small, one very big, that will add up to a bit of a course correction 5. A lot of things will not change, but some things, particularly Patreon and Newsletter pledge levels and rewards, will be overhauled6.
Should you be worried? I don’t think so. Let’s put it this way. If you’re here for my thoughts on the films of the 1970s, that’s not going to change. If you’re here for the confluence of 70s cinema and tabletop roleplaying games, that’s not going to change. If you’re here for Cypher System rpg material, uhhhh errrr ummm7.
It’s going to be really exciting, I think, and I hope you think so too. Stay tuned, it’s coming up soon.
The usual reminder that the Patreon and the Substack newsletter version of the blog don’t exist anymore. Well, technically, as of this writing (12/14/24), they do, but I’ll be deleting them soon as I’m done reposting all the old entries.↩︎
For clarity, as of 10/29/22 it said that the last time I watched a movie was the 26th, and before that, the 23rd. I’d been doing a movie nearly every day prior to that. ↩︎
Avanti! will be post #42; this is #38.↩︎
This will actually be two parts, posts #40 and #41. (This is #38.)↩︎
12/14/24 I confess, I’m not entirely sure what I meant here. I think I know what the big thing is, and that will come up in entry #44 (This is entry #38). But otherwise, not sure what course correction I was intending here. I will say that once these reposts are done, I intend to course-correct-correct by taking this blog back to its original intentions, which was two movie reviews + game material, each month. If everything goes to plan, you’ll start seeing new entries starting February 10th, 2025, and a new post every two weeks after that.↩︎
Long time readers will likely have seen some of this coming, as my current pledge rewards write checks my ass can’t cash. [ETA 12/15/24: This is one of the reasons I took down my Patreon.]↩︎
I should probably make clear here that I still love the Cypher System, and recommend it for your high adventure rpg needs. [ETA 12/14/24: Apparently I was thinking of abandoning my support for the Cypher System? Not sure what this was about. I intend to reaffirm my support of the Cypher System in 2025.↩︎
