3am EMT calls, I will never — eight years into this game — get used to you. Particularly not 3am working structure fires. Doubly particularly not 3am working structure fires where I also get rained on while also getting swarmed by flying ants that are attracted to all the bright lights. Hey, people that smoke carelessly and pitch your still-burning butts into the bushes next to your front porch? Next time wait another 45 minutes and the rain will obviate the need to get my ass out of bed¹.

• Kickstarter wrap-ups: a month ago I noted the launched of the book-kickers for Strong Female Protagonist and Evil, Inc Volume 8 wherein I noted that the former looked like a fast success and the latter an outlier. Looking at the daily data, SFP followed the standard curve of strong start, long tail, and trend upward in the closing days; EIv8, on the other hand, was much wobblier, and featured both zero-dollar and negative-dollar days before finishing strongly.

  Accordingly, the FFF was pretty on-mark for SFP (actual: US$60,974; predicted: $US63,000 +/- US$21,000, just about precisely in the middle of the range), but EIv8 was predicted to run US$7.5K (under goal) to US$15K, and finished with US$15,150 (outside the range). I think the key difference was the just over 200 backers for EIv8 vs nearly 2000 for SFP; as I’ve mentioned previously, sample sizes of less than 500 are pretty much useless, so I think the FFF will have to be modified². We will make this into a science yet!

• Speaking of books, two months ago I was hoping that Minna Sundberg could find somebody to distribute her very large print collection of A Red Tail’s Dream from this side of the Atlantic Ocean. It’ll still be an expensive (and worth every penny, it’s gorgeous inside) book, but the shipping could hopefully be reduced. Ask and ye shall receive:
  

  A note to possible book wanters in the USA though: Hiveworks (that comic thing I’m part of) is in the process of opening up a collective online store for all the member comics, and you will be able to buy signed copies of “A Redtail’s Dream” from over there instead. Since it’s based in the US, the delivery time will be just a few days instead of a few weeks, and it’s also possible that it might be a little bit cheaper. The aimed launch date is sometime late next month, so if you’re on the fence of buying a copy or still saving up it might be worth waiting for that. :3 *End info*

  This particular book-wanter is glad he didn’t wait because that would have been months more of book wanting instead of book having, but the possibility of buying stuff from Sundberg as well as (oh, let’s see) the aforementioned Corsetto and Moen, Jim Zub, a stack of Strip Searchmonauts, David Willis, Ronnie Filyaw, Mary Cagle, Diana Nock, Jamie Noguchi, David McGuire, Audra Furuichi and Scott Yoshinaga, Bill Ellis and Dani O’Brien, and many, many more from one place with one shipping charge? Enticing.

Spam of the day:

Do you mind if I quote a few of your posts as long as I provide credit and sources back to your website? My blog site is in the exact same area of interest as yours and my visitors would certainly benefit from some of the information you present here.

I hate to nit-pick, but it appears that your “blog” is devoted to shilling knockoffs of designer sunglasses. So sure, quote away!

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¹ I must be sleep-deprived — I’m not usually loopy enough to use words like obviate.

² For those that care, the current Fleen Funding Formula is to take the Kicktraq trend figure at the 24-30 hour mark, and predict that the final number will be between 1/6 and 1/3 of that predicted value (or, put another way, PV/4 +/- PV/12). I think for FFF mark 2, I’ll tighten up the range a bit: make it PV/4 +/- PV/20, but only for campaigns that show at least 200 backers in that initial period. For lesser backer counts, I think the formulas break down and won’t be reliable.

We’ll see tomorrow how this works against the Oh Joy, Sex Toy (original prediction: US$97.5 +/- US$32.5K; FFFmk2: US$97.5K +/- US$19.5K) and Slingshot Across America (original prediction: not made, but would have been US$52.5K +/- US$17.5K; FFFmk2: US$52.5K +/- US$10.5K).