Slowly, slowly I am finding myself drawn back into [web]comics, the discourse around them, and the having of Opinions. A’course, it’s pretty easy to find the will to write when Matt Bors drops you a line.

Readers of this page will know that we at Fleen hold The Nib — edited by Bors, with assistance from Eleri Harris and Mattie Lubchansky — in high regard. It’s a deeply thoughtful, skillfully-curated collection of the best editorial, nonfiction, and journalistic comics from around the world, and they pay.

For some time now, longer pieces from The Nib that were up for reruns have been redirecting to Tinyview, a situation that I noticed but which in my pandemic-induced torpor I did not investigate too closely; today, though, Bors dropped me a helpful explainer which I am more than happy to share with you, as it has as its ultimate goal paying comics creators:

For a few years I have been doing some work with Tinyview, a comics app that runs exclusive comics from an array of creators like Gemma Correll, Sarah Graley, and Brian Gordon.

We’re in the middle of a campaign to raise $25,000 in monthly subscription fees that will allow the site to reach sustainability and offer more comics. (All creators are paid pretty good rates.) The campaign is all on-platform with subscribers, not a Kickstarter or anything, and the goal is fairly straightforward: become sustainable through reader support and build from there.

Those looking for more details can find them here but the gist is the campaign runs until 14 February, as of this writing has raised US$15,519 of the goal, and when Bors says that creators are paid pretty good rates, keep in mind that he’s spent most of a decade now trying to find ways to pay creators like it’s still the heyday of magazine cartooning and folks can make a living at it.

And speaking of doing one’s best to put money into the pockets of creators — new Iron Circus anthology, yo:

Hey, Hey, gang! Spike here, letting y’all in early on:

Failure to Launch: A Tour of Ill-Fated Futures!

This anthology’s been in the works for months, and the line-up and stories are both ALL-STAR! Whether it’s a tale of our attempts to un-extinct an ibex, centrifugally assisted birth, or one deadline-blowing apocalypse after another, these stories are beautifully illustrated, expertly written, and unbelievably fun. [emphasis original]

That from an email that landed in my inbox right about launch time.

The sharp-eyed reader will note that this one is not being Kickstarted, as Spike — famous early user and vocal promoter of Kickstarter — broke with them last year over their inexplicable¹ decision to go blockchain²; uh, we probably should have covered that here but … 2022, man. Anyway, Spike’s been having success cutting out the middle layer and just running IC’s crowdfunding through Backerkit directly, and the usual profit-share is in effect: for every US$5000 over goal, the page rate goes up by US$5. Shifting away from Kickstarter makes it tough to apply the Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II as it relies upon Kickstarter data via Kicktraq, but things launched at noon EST and as of not quite five hours later, Failure To Launch is sitting somewhere north of US$15,000 of a US$20,000 goal.

I think they’re gonna make it to goal in the month remaining before deadline.

Oh, and if you backed it in the first hour? Free domestic/reduced rate international shipping. That’s damn clever, Spike, and just as other publishers have copied the share-the-wealth-with-creators approach you pioneered, I think we’ll see them give backers a similar break in the future.

And just so we’re clear — I’m not promising daily updates or anything. This is gonna take a while. But slowly, slowly, I think things are going to shake loose around here.

Spam of the day:
You know what? I haven’t included a Spam of the day since the end of January 2022, if you don’t count a post from two months later that was all spam. Partly this was because the subjects of the few posts since then didn’t deserve to have spam share the page with them, partly because I got out of the habit.

As near as I can tell, the first Spam of the day ran on 30 May, 2014. That’s about half of the blog’s lifespan. I think it did its job and can rest now.

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¹ Literally. They promised numerous explanations and never came close to coherency.

² We at Fleen are still trying to decide what to do personally about Kickstarter’s idiocy. There is literally no reason to involve the blockchain in anything, but at the same time it’s pretty much impossible to tell how much of that math-challenged bullshit is actually in Kickstarter’s infrastructure. For now, at least, if creators choose to use Kickstarter and that’s the only way to support them on a project, we will do so … but if Kickstarter actually implements this crap? Sorry, creators. Find another way for me to give you money.

Hard to tell, though, with the ongoing disruptions to society that are so unevenly present. Time and the passing of the seasons is muted. We need something to look forward to, something we can hang some anticipation of delight on, and fortunately for you, I’ve got just the thing to point you towards.

Lagies and Jenglefenz, I give you the next keepsake game from Shing Yin Khor:

Do you remember your childhood friend August? You met when she rode her bike into a ditch, right in front of you. Now, she’s lost in time.

Kickstarter in September 2021, live game in February 2022.

Follow to be notified on launch: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shing/remember-august

I will likely not be promoting this much, it’s a small and experimental live game that will land a story told in letters(by me and you, as you’ll write back) in your mailbox over the course of Feb 2022. You can buy that nice pen now, in order to save your friend August.

Done, and done. I believe my last fountain pen purchase was in anticipation of this moment¹. There’s preview images of Save August, and a description that should be landing hard in your brain if you’re anything like me:

the basic outline of it:
– you have to remember your friend, an agent of the Bureau of Time Disruption, to anchor her in present day.
– 8+ letters/misc. ephemera mailed to the player over a month.
– the USPS as a third character, a game about the rhythm of waiting. [emphasis mine]

Khor always comes up with unique mechanics for their games, and a game that is about patience is something that I’m going to get a lot of good from.

The Kickstart isn’t up yet, but the reward tiers have been announced:

I’m going to keep tiers very affordable. The backer tiers will be:

$10 – Live email game and game .pdf.
$20 – Live email game AND mailed game archive booklet
$50-60 – Mailed letters and archive booklet.

Post live-game, digital files will be released for free/PWYW!

The reason I am releasing digital files for free is because I 100% encourage anyone to remount the live game for a friend, by printing/prepping/mailing the game letters to them.

You can get much fancier with this outline than I will be able to with my bulk mail limitations!

That’s Khor in a nutshell — whatever they come up with, however many of us pay them for it, they still want everybody to get the benefits of art and experience. The generosity of spirit is stunning and a big part of why I’m proud to call them a friend. Even when things like this happen.

Save August will be launching on Kickstarter soon; find a good pen and paper, gather some envelopes, decide what stamps you want to use, and practice your handwriting. Think I’ll give my new turquoise ink a go with this one. See you all at the mailbox come February.

Spam of the day:

The waterproof sandals that you will wear all summer long

You’re a bit late there, Champ. Try again in about six months?

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¹ Note to self: get some decent stationery.

Sometimes, what you want to talk about just drops in your lap. Hooray for late-summer Kickstarts.

• Say what you will about Zach and Kelly Weinersmith, but they get it. They get their audience and know exactly what they are like¹ and are more than ready to dish it up to them. The academia-themed boardgame, Every Else Thinks This Game Is Awesome, has blown through its Kickstarter funding goal in a about four and a half hours (presently it’s sitting at 180% of goal), and will likely be hitting the stratospheric levels associated with a Weinersmith joint, including globs of stretch goals that make the final product awesomer.

  Me, I decided to back as soon as I saw the grad students were represented by interchangeable pawns with no control over their own destiny. All of the rewards where you got to influence or appear in the game are gone, but 943 people (as of this writing) can grab the reward level where a special card signed by the Weinersmiths² is included in the game. This one looks fun, it’s already funded, it’s basically zero risk given prior Weinersmith Kickstarts, so give it a look, yeah? Oh, and check out the video on the campaign page, it features a great variation on the soundtrack record scratch.

• Also up for Kicks and Starts, the 30th — you read that right, three-zero — campaign from Iron Circus, the latest iteration of their ongoing fairy tales from around the world series, Cautionary Fables and Fairy Tales: North America. Notably, the stories are told by Indigenous creators, which really should be a given but isn’t yet, so good on Spike and everybody at IC. Then again, Alina Pete has been part of the IC family forever, and is herself a member of the Cree nation, so keeping the stories in the hands of the people they originated with was probably more of a given than at any other publisher.

  Usual Iron Circus deal is in effect: every US$5000 over goal raised results in a US$5/page increase in pay to the creators; as of this writing (a day into the 18 day funding period), creators are making an extra US$40/page, and about to hit US$45. According to the FFF mk2, we’re headed for US$155K +/- 30K in funding; hitting the low end of that range would result in a US$105/page bonus, in an industry where mid-major publishers may pay less than that total per page. We’re more than a full day away from being able to calculate the McDonald Ratio, but it would come to at least US$185K, based on what’s been raised in the first two days³.

Spam of the day:

Tool to read messages from friends on FACEBOOK

That would be FACEBOOK. The purpose of Facebook is to read messages from friends on Facebook.

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¹ Damn you, Sports & Leisure category, damn you to hell!

² And featuring facts about both weiners and smiths.

³ Remember, Kel McDonald’s rule of thumb is the money raised in the first three days of the campaign is approximately one third of the eventual total.

As was mentioned previously, the stuff that is taking up some brain cycles continues. It’s been light posting of and it’s not done yet. Fortunately, it is the depths of summer when very little new is going on.

But that is not to say that nothing is going on, and we have some quick hits from some familiar names.

• Item! Flash sale over at Iron Circus. In honor of Friday the 13th, spooky books are 30% off until midnight CDT today. Stock up while you can.
• Item! It’s been a quiet time for new work from Howard Tayler since Shlock Mercenary ended its 20+ year run, unsurprisingly. But he’s always been more than just a comics guy, and one of those other areas is to the fore presently. Tayler is Kickstarting a new edition of XDM: X-treme Dungeon Mastery, with words by Tracy & Curtis Hickman, illustrations by Tayler, and cover color/additional interior illos by Jim Zub.

  It’s not a new printing, it’s a new, reworked edition, and it’s available until the campaign runs out¹ in four weeks. Three days in, it’s about 95% of the way to a generous US$50K goal, and the FFF mk2 says it’ll end somewhere around US$130K – US$195K. Maybe. The Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II is pretty good with [web]comics projects, less good with others, particularly games related. We’ll see.

• Speaking of Jim Zub (we were, he’s right there two ‘grafs back), he sent around an email pointing out that he’s still sharing his knowledge, and giving even more advice at his Patreon which he is considering renaming to … Zubstack.

  James J Zub, I want you to go sit by yourself quietly and think about what you’ve done. We will not even discuss how you ask visitors to your YouTube channel to watch, like and Zubscribe. Bad Zub, bad. No prize.

  In all seriousness, Zub’s got the proportional drive and smarts of a comics-writing spider² and if you’re making comics, you should be following his voluminous advice closely.

Okay, let’s his the weekend. Hopefully things will be less like they are on Monday.

Spam of the day:

Just a heads-up that I believe the word “tate” is spelled wrong on your website. I had a couple of errors on my site before I started using a service to monitor for them.

Ignoring the fact that tate is not a word, you are correct in that is not spelled correctly. It should have been taint, as in you damn spammers can snort my. Taint, that is.

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¹ And, presumably, some day at conventions if we ever get those again because people will not fucking get vaccinated or wear masks and I’m starting to have to take in COVID patients again and godsdamn are we stupid as a society.

Not that I am bitter.

² Just work with me, okay?

You know, when I get a bit down, I can always count on Shing Yin Khor to do something awesome and give me hope in humanity — or possibly gnomity — again. Along with seeing people share their playthroughs of A Mending on social media¹ and wondering how many stories have been birthed as a result, I’ve been thinking back on their intent to make this experience as broadly available as possible.

Experience because everybody I’ve shared it with regards it as more than a game. It’s an invitation to creativity, a tutorial in storybuilding, and an act of self-examination all wrapped in the guise of a game. But it’s the broadly part that I wanted to talk about. Readers may recall that when A Mending was Kickstarting, we at Fleen wrote about Khor’s determination to make it both an open-source framework for the story prompts that others might devise, and especially in acknowledging that they might not see all the barriers that could prevent individuals from being able to participate:

I’m creating two $1500 grants for people who would like to adapt A Mending for wider accessibility. One grant is focused on visual accessibility, the other on range-of-motion accessibility. These grants come with a free commercial license, so they can take 100% of profits from work they choose to make commercially available (I will only need attribution). The non-exclusive commercial license includes my art, writing and game design work. What does this mean? Maybe it’s someone selling raised versions of the cloth map in high contrast colors. Maybe it’s porting the game to Roll 20. Maybe a website that produces randomized voiceovers for all the cards. I don’t really know but I’d like to find out too! [emphasis original]

Not only that, but Khor decided that they would license the game framework to whoever came up with those accessibility modifications, so that the modded versions would be sold for profit. It’s been a busy time getting the A Mending kits out to backers², so it’s only now that they have been able to take a look at those grants. From a backers-only update³ to the campaign:

I initially wanted to offer two accessibility grants of [US]$1500 each to two people or groups working on improving accessibility on my game, A Mending. However, instead of creating an formal application process (which in this particular instance, feels like it might be more gate-keepy than useful), I have decided to simply put aside [US]$3000 to properly compensate people working on accessibility issues if they choose to work on a more accessible version of A Mending, which can include smaller targeted projects. I will write more about this soon, but if you’ve been thinking about ways A Mending could be more accessible, and would like to work on that, let me know — I’d like to pay you.

Proposals(these do not need to be formal) can be emailed directly to me(shingkhor who has an account at the Google-hosted mail, a dot-com); please include your budget/pay-rate and an outline of what you might want to make or do.

If you are an independent designer and would like to self-fund a more accessible version of A Mending, and only need a commercial license to make money on your version, email me. The license will allow you to produce a commercial version of the game with your accessibility changes, whether digital or physical. If you would like to produce a non-commercial version of the game, you can already do so under its current license. [emphasis mine]

I suspect that more people will make more things this way than in the original two grants model. And more people making more things will benefit exponentially more people who otherwise would have missed out.

Khor tells me they will be making a more public announcement once A Mending is widely available, although that may be some weeks away. If you have ideas, contact them at the email given above.

Spam of the day:

After years of providing professional blog writing and other copy material, I have recently launched my own site. My mission is to write engaging blog posts to help start ups and small businesses build credibility, providing quality and value, at an affordable level.

Dude, I don’t get paid for this, you think I’m going to pay you to write a generic post that has nothing to do with webcomics?

Okay, even more nothing than one of mine?

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¹ Yes, I included myself twice. Deal.

² As to be expected, with more than 2500 due physical rewards.

³ I emailed Khor for permission to quote and share, and they graciously agreed.

Whoo, those until-two-am EMS calls really put a crimp in the next day. It’s late, so this will be brief, as we share news of a couple of enticing product [pre]-announcements.

• First up Raina Telgemeier is a ways from her next book; turns out that pandemics completely disrupt publishing schedules, which are complex webs of editors, publicity, planning, printing logistics, and supply chains that run from China across the Pacific. Probably isn’t too great for the brain space of the folks that need to put together the books that will be appearing next year and the year after that, either. And then there’s the fact that Raina’s published five monster hits from 2010-2019 and if we want to see the next five, she’s due a breather.

  But even if there’s not a story coming the immediate future¹, there’s still Raina news to keep your eyes on, starting today:

  I’m so excited for tomorrow’s release of ‘Raina’s Day,’ my new 450-piece jigsaw puzzle collaboration with Clarkson Potter! Be sure to check out my website for some sneak-peek photos and ordering information! https://goraina.com/merchandise-puzzle

  That’s a puzzle of cartoon Raina surrounded by all the thoughts that define her, packaged up in a box that looks for all the world like cartoon Raina’s sketchbook or diary. I dunno about you, but I’ve got multiple [grand-] nieces and nephews that are going to go incandescent when they see it.

• It was not two weeks ago when we at Fleen looked at the latest webcomic offering from Karl Kerschl and noted that The Abominable Charles Christopher’s third volume had been a-borning for longer than anybody would want, but that the wait would be worth it. It would be madness to claim that Kerschl took my plaintive observation as the motivation to quickly throw together a full boo design and get a Kickstart set up — those tasks take forever — but what the heck? He announced it:
  

  Abominable Book 3 is finally coming! Check out the @Kickstarter landing page to get notified when it goes live!!!
  https://kickstarter.com/projects/karlkerschl/the-abominable-charles-christopher-book-3

  31 May was a very good day for product announcements, yo.

  We don’t know what form book 3 is going to take, or what timeframe to expect it in, but soon enough we’ll have the campaign launch and get those answers. All I know is I’ve got to make room on my bookshelf for a new hardcover² in the near-ish term. Charles Christopher! A malevolent lion! A shouty and ineffectual Gilgamesh! RPG-fan forest critters, awkward owlets, a cockroach shrink, Vivol the bear, Luga the honest wolf, and Sissi Skunk’s shenanigans! Stick it in my brain.

• Oh, and a followup to Friday: US$580,099, thirty grand above the McDonald’s Ratio, and a full fifty grand above the previous record holder. Dang.

Spam of the day:

We have a special limited offer for you to send unlimited emails. We allow non-permission based emails and you won’t ever get blocked.

You are offering me the opportunity to annoy other people as much as you’re trying to annoy me? And yet you wound up in my spam filters, where I could have easily ignored you forever. You’re not very good at this.

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¹ Which is not to say there haven’t been any stories with her hands in. The death-themed anthology from Iron Circus, You Died, includes a Raina-illustrated story about beloved father, a collection of ashes, and a trip to a theme park that is absolutely not Disney for a surreptitious scattering. It’s heartwarming and hilarious, and Raina makes the most of writer Casey Gilly’s script.

² And, eventually, a fourth book, but we’ll cross that bridge etc.

We all know that David Malki ! is a busy man, with his hands in many pies and all that project-juggling rendered the more difficult by the pandemic. So much so that he’s only managed a handful of comic strips in the past half year.

Today, we found out some of what he’s been up to:

I’ve spent the past six months making a new party game.
[ IT’S ON KICKSTARTER RIGHT NOW ]

Or, if you prefer the Twitter version:

OK. So what is TBH? Why is it “my new game”?

I’ve been working with Cut.com for a while now. Cut makes social videos that are about connection and authenticity and awkwardness. My mission was (and is) to explore that concept in the field of gameplay.

Which sounds like one of the most Malkidian things you could possibly come up with, honestly. It involves asking the play group Yes/No questions that describe vaguely unhinged dilemmas, which you then embellish until you’ve described a completely unique situation and have to decide: Would you do this? And to get points and possibly win, you must also decide: Which of the other players would and which would not do this? You will, to summarize the how-to-play video, you will learn a disturbing amount about yourself and your friends.

Here’s a sample round that involves the Queen of England and also your butthole. It’s … honestly, it’s exactly the sort of thing I expected, once I learned that Sara McHenry was part of the writing staff, given the stellar work she did for Clickhole; readers will recall that McHenry is also a big part of why Make That Thing has successfully shepherded so many crowdfundings, and is on board with TBH as Project Manager, so that’s all right.

Not sure you want to drop the cash on the game? They made an online version you can play for free, so fire up the videochat and grab some friends. If you have fun, there’s more to be had, from some damn creative people that you already know. As of this writing, TBH is 60% funded after about 48 hours, and I make no predictions about how high it will go, as the Fleen Funding Formula Mark II was designed to describe webcomics projects, and games projects have their own math. Seems pretty likely they fund, though.

Spam of the day:

Hey! I’m an aspiring porn actress. If you want to check it out, register here — [link redacted] I’m there Jane Deep Throat ;)

Jane (or should I call you Ms Throat?), please don’t call yourself aspiring. If you made porn, you’re a porn actress. We’re all about boosting confidence here at Fleen.

I say that because I thought we were back yesterday and then ha ha nope, we were down again for 10-12 hours, until the small hours of the morning. I’m going to give it another day or so before I believe that we are actually stable. You saw my Twitter, and Jon’s, and you can probably guess what I think of our current hosting provider¹.

But assuming that we’re up long enough for you to read this, there’s a case of somebody absolutely screwing … not even a customer, in this case more of a partner absolutely sideways in the most hypocritical and impunity-rich manner possible.

See, I was going to talk about the latest update at Oh Joy, Sex Toy, where Erika and Matt share their long-awaited take on the Hismith Quadruple Penetration Fucking Machine. One may recall that the last time this particular pan-sexual roto-plooker was mentioned, I thought Matt ‘n’ Erika had actually made it up and went looking. Note where I found it, that’s going to be important in a second.

The reason I wanted to talk about today’s OJST was because right in the middle of the epic of the HQPFM, there are three panels (which I’ve arbitrarily numbered 10, 11, and 12), which culminate in a shocked-looking Erika stating matter-of-factly (in what I imagine was a very small voice) I saw God. I was eating lunch at the time and nearly choked on laughter and also sandwich. As it is, I think there’s still some mustard-covered sprouted-multigrain sandwich bread in my nasopharyngeal space². I went to the sosh-meeds to share my appreciation and sorrow, only to find that Erika and Matt had bigger things on their mind:

WELL.

Amazon just booted us from their affiliate program, which we use to sell *their* sex toys and copies of our books on sexual health, because Oh Joy Sex Toy features explicit images.

They informed us they do not have to pay us any of the money we earned before this.

So all the pre-orders we did for LET’S TALK ABOUT IT (and all of THEIR sex toys that we sold for them) that were placed through our Amazon affiliate link… nothing. The income we generated from those sales, they do not have to pay us. [emphasis mine]

There’s more, but that’s the heart of it. Amazon did not come to dominate nearly every aspect of commerce and technology by playing fair and out-hustling lazy competitors. They did it by viciously undercutting businesses to where they could not possibly make a profit, squeezing contractors, killing their pick-and-pack workers, demanding delivery speed that results vehicular death on the regular, and inviting companies to sell on their platform until they can pirate designs and kick them off. Oh yes, and withholding money that rightfully belongs to other people because the only way to get it back is to have a deeper legal budget than Amazon and literally nobody has a deeper legal budget than Amazon except maybe Disney.

People ask me why I don’t use Amazon, ever, and everything in that last paragraph is why. Amazon doesn’t give a shit about anybody they have contracted business with, they are merely a source of money to be extracted at their leisure. I have an account with them that’s more than 20 years old, and which has purchased exactly nothing since 2019. There are books that I’ve been waiting for Diamond to get to my local comic shop³ for more than a year that could be here tomorrow via Amazon, and I won’t do it. There’s entire series that exist only on comiXology that I desperately want to read, and likewise no. It’s not worth the human damage.

I don’t think it’s been a big thing here, and certainly something I’ve tried to minimize, but there will never be another link to Amazon or an Amazon-owned enterprise here. If there’s a pre-order that a creator wants people to use, or something that’s exclusive to comiXology I will mention it, but you’re going to have to find it yourself. Fuck Amazon in the physical manifestation of its collective corporate ear-hole, and fuck Jeff Bezos in particular. They suck.

PS: Buy Erika and Matt’s books and merch from almost anyplace else but especially your local bookstore. Support their Patreon. And Let’s Talk About It is not only a marvelous book that you should absolutely read because it will make you a better person, it inadvertently led to the creation of a new heirloom in my family.

And seriously — fuck Amazon.

Spam of the day:

The sexual part of a woman’s brain is much more responsive to the signals your body is giving off than it is to anything you say. That’s why it’s absolutely essential that you know how to turn a woman on regardless of what you say.

Save your money, I’ll tell you the secret: have a luxurious, Commander Hadfieldesque moustache.

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¹ Who bought out the previous hosting provider, who were everything you want in a hosting provider: boring. Excitement is definitely not something you want with respect to your web hosting.

² Ow.

³ Huh. Monopolies suck and screw over everybody they interact with, who’d have guessed.

After all, there are only so many Shut up and take my money and Just hook it to my veins GIFs that can be posted per second before the lasers that make modern communications infrastructure work start to malfunction and murder random passersby.

And if the source of such money/veins declarations were, say, luxuriously packaged, associated with a wildly popular webcomic, and in a limited edition? Well, that’s just a dangerous situation all around. I speak, naturally, of this:

Friends, what better way could there be to drink illicit hooch from that Lackadaisy Speakeasy (or, if you prefer, straight maple syrup) than from custom-made Lackadaisy shot glasses?

After months of careful product design and sourcing, they’re finally on their way!

Iron Circus Comics is producing an animated short for Tracy Butler’s manic masterpiece, Lackadaisy! And as part of one of that project’s stretch goals, we’ve commissioned a limited, one-time run of Lackadaisy-Speakeasy-themed shot glasses! Each one is emblazoned with the Lackadaisy club logo in gold foil, and they come four-to-a-set in a gorgeous, partitioned wooden crate, oh-so-sneakily labeled as Algid brand “embalming fluid” in case the local coppers get nosy.

Only 1,000 of these sets will be made, and they’re designed and manufactured in accordance with American and international food safety standards. Scheduled to hit American shores in late spring or early summer, but available for pre-order now!

That from the email sent to we at Fleen by C Spike Trotman of Iron Circus and I gotta say, that’s a lot of character for a sales pitch email. For those that didn’t get into the minutiae of the Lackadaisy animated short Kickstart last year, getting the shot glasses made was a US$135K stretch goal¹, and they’ve been through design and sourcing for much of the past year.

Personally, the squared-off design makes them look a bit like a whisky glass², and given the fact that a souvenir-type shot glass will typically run you about ten bucks, a set of four with that gorgeous box is more than fair at US$45. Backers got first crack at the glasses on Tuesday, the general announcement went out today, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the pre-orders are largely spoken for by tomorrow³. I’d say that if you have any interest, you want to get in on the offer now.

Spam of the day:

We greet you !!! If you are interested in a full-time job or a part-time job on the Internet, then we can offer you our way of earning money. Now we provide access to our service, which makes it possible to earn from 20 to 30 thousand rubles a month.

I don’t know if I’m more impressed that you’re trying to entice me with the equivalent of US$268 to US$408 for a month’s full-time work, or the fact that you sent your Russian-language spam in actual Comic Sans. Who knew that the evil transcended the Latin alphabet?

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¹ The project had a base goal of US$85K, and ultimately raised US$330K.

² And in the hands of a cat-sized person, it’s a super-generous pour, and solid enough to do damage in a bar brawl.

³ Although given the fact that this is going to go like hotcakes, a smart person — and Spike is very smart — would be wise to lay in 500 or so extra glasses, to be sold individually for the next forever without the limited edition trappings.

A week back, I wrote about a new kind of collaborative storytelling, in the form of a game from Jeeyon Shim and Shing Yin Khor that involves prompts to dredge through one’s memories and craft a story from them. There are things created (journal entries, letters) to go along with the experiences, and at a sufficient pledge level on the Kickstarter, physical artifacts and ephemera.

In the time since The Field Guide To Memory launched its email playthrough (there will be a full set of prompts sent to Kickstarter backers as a PDF), both Shim and Khor have launched new campaigns in this new category that now has a name: a keepsake game.

Shim’s funding The Last Will And Testament Of Gideon Blythe (I saw the launch too late to get in on the limited physical rewards, dammit), and Khor yesterday launched A Mending, which has an embroidery mechanic. We’re going to talk about the latter today, not because it’s any more interesting than TLWATOGB or the game mechanic is more interesting, but because of a pair of secret stretch goals that Khor revealed after the funding level they had in mind was crossed¹.

A new kind of game/story/experience needs new kinds of ideas associated with it, and Khor’s given us two. The first isn’t too unheard of, but the second is something really special. From the Kickstarter update:

I’ll be releasing art template files for A Mending under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license so you can design/make your own cards and maps. Of course, you can make your own maps and cards for personal use and adapt the game however you like anyway, but template files will make it a lot easier if you would like to maintain some visual consistency. You can also distribute the things/expansions/files you make, albeit non-commercially (totally fine if you want to direct people to your tip jar, though). These files will be released close to the start of fulfillment, likely in late April. [emphasis original]

There’s a real tendency among creators, one that is entirely logical and proper, to view their creations as How This Thing Should Be. There may be adaptations into other media which they are or are not involved in, but once something’s done and released, it’s kind of cast in concrete. Khor is explicitly recognizing that a story that is as much prompts for the audience to fill in as it is structure will never be cast in concrete; the story of A Mending will have as many (or more) variations as there are people who read/play/experience it, and they are acknowledging that it’s not a sole creation.

That idea of my thing isn’t just my thing is even bigger in the second reveal:

I’m creating two $1500 grants for people who would like to adapt A Mending for wider accessibility. One grant is focused on visual accessibility, the other on range-of-motion accessibility. These grants come with a free commercial license, so they can take 100% of profits from work they choose to make commercially available (I will only need attribution). The non-exclusive commercial license includes my art, writing and game design work. What does this mean? Maybe it’s someone selling raised versions of the cloth map in high contrast colors. Maybe it’s porting the game to Roll 20. Maybe a website that produces randomized voiceovers for all the cards. I don’t really know but I’d like to find out too! [emphasis original]

What distinguishes Khor’s announcement from so many previous nods towards accessibility is a) it’s not members of a group that need accommodation having to come as ask for it, and b) it need not be done on a volunteer basis. The allow others to profit from their adaptation part is unique enough; the grant is, as far as I can tell, unprecedented.

I have never seen a creator so explicitly say I have made a thing that is what I want to see in the world but recognize that I can’t predict all the ways that my version of it may preclude others from enjoying it. I want to not only invite you to modify it in ways that I can’t think of and allow you to profit from it, I will pay you to do so.

We’ve talked about the unique nature of comics and how they are read enough times here at Fleen. On a few occasions we’ve mentioned accessibility, but there’s not been a huge exploration of accessibility around comics as a medium; I think it’s just been decided that if you haven’t got sufficient vision, you’re out of luck. Given that the game will have more than just a reading component, but also tactile/motor control components, there are potentially many ways that A Mending could be made more widely accessible². No one person could conceive of them all, but if a crowd could come together to make the initial form of A Mending, why not a crowd of suggestions as to how it could be better?

I have a feeling that keepsake games will be taking off as a category any day now; others will see what Shim and Khor have done, and try to create something that instills as much feeling in their own audience (others still will make slapped-togther crap to try to cash in). Some will be spare, some rife with stuff, and different genres of story will evolve. Will there be another 5-to-6 figure funding of a little game that takes an hour or two to play? Only to the degree that there are wildly original thinkers, people whose brain is (to quote Rich Stevens) the only place that bakes that cookie³. Audiences will be following (and I’m about to get fancy here) the auteur, just to see what they crank out now.

And the very smartest ones will be like Khor, finding ways to enrich the values of their creations by giving up control and ownership, and seeking out others to remix each new project’s DNA.

The Last Will And Testament Of Gideon Blythe is funding for another seven days, and is presently approaching eight times its US$1800 goal. A Mending has 21 days to go and cleared US$80K in the time it took me to write everything since footnote 1; the limited-edition everything-provided tiers (just go read the descriptions; they’re a hoot) are long gone, but more than 1000 people have backed at the levels that provide physical game assets. If you want to see what Khor and Shim are like when they combine their creative abilities, search Twitter for #FieldGuideToMemory.

Spam of the day:

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Neat trick linking ScamAdvisor and other sites to purportedly show how good your fake IDs are, but with links that actually redirect to your site. Sneaky. In any event, where the hell do you think anybody is going right now that they’d need a fake ID?

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¹ For the record, the campaign reached its US$12,000 target in about 17 minutes, and the limited tiers were claimed within an hour. The secret threshold for the secret stretch goals was US$60,000 — five times goal — and Khor sent out the update last night. As of this writing, A Mending sits just under US$80,000 in pledges.

² My immediate thought was around issues of fine motor control.

³ Nine years on and I still think about that quote at least once a month, although I frequently misremember Stevens as having said it at SDCC or Splat!.