I honestly never expected my commitment to this blog to have gone this long, it’s almost been ten years now. I feel horrible putting a Paypal link under the About Me section. Whereas people could just browse my blog without such an annoyance and never have anything like that expected for nearly 9 years now, I’ve come under financial hardship in more recent times and if I have any real talent for this or if you ever thought that anything that I wrote about was worth your time and interest, then please just consider giving whatever you think it was worth. My actual face is in the image; something I really don’t like doing as I’m generally a private person and don’t like being bothered much by anything; and you’ll probably see that image in dating profiles that I’ve added online, so I don’t recommend googling that.

The reason I never asked for anything in return before is because I genuinely hate what has happened with most news websites and companies moving to a subscription-based service. They’ve effectively become glorified gated communities whereby you need to pay-up to get any meaningful news. It’s honestly appalling that in one breath, websites like the New York Times can argue about free press and then in another on the same page, they put a paywall so that you can’t read about important topics until you foot the bill. A free press that you have to pay for. While they meant the legal and political norm of a free press that isn’t controlled by the government, the term sort of annoys me now because for-profit companies constantly talk about their own self-importance in this regard. I never, ever want to put a paywall on any of my writing content. I’ll avoid it like an anathema, if I have to. I don’t believe that anyone should create a paywall for news articles and blogging. Admittedly, a part of it is my own insecurity, as there is always that voice in the back of my mind, reminding me, that I haven’t actually contributed much of value and that I should have rolled my ideas at the stupid idea of blogging about mainly my favorite video game series is something that’s ever worth anyone else’s time of putting money into. Unfortunately, circumstances being what they are, I feel it’s a necessary step because my finances keep taking hit after hit. I’m terribly sorry of that seems selfish, or greedy, or arrogant on my part. I really mean that.

I don’t want to be the person who rationalizes making stupid, inflammatory content shitting on other people based upon what the rankings in a poll; to please people giving me patronage, who want to see that. If I make such content, I want for it to be for my own satisfaction. I notice with a lot of youtubers who do book reviews like James Tullos and Unresolved Textual Tension have this issue. The moment they start a patreon, they inevitably start internal polls and those polls usually want the reviewer to trash newly released bad books that people didn’t like. It’s as if people just want to keep looking in the mirror and trash on the lowest forms of content for a sense of schadenfreude. I’m not inherently against schadenfreude myself, I recently engaged with it on Twitter against Firewalk studios employees because of how much I loathed, absolutely loathed, the ugliness of the character designs of the failed game, Concord. It was a level of stupid that I never, ever want to see any major gaming studio devolve into or put serious money into and that’s why I felt justified in telling those arrogant pieces of garbage exactly what I thought of them. However, circumscribing your views to cater to your audience due to for-profit motives is what ruins it, because it’s about people-pleasing and not giving a valuable critique from a different and informed perspective. It’s no longer authentic to your core values and you may be making videos just for the sake of attention-grabbing. I despise that and I will try to avoid it. I suppose it is paradoxical and outright self-refuting to ask for voluntary financial support, but also claim that I don’t want to be influenced by that support and arguably give nothing back; but how else does one maintain their integrity and stick with their core beliefs? It’s highly likely that this is all overly dramatic and I will simply get nothing at all, which is fine too. That’s how creativity is and should remain. Creativity comes from our intrinsic interests; not people-pleasing or circumscribing one’s views with those of their financial backers. Doing the latter two jeopardizes authenticity and can lead to motivated reasoning, due to the perceived financial benefit of trying to find excuses for why realistic negative consequences somehow either don’t matter or aren’t “realistic” when one believes they can get better financial stability from believing in a lie. That’s probably more reason than not, why stupid policies or game concepts are pursued and lead to abject failure than mere arrogance, albeit arrogance may play some part in it.

I want to remain authentic to myself, my interests, my pursuits, and even my criticisms including my harshest feedback. I believe that to be ultimately more helpful and useful to others in the long-run. Making the blog post criticizing Canada and Great Britain’s government structures has resulted in far, far fewer views from either country in a very stark and noticeable way, for example. I honestly believe that bluntly pointing out the problems of their government structure and explaining why neither country is really a democracy is ultimately a compassionate act. Moreover, it is unfair to use either country as examples of democratic backsliding, if they’re legally and functionally still monarchies under the same Royal family. It simply makes no sense to call them democracies if their monarchy has far more power than ceremonial processions. Please note, I’m the most critical of my own country of the United States, despite referring to Canada as living under a system of Monarchic Primitivism. I still stand by my words due to what I’ve researched about Canada and shared the snapshots of their government website’s claims on structure. I don’t ever want to change that about this blog, so I’ll try very hard to make sure that I never have a paywall added, because I’m completely against them. Unfortunately, reality has set in and I keep getting hit over and over with new challenges, so if anyone is willing, then please consider giving me what you think any of my writing that you enjoyed was worth. No pressure. If I receive nothing, that just means nothing changed and that’s fine too. Absolutely no pressure, I honestly don’t ever want to be that kind of person. I’m thinking of adding other pay systems like coffee or WordPress’s internal system connected to stripe, but I don’t like that they expose addresses to people giving patronage or give Stripe my bank information like both my username and password which is really weird, so it will probably just be paypal for now until I can find more or better alternatives. The Paypal username is obviously my pseudonym and not my real name, which can be seen on my Twitter. I’m terribly sorry if this seemingly comes out of nowhere or adds a layer of annoyance, but I hope this explanation helped smooth over any justified annoyance with this new change added under the About Me page.