An open letter to Sahil Lavingia re: NFTs

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I am against NFTs.

I am an investor in Gumroad, not because I expect my shares to ever be worth anything but because I love Gumroad’s mission. It’s probably the best place online for independent creators to sell both digital and physical goods. Every now and then I look to see what other merch-fulfillment options exist out there, and none of them are nearly as fair to creators as Gumroad. The next-best one is Etsy, which charges monthly per-item listing fees and is part of a bigger problem with long-tail economics in this day and age. I do not have an Etsy store, or any plans to open one. (Most of my physical merch I sell on Storenvy just because I’ve been too lazy to migrate it over to Gumroad. Storenvy is pretty awful too, although for different reasons than Etsy.)

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Flood and Mac updates

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Flood update: Today I checked on my stuff in storage and was happy to find that there is apparently no damage inside any of my instrument cases; they just got a little bit of dirt on the outside. Yay!

Mac update: Even after having done all the stuff to make it stable, it continues to be unstable. Ugh. So I decided to just go ahead and buy an M1 Mac mini (512GB storage, 16GB RAM), monitor, external NVMe m.2 enclosure, and a 2TB drive for it. I won’t have the new computer until January 15. Normally I wouldn’t be so eager to do a first-gen new-architecture Mac but the reviews of it have been great and meanwhile this 2017 iMac has always given me a lot of trouble with stability and reliability and mysterious problems; Big Sur made it worse, but it was never a particularly great computer to begin with.1

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In which I finally stop using Patreon

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So, hey, Patreon is a pretty popular site for funding the creative people you follow. A lot of people rely on Patreon as their primary source of income. More power to them if they do; it’s where everyone goes to do that sort of thing and it’s really enabled a lot of people to do what they love for a living.

But I just removed all my pledges and also my creator account. It’s not one thing in isolation that led me to do this, but a culmination of a lot of things (some big, some small) that had been frustrating and upsetting to me.

(Want to know where I’m accepting donations these days without reading a long missive? I’m on Ko-Fi for one-time donations and Liberapay for ongoing contributions.)

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