I feel stupid for even asking this, but... what does the money from the Kickstarter go to? I trust that it will be used properly, but what does "used properly" look like for something like this? I have a vague idea of "compensating the artists and various creatives", but nothing more than that, especially when my only experience with freelance art is "one time when I was a kid, a local clown paid me twenty bucks to make a simple colouring page".
(With reference to this post here.)
Well, let's break it down. I won't get into the specifics of this campaign's budget, but let's imagine a hypothetical scenario for a campaign of this type that manages to take in, say, 100 000 of whatever currency it's being conducted in.
Right off the top, basically any crowdfunding platform is going to take a 10% cut, and â assuming people are paying with credit cards, which they almost certainly will be â the credit card processors are going to take, on average, another 5%.
Next, you need to set aside a portion to pay business income taxes on the proceedings of the campaign. This can be mitigated to an extent via claimable business expenses, but unless you organise things very carefully and also get very lucky with your timing, you're not going to be able to push that tax bill all the way down to zero; the specifics will vary depending on jurisdiction, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it averages out to about 10% of gross funding.
So, right off the jump, we've only got 75 000 of that original 100 000 to work with when it comes to actually paying for stuff.
Now, let's address the elephant in the room: manufacturing.
Our hypothetical campaign's goal is to produce a printed book, so there's going to be rather a lot of that. In a perfect world, you want to maintain an 8:1 price ratio: that is, the sticker price people pay is eight times the book's per-unit manufacturing cost. Actually hitting that target requires economies of scale that typically aren't accessible to small-time projects, though (i.e., you need to be printing thousands of books, not dozens to hundreds), so in practice that ratio can end up being as bad as 2:1.
Of course, in a campaign of this type, printing expenses can be partially offset by digital-only pledges, which don't incur printing costs, so the final tally is going to vary wildly based on the ratio of digital-only pledges to pledges with physical rewards. Let's ass-pull some assumptions here and figure that printing costs will average out to about a quarter of gross funding, or 25 000 in our imaginary currency. That 75 000 is now 50 000.
(Those physical rewards will also need to be shipped, but let's pretend we're collecting shipping and handling fees at the time of fulfillment and not worry about that right now.)
So we've got half the money left to actually get content into this thing. Here we're going to need to shift from imaginary currencies to a real one; in deference to this blog's readership I'll use USD. Let's imagine our end product is a 200-page rulebook. What is filling this thing with words and pictures going to cost us? Well:
Figure a 200-page rulebook contains ballpark 50 000 words of writing. A reasonable starting rate for technical writing of the kind that goes into a tabletop RPG is $0.20 USD/word, so that's $10 000 USD for the writing.
If we're doing a proper job of this, we need editing, too. For developmental editing (i.e., the editor is functionally a game design consultant) the sky's the limit, but let's assume you only need basic copyediting and proofreading services. That's typically half again your writing cost, or around $5000 USD here.
For illustrations, let's say we want a dozen nice full-page pieces, including cover art. That will make for a fairly sparsely illustrated book at 200 pages, but we're not Wizards of the Coast. At industry standard rates, this is going to run you between $300 USD and $600 USD per piece. Let's take the higher end of that range and assume our dozen illustrations are about five hundred bucks a pop â that's ballpark $6000 USD to have the book illustrated.
Now we've gotta stitch this all together with layout â and remember, we need a print ready layout, not some bullshit we knocked together in LibreOffice. Like editing, layout with print ready prep can range widely, but let's assume we're looking at something in the neighbourhood of $20 USD per page; for a 200-page book, that's $4000 USD for layout.
So: we've got our book written, edited, illustrated, and laid out for print, and it's set us back 25 000, or about half of what we had left. Figure another 10 000 in miscellaneous expenses, ranging from font licenses to transport and storage for the printed books to compensating playtesters to administrative expenses associated with running the crowdfunding campaign itself (you are paying your social media guy, right?), and of that original 100 000, your take-home pay is roughly 15 000 â if, of course, you're doing everything properly.
At this point, you probably have two questions:
"Wait a minute â if just the content for a book of this type is going to run you $25 000 USD, why was your initial goal only $20 000 CAD?"
You're quite right; that's a comparatively low target. In part, the answer is that Eat God's initial development was partially funded as a paid early access title, so a substantial portion of those development costs were already paid up before the campaign began. In part, the answer is that my audience is large enough that the aforementioned economies of scale are starting to kick in; this campaign is not necessarily representative of smaller-scale stuff.
"Okay, but then how do publishers who are even smaller than you manage to set initial goals of $2500 USD when the book's content alone can cost ten times that figure?"
I can't speak for everybody, but with respect to the campaigns I'm familiar with, the answer is usually some combination of "the lead writer, and sometimes the lead illustrator as well, are essentially working for free, and also they did their layout in Google Docs and didn't bother with editing at all" and "they didn't do the math properly and ended up losing money on the project". That's what happens when you're working in an industry that mostly consists of semi-amateur passion projects!
The figures set out above are based on the assumption that "properly" spending the money means everyone involved is making a living wage for their time, including the person managing the project. In practice that doesn't always happen.
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I really do wish that there was a cute accessory that would subtly tell people Iâm a domme with submissives. My pet has its collar, a permacuff on its ankle, and eventually I wanna give it an earring with my initial and maybe a daycollar. It also wears kandi bracelets, including one with my name on it and another that has my pet name for it. Itâs accessorized as fuck.
And what do I get?? My pet made friendship bracelets for me, my doll, and itself but all that communicates is that Iâm fashionable and loved, not that these dykes belong to me. Are dommes just not supposed to be cutes??? Itâs SUCH bullshit.
Are dominants just not expected ro be proud of our half of the dynamic? Is it that itâs more broadly acceptable to say âI want to be keptâ instead of âI want to keepâ? Iâm not ashamed that im a domme and I want accessories!!!!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Intellectual property" was once an obscure legal backwater. Today, it is the dominant area of political economy, the organizing regime for almost all of our tech regulation, and the most valuable â and most controversial â aspect of global trade policy:
Despite (or perhaps because of) its centrality, "intellectual property" is one of those maddeningly vague terms that applies to many different legal doctrines, as well as a set of nebulous, abstract thought-objects that do not qualify for legal protection. "IP" doesn't just refer to copyright, trademark and patent â though these "core three" systems are so heterogeneous in basis, scope and enforcement that the act of lumping them together into a single category confuses more than it clarifies.
Beyond the "core three" of copyright, patent and trademark, "IP" also refers to a patchwork of "neighboring rights" that only exist to varying degrees around the world, like "anticircumvention rights," "database rights" and "personality rights." Then there are doctrines that have come to be thought of as IP, even though they were long considered separate: confidentiality, noncompete and nondisparagement.
Finally, there are those "nebulous, abstract thought-objects" that get labeled "IP," even if no one can really define what they are â for example, the "format" deals that TV shows like Love Island or The Traitors make around the world, which really amount to consulting deals to help other TV networks create a local version of a popular show, but which are treated as the sale of some (nonexistent) exclusive right.
It's hard to find a commonality amongst all these wildly different concepts, but a couple years ago, I hit on a working definition of "IP" that seems to cover all the bases: I say that "IP" means "any rule, law or policy that allows a company to exert control over its critics, competitors or customers":
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
Put that way, it's easy to see why "IP" would be such a central organizing principle in a modern, end-stage capitalist world. But even though "IP" is treated as a firm's most important asset, it's actually far less important than another intangible: process knowledge.
I first came across the concept of "process knowledge" in Dan Wang's Breakneck, a very good book about the rise and rise of Chinese manufacturing, industrialization and global dominance:
https://danwang.co/breakneck/
I picked up Breakneck after reading other writers whom I admire who singled out the book's treatment of process knowledge for praise and further discussion. The political scientist Henry Farrell called process knowledge the key to economic development:
While Dan Davies â a superb writer about organizations and their management â used England's Brompton Bicycles to make the abstract concept of process knowledge very concrete indeed:
So what is process knowledge? It's all the knowledge that workers collectively carry around in their heads â hard-won lessons that span firms and divisions, that can never be adequately captured through documentation. Think of a worker at a chip fab who finds themself with a load of microprocessors that have failed QA because they become unreliable when they're run above a certain clockspeed. If that worker knows enough about the downstream customers' processes, they can contact one of those customers and offer the chips for use in a lower-end product, which can save the fab millions and make millions more for the customer.
This just happened to Apple, who seized upon a lot of "binned" microprocessors that were headed to the landfill and designed the Macbook Neo (a new, cheap, low-end laptop) around them, salvaging the defective chips by running them at lower speeds. The result? Apple's most successful laptop in years, which has now sold so well that Apple has exhausted the supply of defective chips and is scrambling to fill orders:
Process knowledge is squishy, contingent, and wildly important in a world filled with entropy-stricken, off-spec, and stubbornly physical things. Work with a particular machine long enough and you will develop a FingerspitzengefĂŒhl (fingertip feeling) for the optimal rate to introduce a new load of feedstock to it after it runs dry. Even more importantly: if you work with that machine long enough, you'll have the mobile phone number of the retired person who knows how to un-jam it if you try to reload it too fast on your usual technician's day off. This kind of knowledge can mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy.
So why isn't process knowledge given the centrality in our conceptions of what makes a corporation valuable?
After reading Wang, Farrell and Davies, I formulated a theory: we ignore process knowledge for the same reason we exalt "IP," because process knowledge can't be bought or sold, can't be reflected on a balance-sheet, and can't be controlled, and because "IP" can. Process knowledge is far more important than "IP" (just try creating a vaccine from a set of instructions without the skilled technicians who have already spent years executing similar projects), but process knowledge is spread out amongst workers and can't be abstracted away by their bosses. Your boss can make you sign a contract assigning all your copyrights and patents to the business, but if you and your team quit your job, all that "IP" will plummet in value without the people who know how to mobilize it:
"IP" isn't just a case of "you treasure what you measure" â it's also a case of "you measure what you treasure."
Recently, I hit on a positively delightful Tumblr post that illustrated the importance of process knowledge, and the way that bosses systematically undervalue it:
This post is one of those glorious internet documents, a novel literary form for which we have no accepted term. It's composed of four major sections: a screenshotted impromptu Twitter thread made in reply to a throwaway post; a lengthy Tumblr reply to the screenshots; a second Tumblr reply to the first one; and then a chorus of more than 38,000 notes, replies, and hashtags added to it. I have no idea what to call this kind of document, in which some people are reacting to others without the others ever knowing about it, but also which is also written by so many authors, many of whom are explicitly interacting with one another. It's a "hypertext," sure, but what kind of hypertext?
Whatever you call it, it's amazing. As noted, it opens with a Twitter exchange. The first tweet comes from an online dating influencer, "TheEcho13":
I interviewed a gen z girlie 6 months ago and in the interview she told me that she does not like a challenge, has no interest in career progression, prefers to just do repetitive tasks and will never complain about being bored.
In response, Viveros (a content creator from Alberta and one of the 4m people who saw the original tweet), replied with a short thread about the value of people like this, who "keep the lights on and the business functioning at everything from restaurants to post offices but now nobodyâs interested in hiring them":
These are the "lifer[s] who can teach new people how everything works, who knows whatâs up in the system, who knows what the obscure solutions are, and who can help calm down the asshole regulars because they know them more personally." In other words, the keepers of the process knowledge.
When this screenshotted exchange was posted to Tumblr, it prompted Blinkpatch, who describes themself as a "genderfluid," "ancient" "drifter" who pines for "solar-punk flavored revolution" to reply with a brilliant anecdote about their stint working as a dishwasher:
At 16, Blinkpatch was hired as a restaurant dishwasher under the tutelage of Claudio, a 60-year old "career dish pit man." Claudio had washed dishes for his whole life, reveling in the fact that he could get work in any city, at any time.
When Claudio realized that Blinkpatch was taking the job seriously, the training began in earnest. Claudio asked Blinkpatch if they wanted to be able to clock off at midnight at the end of each shift, and when Blinkpatch said they did, Claudio laid a lot of process knowledge on them:
This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you donât have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second itâs done every single time? You canât do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, youâll do 160 loads.
These are the parameters, the kind of thing any Taylorist with a stopwatch could tell you. But Claudio went on to explain how that extra idle minute would translate to chaos in the kitchen, as the cooks ran out of pots and the servers ran out of plates, and how they would take out their frustrations on the dishwasher. To optimize that dishwasher, Blinkpatch would need to have a reserve of bulky, machine-filling items that could be run through the machine any time a load finished before there was a sufficient supply of smaller items. If they failed at this, Blinkpatch would be washing dishes until 2AM, rather than clocking out at midnight.
Blinkpatch's takeaway was that dishwashing was the bottleneck the whole restaurant ran through â and how that meant that Claudio, who was "unambitious" by conventional standards, had the best understanding of the restaurant's overall operations of anyone on site. He was the keeper of the process knowledge
This reply prompted another response, from "Marisol," a "haunted house actress and accidental IT person" who told the story of her time working at a medical office that specialized in mental health and addiction recovery:
The company was in the midst of standing up its own purpose-built facility, and the CEO was working intensively with the architect to design this new building. When Marisol â the receptionist â happened to be consulted on the near-final design plan, "it took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out."
First: "The receptionist canât see the waiting room from her desk with this layout. Itâs around the corner and blocked by a wall." This meant that she couldn't "keep track of the patients who are waiting."
The architect and CEO wanted to know why she couldn't use the sign-in sheet to manage this. She explained that not everyone signs in â people who are there for a check-in or group therapy need to be directed to the other side of the building, while "some people are painfully shy and if I donât appear warm and inviting they wonât approach."
The CEO and architect asked whether this happened often, and she replied "every day." They didn't believe her. Nor did they believe her when she said that the receptionists needed to have continuous access to the chart room throughout the day â they insisted that since charts for the day's patients were pulled in the morning, it would be OK to house them through two sets of locked doors, a five-minute walk away (that way, workers wouldn't be tempted to "goof off" in the room). They wanted to keep the chart room locked, with the key entrusted to the CEO, who would supervise every entry.
Marisol explained that charts were pulled continuously, any time there was a crisis or a patient had a question for a nurse, or when a patient came in due to a cancellation. All told, reception went into the chart room 20-30 times/day. The "goofing off" they thought workers got up to in the chart room was "when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time."
The CEO and architect were still disbelieving, so Marisol had them sit with her for an hour. They didn't last an hour â they left, taking the blueprints with them.
The punchline: Marisol bemoans the fact that she wasn't given more time with those blueprints, because then she might have spotted that they'd forgotten to include any closets, including closets for the janitors. As a result, all their cleaning supplies and holiday decorations were stolen from the cabinets in the bathrooms that they were forced to stash them in.
Marisol blames this on a "CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasnât convinced closets were worth it."
This is doubtless true â but we can generalize this, to "a CEO who didn't appreciate process knowledge."
I've come to believe that process knowledge is the most undervalued part of our society. So undervalued that business geniuses like Elon Musk think you can fire skilled lifers from key government agencies and simply hire new ones if turns out you cut too deep. So undervalued that Trump thinks that you can simply stand up new factories in response to tariffs, and that "training" will somehow allow people to go to work making things that haven't been produced onshore in a generation.
And of course, the people who value process knowledge the least are the AI bros who think you can replace skilled workers with a chatbot trained on the things they say and write down, as though that somehow captured everything they know.
If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed much longer, things will get really bad, really fast.
That global cataclysm hasnât happened yet. But if this goes on much longer, the chances it does only get higher and higher.
Thatâs because, oil analysts say, the world has so far been able to draw down stocks of oil that arenât being freshly pumped out of the Middle East and shipped from the Persian Gulf. These include 400 million barrels that are being withdrawn from the worldâs strategic energy reserves, as well as the release of Russian and even Iranian oil from sanctions, allowing it to flow into the broader economy.
âThe oil market did not underreact. It just had buffers,â the energy consulting firm Rystad said in a note last week.
But, Rystad oil analyst Paola Rodriguez-Masiu wrote, âthose buffers are now largely consumed, and the system that absorbed the initial shock is not the system operating today.â
Rystad estimates that 500 million barrels total have been âlostâ from the market, about equal to the reserve release and de-sanctioning. That means the market will have to begin to make do with less oil.
Rystad is not the only firm calling a turning point. âThe cumulative losses are now large enough to matter in end-use markets,â Morgan Stanley analyst Martijn Rats wrote in a note to clients Monday.
The marketâs other buffers were time and space: After traffic through the strait stopped, oil continued to arrive in refineries all over the world on tankers that already were on the water before the attacks began.
âThe time lag in global arrivals also helps explain why the physical market is only now starting to bite,â Rats wrote.
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Getting The Hell Out Of Dodge update: I love it when a plan comes together
So for those of you who've been watching this saga unfold: It's all coming together very nicely. (And once more, my most heartfelt thanks to all of you who've assisted for helping make this possible. I really couldn't have borne the Christmas holiday at home alone.)
I now have a flight Out Of Dodge. I have a place to stay in my getaway destination. (An aparthotel, with a free breakfast buffet in the mornings: fabulous.) And I have intermediate lodgings for the couple of days during which I'm making my way there.
(I'm not going to be overly revelatory about the details of where I'm staying, because [believe it or not] I also have stalkers [eyeroll]. And without the ever-vigilant presence of @petermorwood at my back, I prefer not to lay out more personal-location info, when I'm on the road, than necessary.)
So by about this time, seven days from now, I'll be in continental Europe on my way to Munich.
Meanwhile, the usual pre-trip junk is happening. Eyeing the local weather forecasts, trying to figure out what I need to pack (is it really going to stay this mild? What if it doesn't? How many layers will I need for [sort of] ten days...?), making sure time-sensitive household bills have been paid before I go, working out what buses I need to take to get to the airport on time, etc. etc.
But that's all regular, garden-variety logistics. More fun by far is sorting out online reminders for things I want to do for friends I'm going to be seeing while I'm away, and notes meant to make sure I do or see things that can only happen over there. For these I have IFTTT apps that will send me reminders when my phone needs to let me know that I'm physically near someplace where I need to shop for something, or stop in.
...For example: This is where you can buy some of the best smoked and air-dried bacon in Switzerland, if not THE best. This is tied for the best beer place in Munich, notwithstanding the presence of the HofbrĂ€uhaus right across the road. Here's Peter's favorite cocktail bar, home of the Pusser's Painkiller. (But how much pain it actually kills is up for discussion, as the last time we took a business associate there, he didn't look all that great at our morning meeting the next day. That said, he had been trying to keep up with Peter...) Here's the place that has the booze-filled chocolate sticks that Peter's Mum doted on (and we didn't mind, either). Here's where you go for some of the best maultaschen in MĂŒnchen. Here's James Joyce's exported Dublin local, where I want to get some photos of the painted tile. Here's the best small artisanal-food market in central Munich. ...And so forth.
There is not a single place on this list in which I won't be thinking of Peter when I set foot there. ...But the memories won't be painful. He loved being there. Christmas lunch/dinner in Munich, in particular, was memorable. I'll be in the same place (assuming it's still there), doing it again.
...It seems obvious to me that the best way I can thank the many people who've assisted in this getaway is to document it as thoroughly as possible: so I'm trying to figure out how best to handle the flood of images and videos that's going to ensue. (In particular, it's going to be Christmas Market time when I fetch up over there... so I'll be storing a lot of imagery of that for those interested.) I've got a few days yet to sort out the details on that, so I'll advise everybody when I get it figured out.
Again, to all of you: thank you! (For those who might still feel inclined to drop something into the pot so I can grab some more groceries or an extra glass of wine: the Ko-Fi is absolutely there for you. Jeez, don't think I'd try to talk you out of it! I'll be glad to drink your health, even if it's just in fabulous German coffee.)
Meanwhile: onward. (Argh, gotta do the laundry... as soon as I figure out what I'm bringing.)
