Scribbles and Bits: the Newsletter?
Oct. 4th, 2025 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeAs many of you know, within the past three months, we've been dealing with a lot of crackdowns on our work online. Our blog is unviewable in Mississippi and our #1 bestseller, All in the Family, got kicked off itch.io. This has nothing to do with the works themselves (oh no, a minor might read our very adult essay about TAXES and BUSINESS EXPENSES!) but wealthy, powerful people trying to control others.
As annoyed as we are by this, we are not surprised. We've seen this coming for years, we have a plan, and we want to hear how YOU feel about it, fans and readers!
As annoyed as we are by this, we are not surprised. We've seen this coming for years, we have a plan, and we want to hear how YOU feel about it, fans and readers!
We won't leave Patreon until we have to, but we are considering ALSO going old-school. A private mailing list of our Patreon perks and public blog posts could work; you'd just get it directly through your email, rather than through Patreon or Dreamwidth or RSS (not sure if the Mississippi ban affects RSS feeds). We can also create a physical newsletter, on honest-to-god paper, and mail it through the post; by our accounts, an LB newsletter would be roughly 28 pages a month, or two ounces, the postage of which is a little over $1 domestically, $2 internationally. That's a manageable cost! It would be more work for us, but such is life, and I'd rather do that work getting the boot off my neck than keep getting stomped.
As for receiving money, there are ways to set up recurring payments through LiberaPay or Paypal, but we cannot trust and rely on those. I'm not above going old-school and taking checks through the mail. That's how queer mags and newsletters did it for ages! It's slow and inconvenient, but also completely cuts out the middle-men jumping out of the bushes to morally disapprove of your purchase. We're also looking into "high-risk merchant account providers," since we DO have international fans who I know would have a royal pain of a time sending us checks through the damn mail.
We are not going to change the work we do, because that will not help. The rules are constantly changing and purposely impossible to decipher in advance. If you cut all discussions of rape, child exploitation, oppression, transness, and consensual eroticism, the only works of ours that seem safe from banning of "objectionable material" are MPD for You and Me, What's Great About Multiplicity?, "Bring Me the Head of Phineas Gage!", and MAYBE Flights of Reality. But we'd mostly be restricted to churning out hugbox pablum, which NONE of y'all have asked for.
We're sorry for the inconvenience, guys. But the political situation is getting worse, and we need to adapt. We are grateful to have a fanbase that has stuck with us through this bullshit.
As for receiving money, there are ways to set up recurring payments through LiberaPay or Paypal, but we cannot trust and rely on those. I'm not above going old-school and taking checks through the mail. That's how queer mags and newsletters did it for ages! It's slow and inconvenient, but also completely cuts out the middle-men jumping out of the bushes to morally disapprove of your purchase. We're also looking into "high-risk merchant account providers," since we DO have international fans who I know would have a royal pain of a time sending us checks through the damn mail.
We are not going to change the work we do, because that will not help. The rules are constantly changing and purposely impossible to decipher in advance. If you cut all discussions of rape, child exploitation, oppression, transness, and consensual eroticism, the only works of ours that seem safe from banning of "objectionable material" are MPD for You and Me, What's Great About Multiplicity?, "Bring Me the Head of Phineas Gage!", and MAYBE Flights of Reality. But we'd mostly be restricted to churning out hugbox pablum, which NONE of y'all have asked for.
We're sorry for the inconvenience, guys. But the political situation is getting worse, and we need to adapt. We are grateful to have a fanbase that has stuck with us through this bullshit.
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Date: 2025-10-04 08:08 pm (UTC)If you make a physical newsletter, we are absolutely signing up for that. Physical media for the win.
(Another idea for you: microSD cards are relatively cheap in bulk for the storage. You could mail those to people for something like your "buy everything" ebook deal right now- the cost to buy one would cover more than one card.)
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Date: 2025-10-05 12:47 am (UTC)The SD card trick could work if new comps have ways to read those. Far as I can tell, they’re all about removing all the ports so as to force you to do everything online though.
People might lovingly mock me for having a twenty year old laptop, but BSOD doesn’t judge me or delete my files in moral disapproval! BSOD is my friend and conspirator, not no fuckin snitch!
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Date: 2025-10-05 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-10-04 10:24 pm (UTC)Both email and snail mail (or sneakernet since I'm local to you and could do that if it's not winter and the world hates me) work.
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Date: 2025-10-05 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-05 08:27 am (UTC)*disappears to go scream into the void some more*
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Date: 2025-10-05 04:01 pm (UTC)(I also have a whole canned rant about how fear of AI artbots have made a bunch of artists EVEN MORE reluctant to alt-text their images, but that's for another day.)
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Date: 2025-10-05 07:03 pm (UTC)Oh, JFC. Great. Ruining even more things. FFS.
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