 What was that dissolve? Oh my God. It's dope. And Mini Soja has the claps. Oh, thank you for clapping, because I'm just not feeling it. That's great. Yeah, that's great. I was too early. All right, so here's what we're gonna do. I'm going to do my little Patreon rant. We'll make that available at Afterdark immediately, and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna rerun the clothes with the Afterdark out open, and we're gonna build another Afterdark that is for our current crowdfunding people. So here's the deal. For those who don't know, Patreon, stay wide, stay wide. Thanks for that, because I mentioned Patreon in the open. I need to drink if we're gonna talk about Patreon. Yeah, it's fine. So it's fine to mention Patreon. And honestly, I need to go to the toilet. Yeah, yeah, go. Everyone's leaving me. Cool, bring me some water too, Jared, please. A water? Yeah, it's underneath Mike's TV. Okay, Ben, do you want anything? No, we're good. Okay, so here's the deal. Patreon this last week announced a change to the way they're doing their payment structure. And Patreon is one of those things that in a very positive way benefited this show. Prior to Patreon, we did something called Space Vidcast Epic, which is our own in-house way to try to get a little bit of money to pay for the show, because it is expensive to do this stuff. We didn't do very well because, A, we didn't know what we were doing, B, everything was way too expensive. It just didn't make sense. And there was no way for other people to find it. So then Patreon came along and we said, look, we're gonna make this so that whatever you think the show is worth, be it one penny, $1, $2, $5, $10, $100, $1 million per episode, because we're not gonna make you pay for what we don't produce. Because at the time we were only doing like 20 episodes per year, right? Because it was really hard, we didn't have a space. It was very difficult for us to do the show. So that worked extremely well. When we say, look, we're here as part of a community, help us out in any way you can, every single penny helps, it worked well. And you did, you helped us a great deal. We now have this great, incredible studio space. We're producing, what is it gonna be? 46 shows in one year? That's a lot, that's not insignificant. Hopefully you guys have enjoyed it. Then Patreon made a change. They didn't really talk to the creators. They didn't even really announce it to the best of my knowledge. And the change was they no longer allowed one penny contributions, which I disagree with. I think that if you wanna contribute one penny to the show, you should be allowed to contribute one penny to the show. If that's what you think it is worth, if that's what you think you can afford, it still allows you to give something to the show and there's value in that. Not necessarily monetary value, one penny is not gonna make or break the show realistically, but it connects you to the show in a different way, I think. You're part of the community now in a different way. And it's more emotional than anything else, but I think that emotional connection from us to you, from a citizen standpoint, is important. And they got rid of that. They said, no, no, no, what had been happening was, we don't bill until they reach $1 worth of stuff, so you need to reach 100 shows before you get billed and that's not fair. So we stopped doing that and you have to have at a minimum a $1 pledge. That sucks because for a show like us where we try to do four shows per month, that means your minimum amount you can pledge, that you're allowed to pledge, not that our Patreon forced us to say $4 per month minimum to support tomorrow. I don't think that's fair, I don't think that's right, but there was nothing I could do. And then this last week, they made another change, except that they announced it. It goes into effect on December 18th and there's a lot of stuff going on online, but ultimately what it comes down to is there's going to be a service fee for every single episode that we air. And the onus of that fee is not on us as it should be, it's on you. And that service fee is going to be every time you contribute per episode, it will be 2.9%, that's for the credit card fees, plus 35 cents, which means if you contribute $1 to the show, you have 2.9%, so three cents we'll call it, plus 35 cents, so you've got $1.38 per episode. Now you're still going to be billed once a month, for now at least, so you're getting this credit card fee for no good reason. Now Patreon did come back later and clarify, look, the reason we're doing this is because we want to do anniversary-based billing to make it fair for everyone, but what they're doing is they're fixing edge cases. Now online, there was a lot of stuff that happened at this point where people saying, you know, Patreon's trying to line their own pockets and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've been to their offices, I've met these guys. They are in fact good people. I'm not mad at the people at Patreon. I do believe that this was not thought out very well at all, and most importantly, they didn't talk to, to the best of my knowledge, any of the creators. The people that, you know, they say, creators first, I don't want you, my community, we're all in this together, you should not be responsible for those fees. That's on me, that's part of me doing this business. I get that, I count for that. And I don't care about wild swings in my numbers, I count for that. Patreon changed everything for tomorrow in a very positive way, but unfortunately, the changes they're making right now, while I do believe they have the best intentions, I don't think they're trying to be malicious with this, I think they're just very, very, very bad for a show like tomorrow. And then, based on the history of Patreon, not communicating with the creators about changes like the $1 change, and based on this change where they're just not communicating or giving us, in fact, in their FACU, their FAQ, they frequently ask questions, they even say, look, we think some creators are gonna want to absorb these costs, you can't do that. I don't understand that. So, that's what's going on with Patreon. I'm not on board with this, and I don't want to say the word upset, but I'm not pleased with where we're at at this point. So, I'm looking at alternatives, but I'll be frank, in the industry, there really isn't much. Kickstarter has something called Drip. Drip actually looks perfect for us. However, Drip is invite only, and there's nothing to say that Drip won't do the exact same thing. What's important to me is that they communicate these changes more than just like, hey, in 10 days we're gonna implement this and everyone's gonna, whatever. So, I don't know what to do. I don't know what you as a community want. And so, rather than making rash changes, I'm just maintaining as is, and I would love your feedbacks, and please leave it, if we can focus the feedback for this right here under this video on YouTube, that would help me a great deal. So, I have one place to go. Let me add a couple other points, which is, tomorrow's not going anywhere. If Patreon went away tomorrow and we got no input or income from anyone, it will hurt the show, but I will out of pocket the show. Karian and I do- Yeah, we've done that before. We'll do it again. That we're not here to be making money off of this show. We're really, sincerely are here for the reach of it, for the community. You know, we would, we were doing this before we made any money on the show. We've never really made a profit off of this show. We don't pull a paycheck, right? Right, all the money goes back into the show. And we are actually the show's largest patrons, still to this day. Of all our patrons, and we have some that contribute quite a bit per episode, and thank you to everyone who does that. We actually still contribute more than that per, and the point of that is, we'll contribute the full amount if we have to. So, this show is not going anywhere, which my point is, you as a patron on the Patreon platform have to make a choice now. If you're on a budget, and you simply cannot afford these additional fees, I do encourage you not to protest Patreon and just pull all of your funding from all your creators. If you're on a budget and you can't afford it anymore, feel free to cut tomorrow. We will go on just fine. And if you do that, let me know and we'll find a way to make sure that you're still a part of the show somehow. Put you back in the slates or something. I don't know how that will work yet, so you're gonna have to give me a little bit of time to figure that out, because we use automated tools to talk to Patreon, blah, blah, blah, blah. But don't not support creators because Patreon did a stupid thing. And if you can't afford to support some of your creators, we will be fine. Please do contribute to people who really, truly need your contributions. The other thing you can do is, I've posted on Patreon how much you can reduce your pledge by, and that will make sure that you're still contributing the same amount per month, and you will stay in those same tiers so that you're not punished for contributing less. So if you go to Patreon, I have a post on how you can contribute. You're contributing less, but your total out-of-pocket is the same. So there's a post on how to make that happen. Also encourage you to do that. Unfortunately, if you're at a tier that is below $1, I have no options for you, because they have basically eliminated, they've tied my hands on those accounts, and there's nothing I can do there. So I don't know what to do, and I would love your feedback. I'm going to wait this out a little bit, because this really, truly is a bad decision on Patreon. I see where they're coming from, and some people are even here are saying, no, I'm wrong, it is malicious. Let's see here. Well, then other people are asking if there's a tomorrow PayPal address. Like, is there a different way to contribute? Yeah, there is, and all of them have problems, to be frank. Go ahead. I was going to say, with the Patreon thing, it feels very out of touch with the way that they're operating it. It is very out of touch. Especially when I saw that quote from the person working at Patreon that said, we'd rather have a bunch of big creators than a bunch of little creators. We'd rather have a few big creators than a bunch of little creators. Let's be clear. Yeah, why would you ever say that? Well, hold on, hold on, hold on that. No, no, no. Did you look at and read the entire article that they said that in? Did you look at the date they said that? Yeah, I did. So to be fair, that predates all of this, and that wasn't their point. Their point was, and I think their point was valid. No dying. Sorry. I was about to qualify that, but I think that's been taken way out of context. What they were saying was, look, a lot of people that have no following are coming to Patreon and expecting to start an account and start making a lot of money because people who have a large following have come over to Patreon and have started making a lot of money, and that won't work. You have to have, and so everyone in that instance that is part of that gets upset and they feel like, well, this sucks. I hate this service, and I don't think necessarily that Patreon's wrong there. I'm reading that to say, look, we want to be smarter about how we bring people into the platform. We don't want to just bring someone on who has no followers, who isn't making anything, who isn't doing anything of value, and then they expect to make $1,000 per month making doodles on a napkin that's not even real anything. Like, no, that's not gonna happen, right? So that's where that came from, and I think there's a lot of that happening right now. People taking a lot of these things, seeing them out of context and putting them back up, and there's also this, there's a theory that the venture capitalist came in and forced this change. Understand there's no data backing that up other than the lack of communication here, but having met these guys, I don't buy that theory. I really, truly don't. It could be true, I have no data supported other than having met the people who run Patreon and talked to them in their offices. It doesn't sit right with me. It doesn't feel like it's in their personality. I think this was, which is in their personality, a total lack of communication and completely out of touch with the community as a whole. That's what I think happened here. And they've been making a few of these mistakes kind of in a row, and I've seen more and more of them, and I don't, I make mistakes like this on this show all the time, right? The difference is I generally like to think that I roll back when I make the mistake and I go, okay, that was a mistake. Let's not do that anymore. You mean like standing in front of TVs? Like standing in front of TVs. With no tables? With no tables. Okay. Yeah, exactly. So anyhow, that's what's going on with Patreon. That's my two cents on it. Again, I don't believe it's malicious, but I do believe that we should potentially consider taking action being, I don't know what our options are here. I don't know that I can get into drip. If we could, I would seriously look at it, but I would need to understand that this isn't gonna happen again. We can stay with Patreon. You can either lower your pledge or you can absorb the additional fees. Someone asked in the chat room, can we go to a monthly based service? That's actually another question. We are going to be bringing on Tomorrow Science in the not too distant future. With Tomorrow Science, I don't wanna have all these different crowdfunding accounts, and I don't know how to work this on a per episode basis when we've got four different shows going on. Right. So, excuse me, you're giving me that. Sorry. Maybe we do move to per month, and maybe that does make more sense. I don't know if you would prefer per month, because what happens if we have a month with like two shows? I feel like you shouldn't pay if we don't deliver. Yeah. That's been my mentality there, but it gets complicated with science, and I wanna roll it in, but then I don't want you to pay for a science show that maybe you didn't want. You're like, okay, well maybe I do want science. Great, then how about tech? How about food? How about I add these other shows in? There's gonna be a show you don't want, and I don't want you to have to think like you're paying for it. I don't know, I have not figured out how to deal with this yet, and I would love the feedback from the community, because ultimately it's you who are working on this, so please let me know what you think. So yeah. Something I've noticed, something I've noticed is that it seems like Patreon is already starting to get a lot of kind of pushback from this, and so there is still a chance that they could, yeah. So there's still a chance that they could reverse this, maybe not reverse it, but just still change it. I mean, it's great that they wanna do away with some of the fees and give the creators more money, but it's not fair to be charging those fees to the patrons, so I don't know. I feel like it should be the other way around, and if there does need to be more fees or something like that, if Patreon wants more money, if that's what this is about, then that should come from the creators and not from the patrons, but so we'll see. Since they're getting, and yes, Marty the Martian, I said pushback, not punchback, maybe they will, maybe there's gonna be enough pressure that they will change it, especially if they get pressure from the big creators that this may or may not be influenced by. Yeah. Does that make sense? It does. I actually agree. I think the creators should pay for it. You know, where this is coming from is they do actually have some legit issues with the way all of this works today, and that is, especially if you're a monthly account, not a per episode account, but a monthly account, what can happen is, let's say you're making art and you spend a lot of time making a comic, for example. Spend a lot of time making a comic and you have someone sign up on the 6th of the month, they don't have to pay until the very first of the next month. So they get all of your stuff for free until the first of the next month. And you might go, okay, well no big deal, they pay for the first of the next month, but they could cancel their account on the 31st of the month and never have to pay for anything that you created. Grab a new email address and then a 6th of the next month, sign back up and rinse and repeat 12 times. They just need 12 email addresses and they get a year's worth of your content that you weren't taught for, for free. So that's problem A. So then what Patreon said is okay, upfront billing. So what happens is, you want access to this account, you need to pay immediately when you ask for this. That makes sense too, except that, now you have almost the opposite problem. If I sign up on the 30th of the month, I pay in full for that month for one day's worth of content. Before on the first, I get paid in full once again for the next month's worth of content, even though I only had one day's worth of content. And this fundamentally goes down to the core issue of, I think, communication, which I think is actually Patreon's weakest part right now. They don't communicate these things very well to the creators or to the patrons. In fact, they do a very poor job of communicating these things, both to the creators and to patrons. Now there are other ways around this. There are ways to do like, oh, okay, so I'm sorry. So then their solution is, all right, here's what we'll do. We'll move to what's called annual billing. That means if I sign up on the 29th of the month, I don't get billed again until the 29th of the next month and the 29th on every month thereafter. But if I sign up for five different creators, one of them is on the 7th, 13th, 15th, 29th, and 31st, five different creators, how do I deal with any of that stuff? Because now if I'm doing annual billing, I'm gonna have five annual dates that I gotta deal with. And so they're trying to move towards this, where they go towards this annual billing, and that means that they're going to have to charge you that credit card free every single show, every single time. So that actually does make sense. Where it falls down is for a show like us, where we are per episode, unless they're billing you on every episode, which we do not want them to do, we actually like the monthly billing. I don't think you should get billed four times per month for the show. That's absurd. If it doesn't fall down for per creation things like us, but you'd still get billed per creation as I understand it, that maybe that understanding is wrong. The other thing that doesn't make sense is you can solve this easily with credits, right? So it's a lot like the PayPal system where the whole problem here are these stupid credit card fees. Alls they have to do is make it so that once a month, you input, we'll call it $100 into your account, whatever number that is, $100, $10, $15. It's enough to support all of your creators throughout that month. And then when your anniversary for that creator comes up, you just get that amount taken out of your credits. That's it, that's all they needed to do. One billing period for the credit card fees, that comes out of the creator, not the whomever else anyhow. There are way better ways to solve this, all of which they could have figured out if this had been communicated to creators, and if they had said, this is our problem, we're trying to fix it, creators could have told them what would happen because you go to anniversary billing, oh man, imagine what happens for creators that send things out on like a anniversary, well, the first of the month for all their, they're gonna have to do that 30 times now, potentially. It does not make any sense whatsoever. There is no universe in which this is a good idea. So, and I think ultimately that's what this is. They had a bad idea, they thought it was a good one, it isn't, and I've tried my best to like take a step back and look at it from their point of view and I can kind of see where they're coming from, I just, I see the engineer in me is like, well yeah, but there's so many better ways to do this. I don't understand why you would choose this way, this clearly is flawed in multiple ways. So, or there's more going on there behind the scenes that I don't know of. So, I just hope that something happens, respond at least in some way. So, you know, it's just, it's not been a good look this week. Right, so there are a lot of great comments in the chat room. If you wouldn't mind, like I said, we're gonna post this to YouTube. That's my idea, that's my thought process behind all of this, subject to change with new data, right? So, I'm sure that we only have a small snippet of the data that's available and I'm trying to work within those confines, excuse me. So, a lot of people are saying, yeah, you know, I'm fine with monthly, are you okay with monthly as well? My other concern with monthly is, you know, the moment we moved to monthly, we're gonna cut our funds by a quarter because it doesn't automatically just like crank your, what am I trying to say? It doesn't crank your pledge up. So, maybe that's okay, maybe we just go, all right, well, we gotta buy a quarter and that's what the community wants. So, all right, I mean, that's how this works. So, we need to bank it tomorrow. And some people are saying don't go monthly, and by the way, we're not gonna be able to, here's the other thing, much like Patreon, we will not be able to make everyone happy. That's unpossible. The only thing we will be able to do is try to do what's right. And it won't be right for everyone because your financial situation is different than his financial situation, which is different than mine and hers and his. That is just how it is. Never contribute to this show if your financial situation does not allow for it. If you are struggling to contribute to this show, do not do that. Not financially, there are many ways you can contribute to this show and be a part of the community and be a citizen without putting money into it. I suck at social media, hardcore. We need people to help us with social media. If you want to help the show but can't afford to do it, A, there is nothing wrong with that. B, you can absolutely help the show and not put any money into it and it will be a great help to this show. Some people can absolutely help, like they don't have time to actually contribute anything other than money. Let me tell you, money helps too. I'm not, money helps a great deal. So, whatever works for you, we are honored and we are honored that you are willing to help us in any way, be it time, talent, money, whatever. It's humbling that there are so many of you willing to help us spread the great word of space to the cosmos. Like I mean, anyway. All right, here's the Wonderwall. There's that, so what we're gonna do, that's the amount that we're gonna make available for free, I just said contribute, blah, blah, blah. But that's what we're gonna put on our channel. The rest of After Dark, we're gonna rerun the intro just so that we have it again. We've got other things. Dutta, are we still gonna try to, like I've got time limits here, so we've got two space pods we need to do, are we still gonna try to hang that thing or do we wanna play that one by ear? We can or we can not. We have a haircut. No, I don't know what I'm saying. We have time constraints. So, all right, so we have. Let's do space pods to see how much time we got left over. Yeah, so that's what we're gonna do. Gotcha. I did have the box, but we can wait on that. Stay tuned After Dark is up next. Yeah. Yeah. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.