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To Patreon or not to Patreon

Liberal Librarian2 Comments

So. Part of the reason I took up the blog once more is because I’m thinking about starting a Patreon page.

Now, I’m not expecting to earn enough money to quit my gig. I wouldn’t quit my gig anyway: you have no idea how much joy I get from the hugs I receive from my library kids. But, besides pecuniary benefits—which would go to paying off debt and saving for a down payment for a house—I feel that if I had paying patrons I’d be more prone to write on a regular basis.

I feel weird even considering it, as I write for the sake of writing. But of course I also hope to publish my various projects, so the monetary aspect of my writing is never far away from my thinking.

So I’m opening it up to my readers: to Patreon or not to Patreon?

Confessions of an Anglophile: Of Roman emperors and naked boobs

Liberal Librarian1 Comment
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Captain Lucius Aelius Picard, or, a hairy Patrick Stewart

OK, look, I was a weird child. My brothers were 10 and 12 years older than me, which had positives and negatives. They had already been through what I was going to go through, so I had an idea of what to expect. But they were also almost autonomous adults, so even though we were a household of two parents and three children, I was pretty much on my own.

But my oldest brother Tony acted as a surrogate father at times, and the one main thing he shared with me was a love of all things British. PBS—back when it was good and would show wonderful programming—was on constantly in my apartment. And this was a time when independent television channels were actually “independent”, and combed far and wide for programming to fill their schedules.

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Diary of a football fanatic

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In my return to blogging on this blog, I intimated that I was working on a new writing project. Since it’s in its infancy, there’s not much to write about. But, it revolves around my love of the beautiful game.

I’m sorry to those who will read this piece and come away offended. But there’s only one “football”, and it’s not the one with a quarterback.

I’d been a desultory football follower since my childhood. One of my earliest memories was watching German Bundesliga highlights on my local PBS station, WNET, back in the 1970s. I can still remember the announcer’s vocal timbre, high-pitched, excited, so English, leading Americans who knew nothing of the game through its progress.

And, of course, growing up in 1970s New York City, I was a fan of the New York Cosmos. Yes, Pele was way past his prime, but we didn’t know that, or didn’t care. And it wasn’t like he had much good competition to show him up. The Cosmos were a show, for a couple of years outshining even the Yankees for star power.

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My new favorite podcast

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As regular readers know, or those who peruse my Twitter timeline know, I have another blog where I write political essays, The People’s View. I try to keep those two worlds separate as much as I can. I generally want this blog to deal with the breadth and scope of my interests outside of politics, from writing to reading, family to friends, work to play. But, sometimes, those two worlds intersect. This is one such case.

While hanging out at TPV, one of the regulars posted a comment leading me to a podcast I hadn’t heard of: The Fall of Rome. Produced by recently enshrined PhD historian Patrick Wyman—who is a fellow Angeleno HOLLA—it expands on his dissertation to encompass the slow decay and fall of the Roman Empire, from roughly 376 to 550 CE. As of this writing, I’ve listened to the first episode, and I’m hooked.

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