Blowing the Dust Off the Ol' Blog
/I’m back, bitches!
Yes, much to the chagrin of my critics who said, “He’ll never blog again.” I’m back, and better than ever, baby. In fact, I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but you might recognize a familiar name at the top of People Magazine’s, 50 Hottest Magic-Bloggers Under 50 list which comes out next week. (Eat shit, Amazing Carl of Amazing Carl’s AbracadaBlog. After nearly 6 years, you’re in my rearview mirror. Get used to it)
Today I need to get some housekeeping out of the way before we pick back up with regular posting.
First, thanks to everyone who has written in with their feedback on the newest book. The response has been really amazing, which is especially gratifying considering this is likely the most “out there” book I’ll ever write, and I really had no clue how it would be received. So thanks for all the positive feedback.
Just to reiterate from a previous check-in post, the schedule going forward will be the old schedule of new posts on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays throughout the month. Non-magic posts will no longer be on this site. So you can easily avoid the music posts or other recommendations that you might not be into. The site for those posts will launch on Friday.
Important dates coming up for supporters and potential supporters.
Feb 25th: Current supporters will receive an email with details to see if they want to sign-up to support for another year. If at least 90% say yes, then the site keeps going. (This keeps me from overstaying my welcome with this site.)
March 1st: If the consensus is to keep the site going, then any unclaimed supporter slots will be made available at noon, New York time, March 1st on a first come, first serve basis. See this site at that time to sign up if you’re interested.
If you do any type of large mailings, I want to recommend pirateship.com to you. It’s shipping software, like stamps.com. But it has a couple distinct advantages. First, it’s completely free, unlike stamps.com, which cost me $250 a year or so. Also, it’s not complete garbage, unlike stamps.com.
Stamps.com would do things in the past like just swap names and addresses on orders randomly. Or they’d tell me an address didn’t exist. We’d double-check the address with the person who placed the order. They’d say, “Yup, that’s my address.” And there was no way to over-ride stamps.com’s objection to the address.
And stamps.com would constantly crash on us. That’s doesn’t feel like something you hear too much about anymore: websites “crashing.” But stamps.com managed to do it about a dozen times when we tried to get it up and running for this year’s mailing.
Pirate Ship has had none of these problems for us. It’s a little more of a pain to get the orders into the system. (It takes a couple minutes as opposed to being automatic like stamps.com.) But once the orders are in, it’s easily 20 times faster to do what you need to do to print out the postage. The customer service is super easy to deal with as well. (Although, be warned, they chat in “pirate speak,” which seems like one of those business decisions that is not long for this world.)
I haven’t noticed the postage from Pirate Ship being any cheaper than the alternatives, but as a service it definitely seems to work better.
For the first time since this site became reader supported five years ago, no supporter died over the course of the year. All my supporters made it through 2020. Interesting. Especially when it was supposedly such a “deadly” year with the “virus” and all of that. Hmmm…
Are you saying you don’t believe in the coronavirus?
No, dummy. I’m saying that—from all the available evidence—it looks like supporting this site keeps you safe from the coronavirus. In fact, I think it’s probably fair to say this site is a cloak that protects you from all the horrors of the world.
That’s why it’s so good to be back.