Hitting the Green

I’m sitting here writing this on a pretty dreary day—it’s Friday (yay), but it’s raining. We also just had a sick baby for the last two and a half days; he had a bout with a stomach bug that, after switching to soy formula, seems to have finally settled. The bad news is I think I’m starting to feel it hit me. I don’t get sick very often, but I tend to always fall prone to stomach bugs. Hopefully, it’s just a tad of dehydration and some water will clear it all up, but with the baby being in “daddy” mode while he was sick leads me to believe I’m in for a rough 24-36 hours.

I do want to keep things a bit shorter after the last newsletter, but we have another week where we have a couple of sponsors to thank!

Recently featured on That’s Entertainment, The Second Age of Aquarius answers the question “Ever wonder what it would be like to bring your favorite dead rock star back to life?” Alberta, a successful computer programmer, has wondered that same question. Using her programming skills, she makes a Russell Aquarius, the ultimate 60s rock icon, avatar. A power outage gives her more than she bargains for! Check it out on Amazon Prime Video!

Look at the Green

I mainly wanted to do a little bit of bragging this week. I started Starbird Media at the end of 2021, which was obviously a year in the red. And while in 2022, we’re not quite out of the red and February isn’t quite over yet (so a major expense could negate this); February is our first green month! There were two big orders for t-shirts and hoodies this month, which also allowed me to play with some new printing technology that I really like. More on that in a bit. But, we also couldn’t have had such a successful month without our wonderful sponsors. They’ve offset some of our costs this month and, if things continue, will help offset some of the web hosting costs we’re about to incur. Now, we’re a bit a ways off from them offsetting the costs of podcast production for Single Player and The The Muppet Show Show, but the first 3 months have been great!

Tees

I’ve been struggling with how I want to move forward with the t-shirt side of things. Set up a shop? License IP? Daily/Weekly tees? What’s a fair cost for these things that allows both the artist to get paid for their art and me to get paid for the labor?

It’s quite honestly a lot. But, I think I’ve found some middle ground with all of those questions. I’ll likely hit the ground running on this next phase Monday, but it’s all going to be a tiered structure. “Ok, you doing/comfortable with A) so this is what you’ll get in return, but if you’re comfortable with B) or C) here are those returns on those options.” The best part is that I’ve got it figured out to where the artist should be getting paid more than what I’ve seen daily t-shirt sites and print-on-demand sites offer. Which, for me, is the most important thing. The second most important thing is using quality materials at an affordable price to the customer. I’m shocked at the cost of premium shirts (soft feel) on some of these sites; while I’ll have a tiered structure for that too (weekly featured vs. regular stock prices), it’s still considerably less.

With any luck, I’ll have more details next week about this next phase.

This newsletter was also brought to you by a second project this week!

Also featured on That’s Entertainment, The Standoff Roleplaying System is a new roleplaying game meant to cover many different genres and styles of play. Specifically created with its own emulator, the system is great for solo play as well as a group. A fun and kinetic dice pool system resolves actions in moments and, as a result, combat and scenes of high tension feel create an interesting gravity that replaces tedium and rules-lawyering that can be inherent to some systems. Pick up a copy of the Standoff Roleplaying System here (by using this link, you’ll save an extra $1!).

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