I had to fight with my cat for space on my own bed when I went to sleep last night and so I slept weird and now my neck hurts. A Thing in my Possession: Strawberry Syrup There were two big days this week if you believe in things like calendars. June 20 was the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, and the day before that was Juneteenth, the federally recognized holiday when we remember that Texas continued enslaving people for two years after the Emancipation Proclamation and only stopped when the US Army showed up to actually enforce it. Juneteenth celebrations vary across the country, and the holiday is recognized in different ways. It has been celebrated for over 100 years in black communities and especially in Texas (i went to a Juneteenth festival as a kid), but only became a federal holiday in 2021. But one of my favorite celebrations is to drink red beverages. There's not (as far as I know) one singular type of red drink that is emblematic of the holiday, but hibiscus and strawberry sodas are popular. This year I decided that in stead of buying strawberry soda directly, I could make my own. Or at lease make something closer to home-made. Semi-home made if you will. So here's my very-unofficial recipe for strawberry soda.
1 pound strawberries 8 oz sugar Unflavored seltzer
Wash and hull the strawberries (remove the stem) Quarter the strawberries Cover the strawberries in water (roughly 32 oz, but I didn't measure) Boil the water and strawberries until the liquid reduces by half (roughly 30 minutes for me) Strain out the pulp with a fine mesh sieve or whatever you have Put the liquid back in the pot and add the sugar. Stir over heat until the sugar is fully dissolved Once the syrup has cooled mix some into the unflavored seltzer. I rarely measured, but a roughly 5:1 seltzer to syrup ratio will give pretty good results.
Drink over ice if you're into that. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: Micropayments First off, I need to set some definitions. You've probably heard about microtransactions, the things where video games that are ostensibly free-to-play ask you for a dollar or five dollars or a hundred dollars to refill your bucket with digital gems so you can save the kingdom faster or smash the monster faster or build the house faster. These have a relatively long history in gaming spaces and are widely hated by everyone. They exist as a profit extraction machine, designed only to prevent you from having fun by making the game less good in hopes you might pay to actually enjoy the thing you will cough up some cash.
I'm not talking about those, Instead I want to talk about micropayments, which is the term Scott McCloud coined (pun intended) in his book Reinventing Comics. Reinventing comics is a book from the long ago times of the year two thousand. Normally there's a conjunction following those two words, but the time was so long ago we hadn't yet developed the need for further qualifiers. In two thousand and nothing, Scott McCloud released his second book about comics. It was a sequel of sorts to Understanding Comics, a book where he used the medium itself to present an academic exploration of how it works and the history of little pictures with words. If you've ever heard the phrase "sequential art" it was probably being said by someone who read Understanding Comics.
In Reinventing Comics McCloud was interested in how this new technology of "the internet" might reshape comics as a medium and artform. I was enamored with both books in the duology, and they even inspired me to try my hand at the art of webcommiking. But we're not here to talk about me.
One of the big revolutions McCloud saw in the potential of comics on the internet was one of creator compensation. While the up front cost of time and labor was significant, the cost of publishing a comic digitally was close to nothing, on a per user basis. McCloud reconciled these two things by proposing a payment to access that reflected the relatively small cost to reproduce. He called these micropayments. He theorized that if you could get a large enough group of people to pay a small amount, playing at the ends of the supply/demand curves, you could become successful while charging very little. He suggested that in the comics world, 25 cents per comic might be the sweet spot for making something viable and sustainable.
It was a radical idea at the time, and people lost their freaking minds about it. There were flame wars. I'm not going to link to them, but people I respect had very strong opinions based on their lived experiences and this was the sort of revolutionary idea that was truly a revolution, meaning you had to turn your back on how things had been done to that point to accept it as a possibility. For what it's worth some of the people most strongly against the idea would, just a few years later be vocal opponents of kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms, calling them a form of digital begging. Of course those same people would also then host their own campaigns and not once admit to being wrong about their usefulness.
But the micropayment flames dies down and people seemed to kind of forget about the idea, or at least in name. But then patreon showed up and presented the same concept in a new framing. They also brought to the table an easily accessible way to do it all, and couched it in supporting the artists rather than transacting for goods or services. But the core idea was the same. And it worked! One other difference was one of discoverability. If you put everything behind a paywall, then it is hard to grow an audience, but if you put lots of stuff out for free and ask people to support you when/if they can, and provide bonuses for your supporters, you can grow an audience while also converting some of hat audience into supporters.
I'm thinking about all this because I do actually have a patreon. It's not for this newsletter, but rather for my sporadically updating podcast where I talk about movies I watched with my sweetheart. Ever since starting the patreon, I think about micropayments and how they did eventually come about. I also support a number of patreons for other creators. I like to pay for things that are given away, so that the artist can keep making their giant swords or podcasts or comic strips. And I do support a comic on patreon, in fact it's one of the ones who was vocally against the idea of micropayments, of charging 25 cents per comic. And at the tier I support them I actually end up paying about 40 cents per comic, which is particularly interesting, because if you put 25 cents in two thousand dollars into an inflation calculator, it comes out to about 46 cents in today's money. Stuff I'm reading Here's a couple articles/opinion pieces that really resonated with me recently. I will f**king piledrive you if you mention AI to me again - An opinion piece by a data scientist who is fed up with AI creeping into everything.
The Empty Brain - an article about how the metaphor of the human brain as a computer is a deeply flawed one and how that metaphor is giving us incorrect ideas about how artificial general intelligence will ever work.
