I’ve bitten the bullet and have joined Patreon as a creator. I’ve been contemplating it for a while and figured, why not?

For this Philosophics endeavour, I have a few expenses that I cover, and there are things I eschew for want of a budget. Although this WordPress account is free, it costs me to host this blog on a server, and I would convert it to a paid account if I could justify it.

Content creation is something I enjoy, but it also distracts from other activities I could be doing, so a little added incentive would help. Notsomuch for this blog, but for podcast and video content.

For podcasts, I use Amazon Polly as an AI text-to-speech engine. It is free for fewer than 1MM characters per month, so I am safe on this account. I could benefit from AWS storage, but this is not necessary. It just means that I need to process paragraphs in smaller chunks to remain beneath their character count threshold. And to be completely transparent, Polly needs a little handholding along the way, so I can’t just feed it text and forget it, assuming that the result would just sound right.

For videos, I have occasionally purchased image and video content (or a soundtrack element or sound effect), but without a budget, it’s difficult to justify. This budget constraint limits the quality, as found free objects do not always convey concepts as well, and commissioned art is pretty much out of the question.

I’ve seen other sites and know other content creators, so I figure why not throw my hat in the ring to see if anything happens. I’ve supported artists and writers in the past. In fact, I opened my Patreon account as a patron back in 2012. A 20-something friend of my son has had a Patreon account for a couple of years now. He’s only had one $1 patron the entire time. (To be honest, we think it’s his dad, but we can’t validate this intuition.)

No pressure or requirement. If you’d like to become a patron, I’d appreciate it. If not, I’ll be producing content anyway, and I hope you enjoy it and find it engaging.

Cheers.