UNCANNY X-CERPTS

Thursday, September 19, 2024

Why donate to Uncanny X-Cerpts on Ko-Fi?

For the last while, every post on this blog has had a link to support me on Ko-Fi promising -- sometimes questionably -- that you can "get more" with your support.

I don't like the idea of twisting people's arms by putting stuff that should be part of this project behind a paywall. I briefly considered whether I should split the difference and put my write-ups of X-MEN vol 2 up there (or Substack or Patreon or whatever platform I was on at the time) but I decided it wouldn't be true to what I wanted to accomplish here.

And besides, I don't have a lot of time to whip up exclusive paid content anyway. I've been down that road. I really wanted to make it work with Patreon and I got close with Substack before the dark truth about that platform was revealed. But I'm usually just a few inches ahead on X-CERPTS and I have other things going on in life, and I respect paying customers too much to short-change them.

I don't deserve any kind of fortune for simply making material out of other creatives' hard work (although in this economy, people have been paid more for less) but I would be doing myself a disservice not to at least have a tip jar. I've given you a half-million words on the X-Men free of charge, and I was happy to do it, and if you want to offer a vote of confidence and a bit of gratitude by "buying me a coffee" with no guarantee of additional work, I am happy to accept. Mentally, thinking of it this way helps me feel less guilt about not providing more exclusives to those who have generously offered a few token bucks over the years.

In thanks for that, I do provide exclusive posts -- I try to do one per month, but in practice it's not that frequent. This week I've posted a write-up of X-Men Unlimited #10, which is a key issue and very worth talking about. Given that the X-Men story is sprawling and often spills outside of the regularly-scheduled pages of the monthly series, it makes sense to have somewhere I can tackle the digressions and side-stories that impact the main thread without disrupting my regular weekly cadence. It's that fabled "stretch space" that has taken a few different forms over the years.

What I like about Ko-Fi is that with one donation of any size, you can have limited-time access to all the exclusive posts I do, which includes X-Men Prime, the fan favourite AOA tie-in Generation Next, the bulk of Phalanx Covenant, and more to come. As of now only a handful of people have read these posts, but you could today!

If you don't, it's no big deal. This blog will do what it does for the foreseeable future, and I'm happy to do it. Thanks for reading!