emerald access and lamentations of the quality inn (Patreon)

hi there
if you have discord access (emerald patrons, level 3+) you now have access to reborn's test build

might be a little messy right now. one of the things we added recently was a discord integration-- you know how like just about every game ever will insert itself into your game activity on discord as you're playing? well, now ours does too. if you let it. you can tell it not to.

shout outs to aiedail for spearheading this, enumag for patching it up, and offworlder rainefall for making the core compatibility gem. 

unfortunately, it also breaks the game if you don't have discord open. whoops. we have a fix for that, but because of ✨ File Shenanigans ✨ it can't be applied in a patch. if you're playing the beta, you should grab that from the patch log channel. it'll be fixed for the next main release. 

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expanding test build access means that i'll need to update tiers and their rewards again.

yesterday i had an appointment out in the boonies. like, not rural boonies, but suburb boonies. no car, busses don't quite go there... so i had a bit of a walk. not too bad-- but not pleasant either. somehow it managed to be both too hot and cold at the same time.

along the way i passed a billboard for the town. it read,

As a community, we can bounce back. Together, we will recover.

i'm sure it's referring to coronavirus, but it really just felt like one of those environmental setpieces that you'd see in Fallout or some other post-apoc game. the suburn truly felt like as much of a wasteland as anything i'd seen.

i counted eight asian restaurants in a span of two blocks. All of them were open. I didn't see any customers. I wondered what their relationship with each other must be. The space is narrow enough to preach about community, but wide enough to get lost in a parking lot.

i took a shortcut through another lot, this one of a Quality Inn. i noticed a sign beaming with a smiling sun.

We've saved you a spot! This space is reserved for our premium members! :)

all of the spaces were empty.

who are all of these parking lots for?
the customers can't stay there-- not without a monthly fee.
the employees can't stay there, they're on the clock.
so who can stay there? the land-owner? the company? the CEO? there are 1,613 Quality Inns in america. 

even the most wasteful of bureaucrats would be hard-pressed to occupy such space. a standard parking space is 180 square feet. let's assume every quality inn has 5 such spaces. that's 900 square feet per location. In 2022, the average size of an apartment was about 887 square feet. so in total, that is 1,451,700 square feet claimed by Quality Inn's premium parking space program.
650,000 homeless people in the US last year btw. js.

so many things are owned by no one.
who is the world for?

so anyway, patreon tiers.
ah, another subscription service. delightful.
obviously there's a world of difference between what we're doing here and a hotel which already charges more than four dollars per hour to stay there
but i think everyone is so tired of subscription services. i am. and i depend on one.
rent is just a subscription service to land anyway, isn't it?

that said, i feel like we actually are a community as opposed to some suburb full of white moms who almost certainly don't have the time to log onto the government website and see what trite and partially-funded initiatives are going on.
i feel like this whole burst of activity with helping visually impaired players is decent evidence for that. i wonder what kind of blind accessibility the Quality Inn has. 

i know some other creators on patreon have a singular reward tier. patrons can still pledge more or less depending on how they want to support, but it's not gating it behind a system of increasingly expensive tiers. it seems more equal that way. almost certainly more practical.

at the same time, i do want to make sure i am appreciating those who do go out of their way to support more (or the underrated statistic as far as patreon goes: for a longer period of time)

so i don't know what i'm going to do with stuff. we'll see.

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in much happier news, and another positive note for the sake of actual community...

Another Time, the fully community-led Reborn fan zine, has finally released! it is on sale until the end of the month, and you can pick it up here:

https://anothertimepokezine.itch.io/another-time-zine

it is full of art, stories, and a lot of love all featuring reborn and characters from it. the base price is 12 dollars and all proceeds are being donated to Lambda Legal, an LGBT-positive charity. please consider taking a look and picking it up; i know a lot of great people have been working hard to make the zine a standout success!