• she/her 🏳‍⚧

26, cartoon and video game liker.


Occasional NSFW rechosts, ask me to tag if necessary.


You can find art I made under #bvart!


A low resolution website banner depicting a close-up of Xenia, the Linux Fox's face against a red background. To the right is large, bolded text reading "LINUX" accompanied by smaller text underneath reading "the choice of a GNU generation."

A deviantART styled stamp containing a photo of an elderly person's face to the right of white text reading "I'm thinking about those beans" with grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes. The background is a photo of baked beans.A deviantART styled stamp containing a screenshot of Mario from Super Mario 64, edited to be giving the viewer a realistic middle fingerA deviantART styled stamp containing a photo of a hairless pet rat next to a toy keyboard with rainbow-colored keysA deviantART style animated pixel stamp featuring cropped artwork of femtanyl's mascot. "FEMTANYL" is spelled out in white pixel letters on the mascot's forehead that individually turn red from left to right in a loop
An 88 by 31 pixel banner of an abstract floating head creature with a liquid eye facing away from the viewer, a closed eye with an eyelash facing towards the viewer, and teardrop-shaped gems coming out of the eyelash. Xhe is accompanied by text reading "Charm will protect you!" and is depicted in front of a purple background.an animated 88 by 31 button. it is a parody of the classic "Netscape NOW! 3.0" button, replacing the Netscape Navigator logo with alternating photos of Laura Les and Dylan Brady's faces screaming, sourced from the back cover of the album "10,000 Gec". The word 'netscape' in 'netscape now' is replaced with a crude scrawling of the word "GECS".an animated 88 by 31 button. along the top is text reading "SPONGEHEAD" in a font from Spongebob Squarepants, colored in black and cohost's plum color. below is smaller Spongebob font text reading "prof-badvibes" in green, with one letter at a time in sequence flashing white. To the sides are Incidental Number 7, a background character from Spongebob, and Eggbug, the cohost mascot, colored to resemble Spongebob.an 88 by 31 button of the transgender pride flag against a gray background next to text reading "trans rights now!"
an 88 by 31 button featuring animated pixel art of Reimu Hakurei from the Touhou series against a gray background. she is pictured next to text reading "powered by Reimu."an 88 by 31 animated button. the button starts showing a blue color, but the point of view zooms out to reveal a blue variant of Tux, the Linux penguin, against a gray background. text reading "Linux powered" appears in the banner to the left of Tux.an 88 by 31 button. it is a parody of the classic "Netscape NOW! 3.0" button, replacing the Netscape Navigator logo with a photo of Weird Al Yankovich's face. The word 'netscape' in 'netscape now' is replaced with the word 'Yankovic'.an 88 by 31 animated button of the Lapfox Trax logo, which is the word 'LAPFOX' in bold serif font with a cartoon fox's head replacing the 'O'. The logo is in front of a rainbow color-shifting grid
A parody of the "Netscape Now!" 88 by 31 pixel button. To the left is a rotating marijuana leaf, and to the right is text reading "Legalize Now!" along with the letters M and J in the bottom right corner.An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner with a yellow-to-green hue-shifting background. To the left is a cropped piece of clipart showing the top half of a newspaper cartoon-styled individual's face looking at the viewer in a goofy way. The clipart is accompanied by text reading "FREE STUFF" in bolded all capital letters to the right.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting two photographed women looking up and to the right against a white background. Text reading "GAY WOMEN" in bolded all capital letters can be found to the right, with the word "gay" being larger and emphasized.An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting a sprite of a blinking one-eyed green alien from the Commander Keen games. To the alien's right is text reading "Accursed Farms".
An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting a rainbow peace symbol to the left of blue text reading "Peace Now!", both against a gray background.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting an inverted United States flag with the stars replaced by a 'no' symbol. On top of the flag is black handwritten pixel text reading "ACAB".An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting Super Mario running to the right through a 'window' to the left. To the right is blue text reading "Dave's Videogame Classics".An 88 by 31 pixel banner containing sprites of Kris and Susie from the video game Deltarune. Susie is looking at Kris with a cartoonishly angry expression. Below the two is white text against a black background reading "kris where tf are we."
An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner with a gray background. To the left is a 'window' showing a sprite of a dove against a black background. The dove is shown flying and being covered up by a red X symbol in two alternating frames. To the right is black-and-gray flashing text reading "DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT" in all-capital letters.An animated 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting an illustration of Hatsune Miku against a gray background. Miku is blinking her eyes and smiling on alternating frames. To the right is text reading "This site is Miku Approved", with 'Miku' in large, bolded blue letters and 'Approved' flashing rapidly between blue and red.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting the transgender pride flag, with beveled edges to give the impression of mild three-dimensional depth.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting the blue Sega logo against a white background.
An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting a screencap of Blender version 1.X, with a classic-styled logo and a wireframe cube in the centerAn 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting the words "download SBURB" next to a logo of a minimalist lime-green house separated into segments. The word "SBURB" is rendered in a bold, cartoony, lime-green font.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting the lesbian pride flag, with beveled edges to give the impression of mild three-dimensional depth.An 88 by 31 pixel banner depicting character art of Sonic from the fangame Sonic Robo Blast 2 against that game's title screen background.
an 88 by 31 button of the blue-and-orange logo of the Doom video game series to the right of the Doomguy's grinning Heads Up Display face against a gray background.

Thanks to @framebuffer for my profile picture, @candiedreptile for the Charm button, @softwareangel for the Spongehead button!


Sources of any other profile graphics that weren't made or commissioned by me can be found here:
[x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x]


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

every month since I started using Patreon, after payout day I see a substantial drop in subscription totals, a few hundred bucks worth. I always figured this was because people get charged on the first, then go "oh shit Patreon I forgot to cancel" and then go cancel. A week later it's back up to normal levels, and I assumed this too was just due to subscriber churn.

The thing is, patreons website is so bad, so unbelievably shitty and counter to anything anyone wants it to be, that there's simply nowhere you can go that will let you answer these questions. There should be a single page that simply lists all signups and cancellations; there isn't. You have to synthesize this info manually from six different sources, which I've also learned can just be wrong. So the data doesn't exist, and all you can do is float in limbo and hope you're right about next months rent

As a separate issue, I realized a couple months ago that if you go into your list of patrons and filter by tier, it shows you cancelled patrons. I've been delivering benefits (minimal though mine are) to people who cancelled a year ago. You have to manually select "Active" under sub status. Again, this website does absolutely nothing the way anyone would want it to.

Yesterday I put these facts together at last and realized that patreon is subtracting the fucking declined payments from my subscriber total. Yeah, declines, the thing that VERY REGULARLY happens on automatic payments and usually gets resolved within a couple days? Yeah that. Patreon stops counting them as subscribers and makes you think you just lost a ton of RECURRING revenue due to a fucking TEMPORARY PAYMENT FAILURE

this website is run by ghouls


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

As someone who is closer to the ivory tower than most, in terms of having things pretty easy financially while not being independently wealthy, i am always thinking about how our society and economy don't work even if you play the game "right"


worked since i was 17. got hired off the street at minimum wage, learned on my feet, got promoted. moved to a new job, got a little more to do slightly more skilled work. moved to another job that paid more using my prior experience in the field. used connections to get my foot in the door for an entry-level position in a more upmarket business, then worked my way up the ranks by working harder than I was asked to, getting noticed, etc.

this narrative is left over from the 1960s, it doesn't work anymore. i managed to make it work better than most... except the whole time i was living with roommates, and never made more than 2/3 of a rent check.

health insurance is my go-to for how much "The System" doesn't work. one of my favorite events in quitting my job was finding out that I had $500 in medical bills that my insurance had just been silently refusing to pay, for months, for no obvious reason. i don't even know who my provider was in the end; my employer switched at least five times.

i played the game, i did what i was supposed to do, and I didn't even get functioning Employer Health Insurance, the thing that's supposed to be Endgame, that's supposed to qualify you as a real citizen. literally every single time I tried to get health care in that whole decade, every single time, i handed the card to the lady behind the desk and she punched in the numbers, frowned, then said "so these aren't coming up..." Every single time I got on the phone with anyone they would ask me for my subscriber ID, and I would give the only two numbers from my card, and they would tell me there was supposed to be a third one. It never, ever worked without a dozen stupid phone calls over a week or three.

okay, so, I quit my job and strike out on my own. i'm doing it baby! let's be REAL capitalists, none of this "what if we didn't force people to run as fast as they can just to stay in place" shit. i'm gonna be an Entrepreneur, I'm going to self-promote, self-motivate, and design my own future. let's get REAL fucked over when the bottom falls out #GRINDSET #NOSAFETYNET

i tried to sign up for health insurance the other day, and found out that if you aren't trying to take government subsidies, they just don't want to hear from you. if you just, straight up, want to buy health insurance at sticker price, there's just... no way to do that, that I could find. i tried googling health insurance companies and all I got were WAHealthPlanFinder, fucking Healthcare.gov, etc. and every single one tries to put you through a workflow that assumes you are trying to get government subsidies.

the government should pay for all healthcare, but that's immaterial: they don't, and I don't qualify for any discounts. i am self-employed, no student loans, no dependents, making over $100k a year - I know I'm just going to pay sticker price. i just wanted to go to a site and put in my visa number.

i spent a solid hour trying to make it through the stupid fucking workflows over and over. even when i tried to just buy insurance on a provider website, it didn't work. i would answer the up front question about where I lived, then - bam, I'm on fucking WAHealthPlanFinder, which thinks I must have a military discount or a dependent or something. otherwise, why would I be there

in the end i gave up in disgust because i simply couldn't figure it out. a week later i got a letter from a dental plan that I apparently signed up for?? nobody asked me for any money, i have no idea how to pay them except by paper check. i still haven't heard word one from the health insurance company that i had selected at the same time. i tried signing up on their website but it takes about six clicks on tiny little links to find out that the only way to do this, despite the fact that i just fucking ordered health insurance online, is to wait for them to mail me a piece of paper with a login on it. i have no idea if this is coming, or when it will arrive, and i am past the legal cutoff date for not having insurance. i have no idea what happens if i get hit by a car tomorrow.

but hey, i'm an entrepreneur, right?? i'm playing the game, Hoo Rah, America, i'm gonna buy stonks at any moment. i'm fucking, propping up this shitheaded house of cards by smooth talking 1200 other people into pay my rent a buck at a time.

whoops, turns out there's no way to do that EITHER that isn't some kind of fucking grift, some kind of shell game. we all knew when patreon started that their goal was to rugpull, and the rugpull has been visibly approaching for a year. they floated an ENORMOUS survey like 8 months ago asking about a ton of incredibly worrying shit that clearly indicated they were preparing to Pivot. sure enough, we're now seeing that, INCONCEIVABLY, they think they're going to turn Patreon into the primary site you go to in order to be entertained. the video player they've released is like an HTML5 demo from 2006 and doesn't support chromecast, rendering it useless for 95% of users. $20 says they never fix this.

we all know that when this fails, and it will fail HARD and FAST, they will close the entire company virtually overnight. the CEO will take every penny and put it in his own account, then have the company declare bankruptcy and walk away to start this whole process over again. every single person making a living on this will be left broke and desperately scrambling to reach out to their supporters (with no contact list, since the fucking website will be shut down before the announcement is even made) to beg them to move to something else, which will invariably be even jankier and will probably evaporate within a few months. soon the patrons will tire of this routine and stop even bothering to re-sign up. and then a lot of people will be fucked, for the crime of... doing what the mythology said they should do. trying to be Good Americans, and not Depend on anyone.

every time patreon makes the website 15% stupider, i know it's because they're actively trying to push people away from paying me money to do what i'm good at, in an asinine attempt to get all of us to do something we have already made vocally clear we do not want to do. i can't wait for this to collapse for no reason.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

the wild thing is i just don't see what's either hard about doing any of this right, or unprofitable. they clearly employ programmers, but i can't imagine what they do all day given that the MVP of the site has been finished for a decade. there's so much low hanging fruit and none of it's being touched.

if i had to guess, it's that the people up top simply don't have a clear goal in mind. seems like everything comes from the perspective "what do I, the guy from pomplamoose, want from this" and then changes are set and made from that perspective.

unfortunately it's worse, it's "what do I, serena williams's husband, crypto guy, and reddit cofounder alexis ohanian, want from this" because that's the stature of dude who actually controls the purse strings

and what he wants is user growth and weird shit like on-site livestreams apparently

it's fascinating. i say this as someone who is Extremely Biased because i help run a company actively working on a competitor but patreon is absolutely in the class of company where every single product change they make just makes shit Worse somehow. absolutely a "what are y'all even doing all day" situation. unfortunately, unseating them will be difficult because they have so much fucking intertia but i am absolutely stubborn enough to try.

On the patron side, I knew Patreon was barebones as well when I saw there was no easy to way to change your subscription date or, in some cases, to see exactly how much you're actually going to be charged.

It feels like a beta for a community subscription platform, that just never left beta.

It's frustrating when you're supporting someone who charges per creation, because the e-mail that you get whenever someone posts does not say whether or not the post is paid for by patrons. You have to visit the post to find out.

fuckin god dammit what. i used to work in subscription payments and we had a lot of details in that system to make damn sure nobody heard about a decline until we were actually out of retry attempts

then again i also had a scare last month because my renter’s insurance rebilling triggered fraud protection and they decided to take it as a request to cancel the policy so uh basically I dunno man maybe that was the only joint that cared

reminds me of that audible scandal where you could b told you sold 5 books in a given week, when you actually sold 10 and 5 of those got knocked off to "refund" returns in a process that was completely hidden from the author

fun thing about this, apparently recently they changed their payment processor or something

so I woke up yesterday morning to my bank trying to confirm if I approved the Patreon charges, and I said I did, and it said “Great! We declined that last transaction, try it again now”

Then I went to Patreon and discovered that, even though they sent me an email telling me it declined, and it told every creator my payment declined due to fraud (!!), it won’t even give me a way to retry the payment! It doesn’t even show me it attempted a payment on the website, and it’s been well over a day since that one and only attempt!

I’ve been tempted to just send this month’s money a different way, I’m getting impatient with this system that’s buggy and seems to only be getting worse

oh yes, there are dozens of people who have had to stop supporting me because they go in to make a payment and it just inexplicably declines, and I know every time this happens because I see 6 to 10 emails stating that I have a new patron, with the same name attached. People will support me for months and it's fine, and then one day it does this, and it'll never work again, even if they switch cards. Patreon support does nothing.

yeah...

You might've just seen an E-mail flash up for me, I ended up completely just unsubbing and resubscribing because I'm seeing other memberships set to renew later showing up in my transaction history and the like, but still not the one that should've renewed on the 1st - I just ended up completely unsubbing and resubbing in hopes maybe that'll fix the issue?? Because it seems like it's just content with never letting me pay any creators ever again otherwise.

...That being said, I kinda forgot you don't charge up-front... do you happen to have a paypal or kofi or something I can send you the $20 patreon decided it didn't want to let me send you?

i do have a ko-fi but i always tell people to just Take It Easy Don't Worry About It. the beauty of patreon is that if a few people have financial issues, they don't need to panic about it, because they're 1/1200th of the total figure. it's actually a really cool approach! almost makes you think that there are better ways to distribute wealth,

That is a super cool way to go about it it, and I appreciate it, but in this case I'm fine on finances at the moment and wanted to send my support, Patreon just decided it didn't want to play ball

and yeeaahh... if only we could actually get there instead of being where we are now, but capitalism and our current systems just so happen to be extremely beneficial for all the people with the power

yeah patreon payment processing is running within an inch of falling over every first of the month. every time ive had to do the payment manually it requires clicking the payment button constantly for about 45 minutes to an hour(per pledge) until it accepts the payment. its janky AF.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

And people look at me funny when I tell them I prefer to be uninsured because I lucked out and found the local hospital with an amazing financial aid system if you live in the right county. I know for a fact I can stay overnight in the ER and pay less than 4 digits out of pocket, so as long as I can stay out of the ER for more than 3-4 months at a time, it's cheaper than insurance. A fucking terrible game of numbers to play but alas.

For someone in your position, is it worth going "fuck it I'm going to set up on subscribestar, onlyfans, etc" and be on 5 different platforms and hope that you can just tank any single one going down?

I used to subscribe to more Patreons, especially for porn illustrators, but I stopped because the mobile version of the site is incredibly slow and kept doing full page reloads and forcing me to log in again. I also set up a creator page back when they were grandfathering people into the old payment structure, just in case I wanted to have one later. Since then every single time I visit any page on the site there's a banner on the top telling me they unlaunched my page for lack of activity. Terrible site.

Yeah my financials got a little tighter so I stopped supporting some artists, but now that I could again, the barrier to even using the site is so damn high. How can something both be that featureless, and that slow, at the one thing it does, and even gets more income than it should take to run doing. (How has it taken in half a billion dollars of venture capital money? Where did it go???)

they fucking took away features! i checked it when i opened up a patreon account and they took away the goal for like...no reason?!

like goals were a good idea! they were a good way of having people work towards something because people like being able to do that, but they took it away!

on the UX side i was trying to update my tiers but it was just a convoluted mess; i clicked "save" and it didn't actually save my tier! it has a tiny little "published" button over at the top right! that's like User Interface 101 how the fuck did this corporation fucking fail the basics?!

it's always been bad for uploading stuff but it has somehow gotten worse!

I have also noticed incredible inconsistencies in when it charges people. I have a small number of patrons that don't get charged at the first of the month. Instead they get charged like 2 weeks in and then finally show up on my patron benefits list.

It was quite exciting figuring this out, it is mostly a problem because it is indeed my big ticket tier where that is the difference of 100+ dollars showing up on time.

That's bizarre if it's unintended, but I was pretty sure the Patreon added the ability a few months back to set your billing date, but only when you sign up. It's supposed to be off by default though, if I'm even remembering correctly

The latest Patreon that I signed up for, earlier this year, is charging me on the day of the month that I signed up for instead of at the beginning of the month like everything else, and I don't see an option to change it. I guessed that maybe it was a feature that they got by default as a new creator, but maybe not...

the age verification system Patreon is rolling out for people who made the mistake of tagging their pages as 18+ completely does not work. they're working with some incompetent vendor with a .ai domain and it insists on taking the photos directly but it doesn't give you the controls required to get a legible photo (like focus control or a manual shutter button). if I were active on there it'd be worth the effort to work around that, but I'm more likely to just give up and deactivate my creator page. unfortunately I will still be giving 5-15% of a decent chunk of money to those assholes until they become so toxic that people who actually depend on them start moving away

(i know this is not the point of this post but for the sake of anyone else trying to navigate health insurance in Washington state)

WAHealthPlanFinder will, eventually, let you browse and buy health insurance at full price, but only after it has verified that you definitely do not qualify for every possible subsidy. this does make it slightly awkward for people that are not currently in poverty, but imo that's a worthwhile tradeoff for ensuring that the people who need it get the subsidies they deserve.