All right. We’ve been struggling to keep up with everything, of late, but now that I actually have some time to myself, I can use it to… do more work… in other areas. Huh.

Well, whatever. Let’s talk about our Patreon and Discord a bit. Because it’s time I gave those some TLC. Starting with Patreon. If you’re interested in supporting what we do, then I cannot stress enough the help it would be to us for you to either become a patron, yourself, or share our site with others and mention to them that we have a Patreon.

[OFFICIAL GALVANIC TEAM PATREON LINK]

First, some quick background. For anyone not in the know, we’ve had our Patreon and Discord for quite a while. However, the Discord basically launched dead and the Patreon we just weren’t managing very well. It mostly comes down to a handful of things. Forgetfulness plays a big part. That and not wanting to annoy people by constantly spamming plugs for either (I know. It’s stupid. Blame anxiety). But now that I’m working on less stuff, at least that first one shouldn’t be as much of an issue.

For those not in the know, Patreon’s been a constant battle for us. When we relaunched our site, we wiped the Patreon because we wanted to streamline it. And now we’re reviving it to get the ball rolling. The streamlined Patreon Page will now feature only the following.

• Early-Bird Previews of Original Content (Bulletoon, the free Burning Sky chapters, etc.)
• A weekly Patron Suggestions Box for those who are not a part of the Discord Server.
• Weekly Blog Collection Posts (Links to posts on this blog from throughout the week)
• News Updates Relative to Patrons (Tier updates, goal updates, etc.)

There will, of course, be some growing pains. For example, we’re still not entirely certain how the Patreon is going to work with Burning Sky, once the free chapters are done and it starts getting into the paid stuff. A part of me, personally, doesn’t feel comfortable with the idea of Patrons having to pay even more for that. But, at the same time, Burning Sky is its own animal and most likely isn’t going to be housed on this site when it does transition to a paid model. The Patreon is for this site and that which goes on it. Perhaps we’ll end up overlapping them or maybe Patrons will get a discount or something. I don’t know yet. We’ll work on it. There are several months, yet, for us to worry about that.

So what about the Discord? Well, we’re going to start actually using it again. To set this up, the rest of the G-Team and myself primarily use Skype to communicate. Because working on this stuff in a text format is just not optimal. And, unfortunately, our respective internet services, joined with the distance between the lot of us, for whatever reason causes Discord to be… finicky. So we can’t always use that one to voice chat. Which has led to Discord falling to the wayside.

Now, I’m personally on Discord a lot. As is Bob. We just haven’t been on our own server because… well… neither of us are exactly chatty people. At least, we’re not conversation starters. We tend to jump on conversations already underway. The Discord has a few members, of course, but it’s generally just incredibly quiet there. So we’re gonna fix that. Let’s start by making sure everyone knows how to access it.

[OFFICIAL GALVANIC TEAM DISCORD LINK]

(I took it down from the site for some reason and cannot, for the life of me, remember why. But it’s back, now.)

And now that that’s dealt with, here’s how we’re going to address the Discord issue, at least partially. We don’t know the days quite yet. We need to work out the timing that’s most convenient. But, once we work out whatever is causing our tech issues, we’ll be doing bi-weekly Discord chats that only Patrons will be able to access. These will come in categories and go for anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours (depending on the day, the category, how chatty we’re feeling, and all manner of variables).

• Writer’s Room: Whatever staff present (usually Bob and myself) will just talk for a bit about our current projects. Mostly Burning Sky, perhaps with a bit of gab about Bulletoon or EXTRA, or something.
• Casual w/ Mutuals: We’ll try to reach out to some people, either of our own choosing or our Patrons’ suggestions, to come in a talk for a bit. Sort of a mini-podcast. I don’t really want to call it an “interview,” necessarily, although that’ll likely be part of it. Sometimes there’ll be questions, other times we may just talk about anime or video games or something.
  • Q&A: This is a special one because it can be tacked on to any of the above categories or can be something that exists entirely on its own for Patrons to ask us or guests random questions (WITHIN REASON).

Just as a quick breakdown of how these will work, only the staff and guests will have voice enabled. Listeners interact in a Patron text chat during the call. It’s an efficiency thing. As for recordings, we don’t currently have the ability to record those calls (at least, I don’t believe we do), but it is in the plans to eventually take things in that direction. Then we’ll upload the recordings to our YouTube channel. Whether we actually post those recordings here or not is up in the air. Also, just for the save of clarification, all dates and times will be in the EST Timezone.

I’m going to level with you. There will absolutely be some weeks where we just… can’t. And we’ll do our best to provide advanced notice. The same goes for Early-Bird previews. It’s not exactly uncommon for us to be working on something down to the last possible second. Most Bulletoon episodes are posted the second they finish rendering because of the work that goes into them. That said, we’ve loosened our uploading schedule and procedures a bit (Bulletoon is no longer relegated to weekends, even if it still aims for them), so that shouldn’t be as much of an issue anymore.

Last, but not least, we’ve got some pretty exciting news. Thanks to Yuki Aly and Zachary Baughman, we’ve recently hit a major goal! There’s a few logistics to figure out, buuut with that little boost, we’ll be able to upgrade our WordPress Plan to Business, which’ll give us access to a few features we previously didn’t have. We won’t be able to launch that right away, like I said. But you should look forward to us starting to experiment with some things some time in the next month or so. So we’d like to thank them for helping bump us right up to that goal and for joining the few, the proud, the patrons. *salute*

And thanks to everyone, again, for your continued support. It’s been a fun ride, the past four years. So here’s to many more. All that’s left to say is, well… you know this one by now. Keep up the Awesome!

Take Care,
Voyager