We're still short of our goal for January right now, after the expense of replacing a drive, renewing domain names, my own dental bill of $900 and my sending some funds to Piper to help with medical bills. If you can, please contribute toward our goal
We had a drive failure on the BigCloset server. We're limping along right now but we've ordered a new drive and will attempt to get it installed as soon as it arrives in Denver, probably tomorrow or Saturday.
Since this is the boot drive for the main server, this will cause a certain amount of outage time, estimated 4 to 30 hours, depending on how quickly Denver gets the new drive imaged with the right version of Linux, etc.
First of all, Merry Christmas to all who want to celebrate that holiday and Happy Holidays to those celebrating some other day and Seasons Greetings to everyone else!
I set the donations goal for November at only $1000 so we could start December at $0 instead of continuing to be a whole month off. November also completed our 14th year of running BigCloset!
Weather in the Denver area interrupted power and connectivity to the server farm. They worked on the problem for quite a while then it took even longer to get all the servers rebooted. Looks like we are back online. :)
This book is written by a friend of mine from a local writer's group. It's a fantasy novel, no TG, but it is well-written and presents a very original idea. I helped with the editing. :
I'm feeling better now but I woke up at 330 AM last night with diarrhea and vomiting that lasted till a bit after noon. I kept drinking things like lemonade and Seven-Up and hot tea and water, to keep my fluids up even tho a lot of time they just came back up. At noon when I thought I could keep it down, I took an anti-diarrheal pill.
Contributions to the Hatbox continue to be what keeps Piper and I able to keep this website and a dozen others used by the TG community active and running.
Angela Rasch's "Voices Carry Over Water" is now available to contributors to the Hatbox and we will soon have the revised version of "To Alleviate Suffering" there, too. Thanks very much, Angela. :)
We're going to try a new capability here after a recent request. Now you can subscribe to your favorite authors to be notified when they post new stories. :) At least, we hope this works. Consider it to be in test mode right now.
Back from the con, I had a great time. I'm working in the bookstore today and have a writer's group meeting tonight but I will be on and off. And Piper and Amy had their baby!
I'm going to spend three days in San Diego, hobnobbing with some of my friends in the comics industry at a small con out in Mission Valley called ComicFest. I'll have WiFi, laptop, phone and tablet so I should be able to get online frequently and check in. Have a swell time. :)
We just payed our $1572 hosting bill and will have another smaller one next month (or maybe it is in November). Anyway, these things go on my credit cards and then I pay down the balance with the money that comes in from the Hatbox gifts. We made our goal for August over the weekend and now need to think about September.
Anything you can send will be good and if you can't do anymore than hit the kudos button on your favorite story, we all understand.
We're halfway through September and have half of our goal received for August. All gifts are appreciated and the money is being spent to either pay our ongoing hosting related bills, pay down debts accrued in keeping the site running for the last 14 years or pay Piper enough that she can forego other paying jobs to keep BC and related sites functioning. Some goes into the Server Fund intended to upgrade our hardware next year and what little is left over I probably spend on comic books and In-N-Out burgers. :) I also share donations received with other TS/TG sites and causes.
It's the middle of August and we still aren't halfway to our goal for July. There've been a lot of unexpected medical expenses and while the hardware fund has collected some money, that last $500 was from me.
I want everyone to know how much we appreciate your gifts, we couldn't do this without help. Piper's work on the servers has made BC stable and reasonably fast. If you appreciate that work and can afford to, a few dollars would be a great help.
Disrespecting anyone's profession of belief in a comment, blog or forum post is not allowed on BC. Please don't attempt to embarrass someone with public comments here. But is this a friendly place for atheists? I try to make it so.
You can announce your beliefs without dissing other people's in public. I remove comments and blogs where someone calls out their version of religion as being the only true one. You can announce what you believe or don't believe but no proselytizing. And trying to ridicule other people's beliefs is definitely against Rule One.
We made our goal and thanks to everyone who contributed. I have a couple of checks here still to deposit that didn't get done because last week I was sick and the week before I was on vacation.
This is a new extension to the friendly rule; titles and teasers that appear on the front page should be work safe and if there are non-work friendly images past the teaser, that should have a caution attached.
This means some of my own teasers would not have passed this test but I think we need to add this caveat. It applies to stories, blogs, links, and even comment subject lines. I will take what steps I think necessary to implement this, usually just modifying the teaser, tags or title slightly.
This is about my 20th time, I attended the third one way back in 72 and I've gone to almost half of them since then. I have a few friends in the industry and know even more people just to say hi to. I always get enthused about my comics work when I'm here. :)
Having been a small publisher back in the first days of indie comics (we called them street-level comics), I get a professional badge and get to hang out with the pros and drink free coffee in the pro lounge. So cool!
Checks can be made out & sent to:
Joyce Melton
1001 Third St.
Space 80
Calimesa, CA 92320
USA
Note: $6000 is the operating, maintenance and upgrade budget. Amounts received in excess of the $6000 will be applied to long term debt accrued over the last 19 years.
