Spring 2025
Intro • What's Next • How To Follow • How To Support Me
Introductions & Past Productions While this is the first RQ [1] at this address making seasonal appraisals of progress is an established habit. Looking at Winter 2025 & Fall 2024 shows how this time is different. The Winter Update is just a sad blog entry that captures a desperate season for me (that I am still struggling to exit), while the Fall entry is a hybrid of progress update & attempted permanent home for a roster of projects. (In October 2024 I made highlighted additions to a post written in May 2024; feasibly I could have elected to do the same again now. I'm choosing change.)
What does all this mean?! — Whatever! Adding more complexity is typical me & hardly seems a good strategy to achieve my actual goal of simplification! But that's the idea. Many times I start something new but it's impossible to leave the past behind. For example, I'm still on Instagram & I maintain presence on Patreon & Ko-fi, even though I do not like those platforms. What it boils down to is accepting other peoples' preferences. [Please see How To Support Me for more on this.] I am reinforcing the habit of offering seasonal updates in part because that is the amount that I am willing to commit to putting on Ko-fi & Patreon as proof of creative life. I would like to encourage all who are interested in what I do to follow me using accounts that I control, not those controlled by corporations. This site is operated by a nonprofit. I cannot guarantee it will always be here, but I can promise you that there is zero surveillance or advertising here. And I commit to operating the following newly acquired addresses for as long as I can:
I use these addresses that I own [2] to redirect you to whatever preferred nonprofit, non-surveillance site I may be using at the moment. Additionally I'm now offering communications differentiated by frequency: Seasonal, Monthly, Weekly, & Firehose.What's Next What's next depends on the frequency you choose to follow.
Firehose is the joke name for the places I post the most, Mastodon, Twitch, Instagram, and my anytime blog. There is no digest version, but humanissome.org currently displays an embed of my twitch stream (when live) & my latest posts to the fediverse (Mastodon). Some day I may change the first page of humanissome.org. If so I will move these embeds of my 2 preferred social media outlets to a sub-page.
Rob Weekly may not always be a status update. I might choose to write an essay about something other than me—Gasp—or more likely, interpret a topic from my personal point of view, as I've often done before (but not on a weekly schedule):
* 6 October 2024 Poetry for survival (mine & ours)
* 9 April 2025 Random lines in songs that I turn into mantras
* 27 October 2023 The ringing of the (notification) bell commands you
Rob Monthly may include a new essay, or links to recent writings, along with an update on my progress towards various goals.
Seasonal gives me an opportunity to reflect on long term projects.
- Visit this URL: https://paper.wf/seasonalrob/
- Receive an email newsletter: contact me at
big.changes.in2025🥰icloud.com[replace 🥰 emoji with @] & ask for Seasonal email - Subscribe to RSS: https://paper.wf/seasonalrob/feed
- Follow within the fediverse: @[email protected]
The Monthly & Weekly RobBlogs work the same, at their own unique addresses. The whole point of this “complicated” thing I'm initiating is to offer options so that others may choose their level of engagement. It is not enough to hope that a corporate algorithm will keep us connected. Or if it's your preference, feel free to drop me an email at
big.changes.in2025🥰icloud.com
[replace 🥰 emoji with @]; or text if you know my number. I have not been in good contact with friends and family in recent years. I'd like to change that.
How To Support Me Paintings & Things If you have room for a painting (or several) in your life, now is the time to speak up. Getting them into loving homes is more important to me than receiving money for them. I am making huge moves in 2025 that may lead to having to pay for storage and/or throwing art away. The same applies to many of my possessions. I do not have enough energy to carefully rehome everything. I need to hear from folks who want stuff. If you want something but don't have money to spend, it can be a loan until I retrieve it again some day. I do not expect to have a stable home in 2026. Financial Support I'm grateful to have a handful of monthly patrons even though I dislike Patreon the company & the interface. If you are willing to pledge a monthly amount I encourage you to try Liberapay, a nonprofit alternative. The nonprofit sites I prefer are clunky compared to their corporate counterparts, of course. Liberapay is secure. It respects privacy. It doesn't spam us or sell our info or show us ads. It is based in France. When making a pledge with Liberapay you can choose to use Stripe or Paypal for card processing. That is the only fee. I have big opinions on all this—in fact, every paragraph in this update could have been six pages! If you want to hear more, just ask me. (But what I mean by “lean” vs. “bloated” in the chart below is whether the company seeks to waste our time just to use their service.)
Ways To Show Financial Support
| One-time | Recurring |
|---|---|
| Zelle no fees, lean, instant | Liberapay lean, no additional fees, credit card processing fee |
| Venmo no fee, slow | Patreon bloated, fees |
| Ko-fi bloated, no additional fees, credit card processing fee | Ko-fi see entry at left |
| Cash App no fees, slow (? I think, no one has used it in years) | |
| PayPal credit card processing fee |
I do not wish to discourage you from giving using your preferred method. I'm happy when I receive a payment notification from any of them! In a discussion once as to whether I had a default method of getting paid, I replied with one of the truest things I've ever said:
| I accept money every way that it is offered to me. |
[1] I do not promise/threaten to continue to call it RQ (I like “Seasonal Rob” even though I do not even like the name Rob!) ↩️
[2] Thanks to a patron's gift when I reached out for monies specifically designated for web restructuring. The old school dot-com & dot-org are held at a reasonable fee, while some of my other URLs have used novelty suffixes (dot-art & dot-me). The controllers of those addresses do not operate like custodians of a vital utility. They act like storage unit landlords; once your stuff is inside their goal is to raise the price to the highest amount they can extract. Humanisso.me is a cute address but it goes away in May 2025.[3] With RMiddleton.art I made the panic decision to pre-purchase several years in a row before the dot-art registrations were raised 300%. Needless to say I now despise that landlord. When the pre-purchased contract expires (in '28 I think?) I will not renew. Rartsy.com is where I'll be. ↩️
[3] I can only hope that humanisso.me goes away after I choose not to renew it. That's not what capitalism does with expired addresses. What capitalism likes to do [4] is to have an internet registrar company take possession of all expired domain names. It costs them nothing to park a name among the thousands that they own. They sit on it, hoping that the entity who just lost the registration will regret it & that they can resell it to them for an exorbitant markup. The other nasty alternative is that scammers like to acquire expired addresses in hopes that someone will visit by mistake & create ad revenue (for doing nothing) or fall for an unsafe spam link. [5]
[4] Because capitalism's highest goal is to make money doing nothing. To turn a small amount of money into more money. Capitalism is existence centered around capital, and perverts the real value of goods & labor.
[5] Because capitalism sucks & ruins everything. [6]
[6] I should have stopped writing this an hour or so ago. It's 20 'til 2 as I'm ranting in these footnotes. I would erase them all but it's kind of a reminder of my satire magazine days. Notes nested in notes, by an author becoming more unhinged... Seriously though, I do hate capitalism as we know it.