Hey Folks! It’s been a long time (Years!) without consistent updates coming from my corner of the north GA mountains. There are lots of reasons for that, and most of them come down to time commitments and my dayjob, but I’ve got some news: As of earlier this week, I’m not working a day job. I still run Analog Revolution Records, Ellijay Coffeehouse, GA Mountain Coffee Roasting, Mountain Town Toys, Mountain Town Antiques, New Ellijay Television, the Ellijay Makerspace, Mountain Town Radio, Mountain Town Technology, the podcasts Jupiter’s Ghost and Expedition Sasquatch, and I’m working to build the infrastructure and tooling for our Community Media Network, among a few other things, but I’m not giving 40 hours of my life to a company that can’t do me the basic dignity of speaking to me honestly and respectfully anymore, and that’s liberating. So, what am I going to do instead?

Yeah! What are you going to do?

Well, it’s media production time. Over the last several years, I have devoted a huge portion of my scant freetime to producing and distributing media, digitizing old television shows, and writing about the creation and distribution of media at the human scale, but my efforts have been slowed by the demands (both time and mental energy) of my day jobs.

I’ve decided that the best path forward is to spend my 40 hours of Day Job energy each week on the creation, curration, analysis, and distribution of media (and creating tools to simplify the aforementioned media tasks.) We’re aiming for monthly releases from Expedition Sasquatch and Jupiter’s Ghost, as well as newly digitized archives from the collection, regular blog posts and newsletters, and probably some other video productions.

I am hoping that I can transform my small successes in blogging, open media production, free software advocacy, public domain archival and curration, and making weird stuff on the internet in to something that pays my bills and keeps food on my table.

I’m trying to do this durring an economic downturn, without youtube, without twitter, without facebook (and, when I can manage it, without patreon) because that aligns with my values. Maybe I can, maybe I can’t.

I am not at all sure this will work, but I don’t know that I could live with myself if I didn’t try it. I’m in a position of priveledge at the moment that lets me take this risk, but it is a risk.

Okay, so what?

So, if you’re a long time reader and supporter of the work that I do here, consider supporting me on patreon. In the near future, I will also be rolling out a (still paypal based, unfortunately) non-patreon subscription which will get you access to the same benfits, and perhaps even a few more. I’ll be talking about that here, and on patreon, and in my newsletter.

If you don’t feel like giving me some money to feed this experiment and see what kind of wacky stuff I can create, but you still want to keep up with what I have going on, sign up for my newsletter. I’ll be sending updates out monthly (at a minimum) or weekly (at most!) starting today.

Anything else?

Well… yeah!

I mentioned a lot of things I have in flight at the top of this post, but each of them is a way you can support me more or less directly, so I’m going to spell some of them out more explicitly.

For free, you can:

• Listen to music from Analog Revolution on bandcamp (or spotify or whatever)
• Watch New Ellijay Television online or on the New Ellijay Television Roku channel.
• (I could list a lot of other things you could watch. We release somewhere between 5 and 10 new videos every week, but you get the picture.)
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Read the zine I wrote about the need for community media (for free!)
• Play New Ellijay Television in your business, to your customers (this doesn’t make as much sense if you’re not in Ellijay, but I’d still appreciate it.)
• Listen to mountaintown raido, and encourage your friends to do the same.
• Tell your friends about one of the things we’re producing.

For money, you can:

• Buy the music my record label releases, from our website (or on bandcamp or whatever)
• Buy some of our coffee! (I’m particularly partial to Jackalope Joe, an Ethiopian bean.)
• Buy a copy of the zine I wrote about the history of community media, and it’s future.
• Buy toys from our toystore (to be fair, this one helps my dad more than it helps me, as he runs most of the toystore stuff. (but I pay him to do it, and it’s easier to do that when toys are selling. (That’s economics (or maybe the circle of life.))))
• Advertise with New Ellijay Television (packages start at $100/month, fill out the contact form for more info, or reach out to me directly via the fediverse at @ajroach42@retro.social or matrix @ajroach42:talk.ellijaymakerspace.org)
• Sponsor one of our podcasts or video productions (There’s an Executive Producer tier on patreon right now, but I’m open to exploring other methods of sponsorship, just reach out through your method of choice.)
• Buy some t-shirts from the makerspace. We screenprint these ourselves.
• Just give me money.

This is just a begpost.

Well, yeah, kind of. I’m trying something new, and that means I have to talk about it. I value transparency, this is me living that value.

So, you know, come along for the ride.

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