Pour Us the Coffee

"You pouring the coffee, with those blood red lips

Kiss me please

Don't say anything at all

Death will soon come calling

Please, because I'm begging..."

...that's what Mr. Sakurai said. We're going to say it more directly: BUY US COFFEE. That is to say, we have set up an account with Ko-Fi, which enables you to pay money to our pain.

What is this Ko-Fi, you ask? It's a "tip jar" platform, which allows fans to support creators whose work they enjoy. Click the "Buy Me a Coffee" button in the right-hand corner of the page, and it will automatically send you to our Ko-Fi page, where you can send us a donation that is roughly equivalent to the price of a coffee, or you can even buy us multiple coffees, if you so choose. No, it's not real coffee. The "coffee" is just a stand-in for support, to make the whole money thing less awkward. Every time you buy us a coffee, you are contributing to our ability to pay our living expenses, which means that we don't have to spend as much time working at "real work" tasks to earn money, and can in turn spend more time writing translations, blog posts, and whatnot for y'all.

We have started this because you readers suggested it, so if you don't buy us coffee after all, we might feel the teensiest bit let down. Not to be passive-aggressive or anything. Just sayin'.

Perhaps you're wondering why we've opted for Ko-Fi at this point, rather than Patreon, as we discussed in the previous post. The reasons are manifold:

- Patreon's website is a maximally confusing nightmare largely devoid of helpful info and stuffed to the gills with irrelevant videos we don't want to watch (Patreon people, if you're reading this, consider this a suggestion to improve the usability of your site!)

- Patreon's model encourages creators to produce exclusive content for patrons (people who donate). We find exclusive content to be too neoliberal capitalist for our tastes, at least in the context of this blog. We know that plenty of you probably can't afford to donate even if you wanted to, but we still want you to be able to read our content, since once upon a time we were a broke young thing reading free articles online just like you.

- Patreon's model encourages serialized content on a monthly basis, but that model doesn't work as well for NGS/Blog-Tick, given that the goings-on in Buck-Tickistan are sporadic, and our personal and work commitments outside of NGS/Blog-Tick fluctuate wildly from week to week.

- Patreon takes a 5% cut out of donations, and Ko-Fi takes nothing. Everything you donate to us reaches us, except for the bit that gets eaten up as PayPal fees, but, y'know.

- Ko-Fi lets you support our work in general, rather than paying for any sort of specific perks, which works better for us, because... what would those perks be, anyway? We'd offer to Photoshop your face onto the body of a Buck-Tick member of your choice, but realistically, that would take so much time it wouldn't be worth it.

HOWEVER.

We'd like to offer something special to generous supporters, so if there's a project you want us to do, and you buy us a bunch of coffees, we'll make that project a priority  (assuming it's relevant to the mission of the site, yadda yadda). Whether there's a song you want us to analyze, an album you want us to review, and interview you want us to translate, or an aspect of Japanese culture you want us to cover, the more coffees you buy us, the more likely we are to do it, and sooner. If the amount of coffees you bought us isn't quite enough for the scale of the project, we can make it a goal and invite others to contribute. In the free spirit of the open internet of the 90's, we're going to leave the exact number of coffees up to you for the moment - just bear in mind that obviously, larger, longer projects require more coffee to finish (including literal coffee). 

Also, y'all have been asking for short interpretations/explications of individual Buck-Tick songs. As a tangible reward for your support, if you buy us 3-4 coffees, we'll interpret a song of your choice, as soon as we have time (within a week or so, unless all Hell breaks loose).

Unrelated fun fact: "pandemonium" literally means "ALL the demons."

We look forward to drinking all our coffee on you from now on.