Using Community Funding to Grow

Happy Friday!

I’ve been really swamped at work for the last couple of weeks, so I’m extremely excited for it to be Friday today. We’ve also been experiencing a lot of rain over the last couple of weeks and this weekend from today to Monday is supposed to be sunny before it gets rainy again, so I’m especially excited to have a bit of free time to hopefully get outside and do a bit of stuff in the garden.

It’s also Ostara this weekend which is a pagan celebration of the Spring Equinox and is often celebrated by observing the coming of life back into the ground. Some of our seedlings are really outgrowing their little pods already, so we planned to do a bunch of transplanting this weekend which fits in perfectly for this celebration. Even though we’ll be doing a lot of that transplanting inside, I’m still grateful for the warmer, sunnier weather to make to seem just a little nicer. I always have more energy when it’s nice and sunny outside. It’s a big reason that we have a house full of floor-to-ceiling windows.

Using Patreon to Grow

For those of you who are regular readers and are particularly observant, you may have noticed a couple of small changes to this blog recently. As of this past week, I’ve been able to get my payment methods all sorted and connected to my East of Urban Patreon page so that I could make my first payout. With that payout, I upgraded the WordPress.com plan that this blog is using so that I could both remove ads and so that I could change my domain name to EastOfUrban.com.

Both of those changes are really important to me. I strongly believe that advertising is an absolute scourge on humanity as it is the absolute largest distributed propaganda campaign used to strengthen the footholds of Capitalism through manipulating people by their insecurities and desires into consuming things that they don’t need. Clearly, I don’t want to be any part of that if I can absolutely help it, so it’s nice to be able to remove ads from my site.

The name change is also a really big deal for me too. About a year and a half ago, I started going by the name Rose instead of my given name of Patrick when I came out as nonbinary. I was named Patrick after St. Patrick and for many reasons, I just felt like it never suited me. Even before I came out as nonbinary, I spent a lot of my time trying to find a name that suited me better through trying out different nicknames in college or going by a silly french name in my art classes or developing different pen names and online handles.

I found the name Rose while staring at a gorgeous and meaningful art print that my friend Tashi got for me. It was perfect and I couldn’t imagine anything fitting me better. While Rose is typically considered a feminine name, I feel like that’s a very limiting view for that name in the same way that stereotypical feminine traits is a very limiting view of what a person can be considering how complex it is to be any sort of individual. In any case, Rose felt like a perfect name for me because it is both soft and sharp, has both meaningful herbal and culinary connections since most of the fruit we eat is in the Rose family, and it’s the name of my great grandmother who took care of me when I was really little.

I’ve spent the last year and a half trying to replace instances of where I’m identified as “Pat” with Rose to represent this new identity. In a lot of places, it has been really easy since it generally just requires changing my account settings in places like LinkedIn and Facebook. It’s been harder in places where I’ve used Pat as part of my username or URLs such as for my “professional” email address or the URL for my blog from the time period that I was trying to promote my Graphic Design brand as “Pat East Design.”

So being able to afford this change to my blog is super meaningful on a number of levels and I couldn’t have done it without the support of a couple of friends who support me on the East of Urban Patreon page. If you’re a patron and you’re reading this, I really appreciate your support.

In the future, I’m hoping to use proceeds that I earn from Patreon support to continue to level up both my garden and the blog. I’ve got my eye on a small video camera that I would love to have to take videos of the garden as we make progress and I’ve been thinking of buying a cargo van that could be used for hauling gardening supplies and for creating a very lite #vanlife build to go camping a bit more comfortably and maybe do some road trips when the world opens up a bit more.

If you’d like to see more from this blog, I highly encourage you to become a patron as well. The more patrons I have, the more I’ll be able to invest in content creation and I would love to make this a part-time gig someday.

Paying it Forward

I was fortunate enough to have more money in my Patreon fund than I needed to upgrade the blog at this time, so I want to pay that fortune forward to other creators because I know just how hard it is to make a living as a creator in this world.

With my first little bit of extra cash, I’ve decided to support Ashe’s friend Vox who is on Patreon as agenderblob. They are an absolutely amazing nonbinary artist living in the Tacoma area of Washington and are training to be a tattoo artist. Their illustration work is absolutely phenomenal and I hope that I can get a tattoo from them one of these days when they get established in a shop.

If you’re in love with Vox’s art style even a little bit as much as I am, I highly encourage you to become one of their patrons. They have a tier that is as low as $3 if you just want a little art in your life, but at the $10 tier, they will mail you monthly stickers that they make themselves which is totally dope.