Melissa Avery-Weir 0:00
Hello and welcome to Audacious Compassion, a podcast where we talk about how to find compassion and empathy in everyday life. I am Melissa Avery-Weir.
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:12
And I’m Gregory Avery-Weir.
Melissa Avery-Weir 0:13
And we did not get a prompt for December. So this is going to be just a short hello episode, essentially.
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:22
I think our first order of business is: happy holidays. Happy solstice. Happy Christmas, or New Year’s, or whatever you celebrate.
Melissa Avery-Weir 0:32
Yes, definitely. And I hope it was peaceful. I know this can be really a stressful time. People dealing with family.
So I hope everyone’s has been as peaceful and as fun as they want it to be.
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:47
So this is going to be a short one. We’re just going to chat a little bit about a few things that are going on. If you want a full episode, then please send in a prompt for us, a question or a session for us to discuss and we’ll, we’ll talk about it in January. Yep. So how have you been, Melissa? What has your month been like?
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:09
It’s been a lot of fun. I went to Germany–
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:11
Germany?
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:13
Yes. To Nuremberg, Germany, in the state of Bavaria, or Bayern. I don’t know how that became Bavaria. But there it is. Yeah. So I spent about a week there, if you exclude travel,
which was long and it was awesome. We were primarily there for the Christmas markets and to sort of soak in the history and the sights of, of Nuremberg.
So we did so. This was me and my younger sibling.
It was seven days of out of country shenanigans. It was great. But I’m tired. I got back Christmas Eve evening. So I just kind of was a zombie be on Christmas. But–
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:02
You slept very late.
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:03
I did. But it was great. It was it was a wonderful trip. But I’m really glad I went especially ticket to spend that much time with my younger sibling. I think that is actually the most amount of time we have spent together since I went to college. So.
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:19
Yeah, when they were real young.
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:21
They were… Yeah, they were four when I went to college. Yep. So it’s interesting.
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:26
And if you want to get more details on that trip, Melissa has been posting blog posts on irrsinn.net I r r si n n.net for each day. And there’s pictures and videos and stuff. It’s really cool.
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:41
Yeah, we’ll link it in the show notes. How was your Christmas?
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:46
My holiday’s been pretty good. I have been a little more productive lately in things that I care about. I’ve been figuring out how I want to spend my time and how I want to get projects that I care about done when I also need to, like pay the rent. And lately I’ve had that gig where I can work not a full 40 hour week, which fortunately, I can afford to do.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:11
That’s awesome. Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:12
Yes, it’s very, very nice. It means that I’ve been able to spend time working on other things, and figuring out ways to get certain amounts of work done. So I’ve got a new podcast that we’ll talk about in a little bit. But I also have been working on my Patreon situation.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:33
Ah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:34
So I’ve got a Patreon at patreon.com/GregoryAveryWeir, where people can support some of the writing and other work I do. And back in September, I had a good rush when I was actually unemployed, a good rush of productivity on that doing new podcast episodes, and so on. And then that kind of lapsed, and one of the reasons that elapsed is when I wasn’t working on a personal project, just as much I had switched it to pay per release, which is one of the options on Patreon.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:05
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:06
And that led to a situation where I kind of felt like, Oh, well, I should focus on things that are proper releases, and well, what counts is a proper release and all of that.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:15
You don’t want to do too many, because that suddenly this like, glut of costs on people.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:22
Yeah, yeah. Like, I don’t want to, I only want to charge people as many times as they expect. Because if I do more than that, a) I’ll just hit their monthly limit and I won’t be getting the full advantage. Or b) I’ll just be a jerk.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:36
Right.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:37
So I’ve switched it back to a monthly thing. And I’m actively trying to be okay, with just releasing little trickles of things like, Hey, here’s this thing I’m working on that’s in progress. Here’s this side thing. Hey, here’s this stuff I’m doing that, you know, maybe isn’t technically just me like Audacious Compassion or work, I do at Future Proof. But if you want to support my work, well, you’re also supporting that. So here’s news on that.
Melissa Avery-Weir 5:05
Right. That’s awesome.
Gregory Avery-Weir 5:06
Yeah, I’m feeling better about that. And it means that I’ve actually been releasing stuff and I’ve been working on little projects that I hadn’t been working on for a long time. And it’s, it’s pretty cool. So I’m feeling good about that. Next month is going to be really when like, it’ll be my first full month doing that. And so will be like putting up a poll for certain tiers of Patrons to ask them what I should be working on.
Melissa Avery-Weir 5:27
Nice.
Gregory Avery-Weir 5:28
I’m interested to find out how that goes.
Melissa Avery-Weir 5:30
Yeah, yeah. So since we don’t have a full episode of this this month, there are a couple of other places where you can hear our dulcet tones at far more length.
One of them is Greg’s new podcast:
Gregory Avery-Weir 5:48
That is Tabletop Garden. It is an “actual play” role playing podcast, where you just hear actual recordings of us playing a tabletop role playing game. And it’s dedicated to interesting characters and short campaigns. So each campaign might be only a few one hour episodes, or maybe, you know, 10 one hour episodes at the most. We also discuss out of character issues surrounding the podcast as we work. So we’re dedicated to playing with intention and maintaining our personal values. And each episode, we take a time out to be like, hey, how, how are things going? How are we how do we feel about this aspect. In our pilot campaign, Melissa raised some really good issues surrounding colonialism and the weirdness of post-apocalyptic settings in fiction and how that sometimes does odd things with the views of humanity. But the first first micro campaign is Mechanical Oryx. In our campaign, we’re in a solar punk post-apocalypse where everyone is playing weird mechanical creatures, mostly oryxes, who are investigating why peace is breaking down in this post-apocalyptic community.
Melissa Avery-Weir 7:05
I thought you’re going to explain what an oryx is.
Cuz nobody knows.
Gregory Avery-Weir 7:09
Cool antelope, cool horns. They’re, they’re neat looking.
Melissa Avery-Weir 7:13
And the second place you will be able to hear us soon is over on the Future Proof Podcast, futureproofgames.com. Our December episodes a little unusual, instead of it being kind of a status update of what we’re working on, and some things we’re excited about, it’s a follow up to a strategy meeting that we had back in November. So we’ve been sort of shifting our priorities as a company and just sort of as as two people wanting to do creative work. And so this meeting was okay, so we talked about all these things. There are some things we had to follow up on, like, what is our accountant say about something? Or what’s our next game that we want to work on? How are we going to structure things going forward? So it’s a longer episode in that mixed with my travel is kind of why it’s not out yet. I need to do transcriptions and all that sort of stuff for it. But yes, that will be out soon. So you can subscribe over on futureproofgames.com.
Gregory Avery-Weir 8:09
And then I’ve got a podcast of I own that’s about the art of interaction that’s at ludusnovus.net. L u d o s n o u s.net that I hope I should be getting an episode out soon. My patrons have already gotten a preview of it. But this one is on transcendentalism, gentrification, and the procedural rhetoric of Stardew Valley.
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:29
I do love me some Stardew Valley.
Gregory Avery-Weir 8:31
So yeah, we’ve done our plugs. We’ve done our update. I think that’s about all we’ve got for today.
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:36
You can find me over on Mastodon. I’m melissaaveryweir, at mastodon..social
Gregory Avery-Weir 8:42
And I’m Gregory Avery-Weir and you can find me on Twitter at GregoryWeir and I’ve been more active on mastodon lately, so you can check that out at gregoryaveryweir at mastodon.social.
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:53
Thank you all for listening, and we will talk to you again in January.