UNION playing cards

My favourite deck of playing cards changes from time to time. Generally it happens when I get a new set of decks, or a kickstarter pledge arrives and I remember why I pledged for it in the first place.

The UNION deck from Theory 11 though, is one that turned up before Christmas, and has become my new favourite. It truly is a beautiful deck of cards, simple in design, but with a gorgeous tuck box, and the usual air cushioned finish.

The quality starts with the tuck box itself…

The tuck has a beautiful finish, with foiling and embossing all over. I hope the pictures show quite how nice it is. Once the cards themselves come out, you can see that they have a very stylish number and pip design, along with some stylised and attractive court cards. The back, which is a flat version of the design on the reverse of the tuck box, is also classy; clear, straight lines with gold and red/brown colouring.

It really is a wonderful deck to handle – to shuffle and to spread. I can’t recommend these cards enough. If you have a weekly card game going on, there’s no better way to make it a bit classier than to get yourself a deck of UNIONs to play with.

The UNION deck is made and sold by Theory 11, here. However, as this is quite a popular deck, you can also obtain it from a number of other sources, including JP Playing Cards in the UK, right here. I’m pretty sure you will also be able to find the UNION deck on Amazon, and eBay, as always.

January’s Spotify Discover Weeklies

Rather than posting my Monday Discover Weekly playlist every week, I thought I’d collect them all together and put up some links for the whole month. So January has brought four new Discover Weekly playlists. I can’t honestly say I’ve listened to these – just had a bit of a flick through to see if there was anything that caught my eye. I’m hoping that I’ll get a chance to play them out and have a good listen in the next few weeks.

So here’s your eight hours of Spotify Playlists for January. Enjoy.

4th January 2016

11th January 2016

18th January 2016

25th January 2016

 

New Music Day

I picked up a couple of new CDs this week (says the old fart who still likes physical media). I know the kids are all buying things via download services these days, but if I like an album, I do still like to have a physical copy. This is mainly because I like to rip all of my digital music to FLAC format these days. Amazon should be dropping them through my door later today.

Two of them came out in the last week: Night Thoughts by Suede is out today, and Not To Disappear by Daughter came out last Friday. Shulamith by Polica came out a while back, but I picked it up cheap as a lead in to the new Polica album coming out soon.

And as if by magic, you can actually listen to all three via the magic of Spotify…

Polica – Shulamith

Not To Disappear – Daughter

Night Thoughts – Suede

The Daughter album is growing on me. I’ve listened to it a couple of times now (mainly in the car on my drive home, so not ideal conditions), and I had my first listen of the Suede album, which sounds pretty good (although it was also a ‘car listen’). I haven’t listened to the Polica album yet, but hoping to listen to them all properly this weekend.

 

David Bowie RIP

Monday 11th January was a bit of a weird day. After having come down with a cold late on Sunday night and feeling as rough as a badger on Monday morning, I was expecting to spend the morning in bed being grumpy, coughing, spluttering and consuming lemsips (other cold medicines in a cup are available).

My alarm went off at about five minutes to seven (timed so I can catch 6 music’s Shaun Keaveny generally being a bit miserable and sounding unprepared as he takes a handover from Chris Hawkins). Rather than the usual short-tempered banter, all we heard was a handover saying that Shaun would be next.

As we were about to discover, news was just reaching BBC 6 Music that David Bowie had passed away that morning, the Monday after his 69th birthday, and only a few days after his most recent (and now, sadly, final) album Black Star was released.

I can’t claim to be a huge Bowie fan. I’ve never seen him live, and I’ve never bought one of his albums (or listened to one of them all the way through on Spotify). However, I am aware of the huge influence he had on bands and artists around the world, and there’s a surprising number of his tracks that I would always consider throwing on or including in a playlist.

What became clear on Monday morning though, was quite how much he meant to so many people. If ever you wanted an example of when DJs and music fans acted as one, then I would invite you to have a listen back to how Shaun Keaveny and Matt Everitt, followed by Lauren Laverne and Mark Radcliffe handled the news on iPlayer (UK only).

There’s a great article on the Guardian which documents the behind the scenes activity as the news came through. It makes me proud to be a listener of 6 music and Shaun Keaveny’s show in particular. Commercial radio couldn’t have come close.

For those who never appreciated his versatility (like me!), there are some great playlists on Spotify – the “This is: David Bowie” playlist of 50 tracks, as well as a “Best of Bowie” collection which was released in the last few years, but still contains some of his most iconic tracks. This is where services like Spotify, Deezer, et al come into their own. Streaming of Bowie tracks increased by 2000%+ on Spotify. I can now listen to any or all of his back catalogue at the click of a mouse. Brilliant.

Arcana Tarot Playing Cards

As I mentioned in a previous post, a lot of playing card decks come in pairs, with either a light/dark theme, or more commonly a red/blue variation. It’s a relatively simple way of offering multiple variations (and raising twice as much cash!) without too much effort on the part of the artist. If you collect cards as I do, you hate to only have one of a set!

One of the best light/dark deck combos that I’ve picked up in the last year is from another small card designer, the brilliant Dead On Paper. I’ve recently managed to pick up a deck of their previous design – Midnight Calaveras (the standard Calaveras deck seems sold out everywhere, and rapidly going up in value), and I’m sure they’ll feature on the blog at some point in the future. All the cards are designed by Chris Ovdiyenko.

But the deck I want to focus on here is the brilliant Arcana deck. It’s marked as a set of ‘Tarot’ playing cards, which sounds a little odd. There are Tarot Cards, and there are Playing Cards, but upon examining the tuck case and the artwork on the cards themselves it all becomes clear.

The detail on the tuck boxes is truly brilliant, with raised lettering and a raised & detailed Ouroboros (snake eating it’s own tail). It’s hard to show in these photos quite how brilliant the definition is, but hopefully I’ve been able to capture how great the details are before you’ve even taken the cards out of the box. When you open the box, you also see the foil interior, which is a classy touch. Once the cards come out, you’re able to see quite how brilliant the artwork is. There are customised aces and royalty for all four suits, and an exceptional four jokers, which are Tarot cards. Here are some shots of the light deck:

It’s hard to decide whether I prefer the light or dark decks. The red suits really pop on the dark decks, and they have a brilliant ‘scratched’ appearance. Here are some shots from the dark deck:

Here’s a close-up of the some numbered cards from the dark deck, with the brilliant ‘scratched’ appearance:

The cards, as always when printed by the USPCC have the air-cushioned finish, and slide and shuffle brilliantly.

I can’t speak highly enough of these cards. To me, they are one of the finest examples of the reason you can call decks of playing card ‘art’. The close-up detail of the court cards is fantastic – Chris Ovdiyenko is without doubt a brilliant artist/illustrator and his style suits these cards perfectly.

Alongside the decks of cards, I also managed to pick up a couple of brilliant ‘occult’ style coins as part of the kickstarter, which are available direct from the creator. I’d highly recommend you check those out too as a nice addition to the decks.

If you want to pick up a couple of these decks for yourself, they’re available from a variety of sellers, such as JP Playing Cards (in the UK), or directly from the creators on their website, Dead On Paper.

I’m planning on keeping my eye on these guys on Kickstarter. I can’t wait for their next deck!

Last Week’s Spotify Discover

One of the great things about Spotify is that every Monday morning there’s a brand new 2 hours-ish playlist generated for you based on stuff you’ve listened to, and stuff you might like.

It’s often surprisingly accurate. The only thing is that it updates every morning – so if you want to save the playlist you have to copy everything into your own version of the playlist, or it just disappears into the deep dark depths of t’interwebs.

I’m planning to try and save all of my weekly Discover playlists in 2016, but here’s my last one from 2015. I’m not vouching for it’s quality, though!

Rich’s Spotify Discover Weekly  Playlist for 28th December 2015

 

The cards that started it all…

The very first decks that I saw that turned me on to collecting custom playing cards was a deck from quite a small producer. I hadn’t gone looking for playing card on Kickstarter, but a videogame producer that I follow on Twitter (Brian Fargo of InXile Games) tweeted a link to this set of cards, and when I saw the artwork I was impressed at how great they looked in comparison to the very dull and formulaic playing cards that I had in my cupboard for, y’know actually playing cards with.

As with a lot custom decks that you find out there, the Bicycle Illusionist deck comes in two colour variations (light and dark in this case). A lot of decks come in variations of red/blue or light/dark, if not more. As an example, I now have four different colour variations of Theory 11’s Monarch deck (Gold, red, green and black, with the gold being very limited in number). The colour variation tends to refer to the backs and the tuck cases only, although light/dark variants often have the face cards represented differently too.

If you haven’t handled playing cards much since you were a kid, you may well be surprised by how smooth the cards are – they often seem to float (this is down to the finish applied to the cards as part of the production process).

There a quite a few major card producers around the world, but probably the most famous is the USPCC – the United States Playing Card Company. The USPCC have a long history of producing playing cards (you can read more here), but they are most well known for the Bee and Bicycle card brands. A large proportion of the decks I started picking up have the Bicycle branding, both as a mark of quality and for the way the logo looks on the tuck boxes themselves. More recently though I decided to move away from exclusively picking up decks with Bicycle branding, purely because I didn’t want to miss out on some tremendous decks of cards with great artwork.

So to get to the main point, the very first set of decks I pledged for on Kickstarter were the Bicycle Illusionist deck (I think a couple of other decks arrived just before them, so they don’t count as the very first decks I picked up). It was a combination of both the quality of the artwork on the card backs, as well as the design on the court cards (the Jacks, Queens and Kings, and sometimes the Aces) that drove me to backing them on the crowdfunding site. The artwork for the Illusionist deck was by the American artist Megan Wyreweden.

Here are a few shots of the cards to explain what I mean…

If anyone is interested in picking up a couple of the decks, they are still available from a number of sources:

From the original designer at Lux Playing Cards

or from Amazon or eBay

They’re definitely amongst my favourite decks, and will always be special as the decks that first got me started.

A New Year, A New Start

I think it’s been well over a year or two since I posted on the blog. I know I’ve renewed the domain at least once since I last posted, anyway.

So what with it being a new year and all, I thought I’d make a renewed effort to get my money’s worth from the domain 🙂

It gives me a chance to refocus the blog on a couple of things. The first is that I’ve started making recordings of gaming videos and posting them to my YouTube channel. At the moment, it’s very racing-game focused (there’s a playlist of Forza clips, some Project CARS hot laps and the most recent is a series of sprint stages from Codemasters’ awesome PC rallying sim Dirt Rally). The plan is to try and add some more clips and recordings of other types of games, both from my Xbox One, and from the PC. Technically I could also pull clips from the PS4, but I don’t have much in the way of PS4 games to record.

The second new focus for the blog is my latest collecting obsession – customised playing cards. I’ve always been a huge fan of playing cards – how they feel, how they shuffle, etc. but I wasn’t aware of quite how many customised decks were out there in the wild. I’ve gone from a half dozen to well over a hundred and fifty different custom decks from a huge number of artists, designers, magicians, and sellers. I can’t tell you how much I’ve spent so far, but I am constantly amazed by all the different decks and designs. I’m planning on using the blog to publicise new decks on Kickstarter that are being crowdfunded, to show off pictures of decks that I’ve acquired, and to just document some of the decks that I think need to be shown off.

At the end of last year I started posting some YouTube and Spotify music playlists to Facebook so that people actually had something interesting in their facebook feed rather than the usual bollocks of slightly racist posts from people who should know better, reposts of Britain First bollocks from people who really don’t know any better, pictures with supposedly ‘deep’ sayings on them, and pictures of people’s babies/kids. I stopped before christmas when I wasn’t well, but I may well start posting a few (under the RJFM banner) in the new year. Not every day as I was, because that took an awful lot of work, and advanced preparation – neither of which are my strong suit. But what better place than to post them than here on my own blog as well as the usual Facebook/Twitter combo?

And in amongst those three main topics, there’ll be the usual bollocks of politics, TV stuff shit about any ongoing health issues/crises as and when they happen. There may possibly be a little bit about work in an entirely non-specific way, to ensure that I’m not in breach of my employer’s social media policy. And there’ll be the occasional post about my ongoing attempts to learn Japanese and stuff about the various digital comics I’m reading, courtesy of Comixology.

So that’s the plan. A new year, and a new focus – incorporating more pictures, and more videos. And we start in the next few days with a post about where the playing card collecting began recently, with the Bicycle Illusionist deck from Lux Playing Cards.

 

Laid Up

Well, it’s been ages since I last wrote anything, and not just on this blog (although it has been fucking ages for the blog). That’s partly because I was busy on my 14-day trial for learning Japanese, partly just me being lazy. Writing started becoming a bit of a chore once I went back to work and was having to deal with an idiot of a project manager for 7 hours a day.

 

But now I’ve actually got no excuses with regards to work. I won’t be going back to work for some time, I think, and when I do, I’ve got a feeling I’ll be on “light” duties.

 

No, I haven’t resigned. And no, I haven’t been sacked (whoever shouted that from the back of the room!). I’ve actually been diagnosed with a blood clot in my left leg. If you’ve got the time, there’s a long story behind this… let’s go back to the beginning of how this all started.

 

One of many Dublin Bars

Weirdly, I don’t think I’ve been feeling 100% since I came back from Dublin way back at the start of December. I wouldn’t say everything stemmed from that. Nothing of the sort. In fact, I probably got more exercise on that trip, walking between pubs and walking around the city than I’ve got in ages.

 

But over that weekend, I think I finally smoked myself out. I took two packets of 20 camel lights over, and I smoked them at almost every opportunity. In fact, I ran out on the Sunday morning.

 

By the time I got home on the Sunday, I don’t think I have had a single moment where I felt like I fancied a cigarette. Which is brilliant, in it’s own way. The fact that I don’t see myself ever having another cigarette is great. A shame it’s taken me “smoking myself out” as it were to get to that stage; it’s probably not the best thing, but what can you do? Stopping smoking generally involves some form of willpower, which, in most circumstances, I’m not overly blessed with.

 

Anyway, having smoked myself out, I seemingly picked up a cold and chest infection, which took bloody ages to shake off. And when I say ages, I mean weeks. I felt ill over Christmas & New Year, which put a distinct downer on celebrations. I barely drunk anything, even though I had two and a half crates of wine sat underneath the kitchen counter. I really couldn’t face the prospect of drinking, plus I really wanted to enjoy the wine I had there, not to just drink it. So I didn’t touch any.

 

Eventually, in the new year, I went to see the doctor, as I’d coughed enough that when I was stood over a bowl of steaming water and I coughed up some phlegm, there was a spot of blood there. Only a tiny spot, but it scared me enough that I don’t think I coughed anything else up just in case there was more blood (stupid idea I know, but like most blokes, out of sight is out of mind). When I went to the doctor, I got some antibiotics (which a mate seemed quite peeved about, as his doctor had refused to give him any!). Those antibiotics finally did the trick; I was also referred for a chest x-ray. I’d never had a chest x-ray (or any type of x-ray) before, because I’ve never broken anything. The x-ray was a bit odd – I didn’t even have to take off my t-shirt! I was able to just walk in to the local hospital and get the x-ray done, although it did take me a bit of time to find the right place.

 

Having had the x-ray I kind of forgot all about it, and headed in to work – didn’t give it a second thought. I felt ok-ish after that; although not brilliant (I had the odd bout of panic attacks in work, which happens from time to time and I’ve learned to disguise them pretty well, although if people know me well, they might see that I’ve suddenly become a little less talkative than usual).

 

In the week or so after I having had the x-ray, I started feeling lumps in my throat, along with my throat feeling a bit scratchy. So I went back to the doctor earlier than I was planning to – and I felt slightly dismissed. Apparently, I had swollen lymph glands, which is really common and I kind of felt that the doctor wanted me out the door. While I was there though, she mentioned something that they’d found on the x-ray; something slightly “bulky” to the left side of my heart. Probably nothing for me to worry about, but I should probably keep my scheduled appointment later in the week to discuss the results.

 

Now, I’m never one for waiting for news (particularly medical news). Most of the time, the anticipation is worse than the news that’s likely to be delivered. It’s also a driver for my panic attacks to kick in again. So it’s fair to say over the next few days between doctor’s appointments, I felt lots of strange twinges in my chest that I was convinced were related to whatever this thing around my heart was, but were far more likely to be muscle strains from me propping myself up on one side or the other.

 

When I eventually went back to the doctor, he explained that this thing that had been identified on the x-ray was probably nothing – that it could have been that I was turned at a slight angle when it was taken. As they didn’t have anything to compare against, he suggested that I wait for a couple of weeks, and they’d do another one, then have a look at that and go from there.

 

The same day I talked about the x-ray results, I had a pain behind my left knee, on the inside of my leg. It made it slightly awkward to walk on, and so I was limping about a bit, to the amusement of one or two people from work (who shall remain nameless, so that they don’t feel guilty that they were mocking someone with a genuine injury). I went to Bristol that weekend, for the start of the 6 nations, and although it was a bit uncomfortable, I managed to walk from the train station to the pub ok (if a bit slowly).

 

After that weekend, I picked up another cough, so I thought the best thing to do would be to delay the chest x-ray slightly, so that the cough had cleared up – I didn’t want another thing on there that could be mistaken for something else.

 

I was planning to go back and have the chest x-ray at the end of this week, or early next week, but things have all been overtaken by where I am now.

 

When I woke up on friday morning, I didn’t feel great. I hadn’t got a huge amount of sleep. My left leg had been aching again, and I’d woken up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. But I got up, stuck my jeans on and hobbled down the stairs from the top floor (the leg was feeling a little dodgy, but nothing too bad).

 

I jumped in the car, and I’ll be honest – changing gear started to become a little bit painful. I tried to avoid changing gear if it was at all possible. When I got to work, I got to my desk – ironically my desk is about the furthest you could possibly walk to a desk in that building, logged in and immediately realised I was not going to be able to work. My leg was hurting, it was uncomfortable even to sit down. I typed up a short email to my line manager, and my PMs (including the one who’s been annoying me so much the last week or two), saying that I was going straight to the doctor to have my leg looked at, because I was in a lot of pain. I did manage to get what I thought was an excellent “fuck you” to the annoying PM into that email though, something along the lines of “Needless to say that means I won’t be updating your tracker” (referring to this document that has become the be-all and end-all of the project, and should be his job to update). It was a crumb of comfort at least, in amongst the increasingly painful situation with my leg.

 

This was a week after first diagnosis… can’t get my jeans leg over my calf any more

I immediately called the doctor’s office and got an emergency appointment. As I was in Cardiff, and it was already 9.30, I wasn’t going to be able to make a 9.55 appointment, but I said I’d get there as soon as I could. I ended up having to wait a while in the holding room, but eventually I hobbled in to see Dr C (who I’m not sure I’ve seen before). I mentioned that I’d felt that my calf was now really tight, because my jeans were pulled tight around my calf – and I had no idea how bad it had got. So I whipped off the jeans, and at that point I realised how swollen it had got. Quite honestly, it was fucking massive. And rock hard too, although not painful, weirdly. I gave the doc a bit of history about the pain behind my knee, etc. and after a quick check on my balls (which was a little unexpected, I’ll be honest!), she decided the best thing was to get straight down to the local hospital for the DVT clinic, to look for a blood clot.

 

I managed to drive to my parent’s house, but that was me done for driving because changing gear was getting really painful. The doctor called me there, and my Dad took me down to the hospital while my Mum collected my prescription of anti-inflammatories. I got to the DVT clinic, and after assessment (and measuring both my calves and thighs to see quite what the disparity was), they arranged for me to have a doppler scan after lunch. A doppler scan, I discovered, is just an ultrasound, like they give pregnant women, and like the one I had for my stomach a couple of years ago.

 

What they discovered is that I did have a blood clot in my left leg (seemingly quite a large one). I went back to the DVT clinic and we started talking about treatment.

 

My belly after 8 days of injections

This is where it gets fun (sarcasm). I had to have an injection into my stomach, and I have to give myself two over the weekend – one of which I’ve done already. It stung a bit after I’d done it, but it seems ok now. Was easy-ish enough to do, although obviously not something I’d choose to do in the general scheme of things.

 

I have new-found respect for type I diabetics.

 

As well as that, I have to go to a clinic at the hospital every day for the next 5-10 days until they are able to thin out my blood, using a drug called warfarin (which also doubles as rat poison – who knew?). In order for the hospital to work out how much warfarin I need to take, they have to take some blood each day (woohoo!), which is never my favourite thing. Even more so when apparently, it’s quite hard to find a vein in my arm. I guess the upside of the news is that it would be very tricky for me to be an intravenous drug user (good to know!). Anyway. They took some blood on friday (looked like an armful, ho ho!), and I didn’t pass out, so that’s a good sign. I guess I’ll get used to it. Side note – I am getting used to it, although I still can’t watch the needle going in/blood coming out – I open my eyes again once the cotton wool ball is on my arm.

 

So now, it’s a case of go home (or back to Parent’s at least, until I’m able to get up and down stairs reasonably), and take the injections, and the anti-inflammatories until the swelling goes down. I will be on warfarin for at least 3, possibly 6 months. I also get to see a haematologist on monday (blood doctor). I’m not going to be in work at least until my blood is thinned out sufficiently that I don’t need to go to the clinic at the hospital.

 

So that’s life for the next few weeks/months. Funny how things get thrown at you. I am quite proud of the way I was defiant to the last with my twat of a project manager. Good to see there’s still a fighting spirit in there. In fact, I think the ache in my leg was driving me to being increasingly annoyed with the guy. He deserved what he got from me, don’t get me wrong, but my bluntness was probably related to the increasing annoyance at my leg.

 

This is all kind of old news to me already – I wrote this back on the 15th Feb, and wasn’t sure about posting it. But I think it’s safe to do so now, particularly now I’m not worried about my condition being life-threatening 😉 I’ve got another update to come that’s already written, but I’ll save that for a few days…

Why I Love Kickstarter

Normally this blog is about things that annoy me, or make me angry. But not this time! This time I want to talk about one of my favourite things on the internet. No, it’s not The Onion (which I barely visit these days due to their ludicrous paywall for foreign readers). It’s KICKSTARTER.

“Crowdfunding” as it’s known, is not especially new. The idea is that creative people who need money to start/continue/complete a project can make a request for a specific sum of money, and people can pledge money for that project. Backers then receive various ‘rewards’ depending upon how much they decide to pledge. If, however, the project doesn’t reach it’s funding goal within the time limit it’s been set, then none of the pledges are taken. It’s an all-or-nothing deal.

So far, I’ve got a pretty successful record on Kickstarter so far, in terms of backing projects that hit their funding goals. Only one of the nine projects I’ve backed so far failed to get it’s funding. In fact, that project was technically cancelled way before it’s deadline because it was quite clear that there was no way it was going to hit it’s very ambitious target. That one project, for people who were interested – was a manga-style comic called n.e.o.n. which looks really good, and I’m definitely hoping it eventually gets published.

There genuinely are projects for everyone on Kickstarter. The first project I ever backed was a sequel to one of my favourite videogames from when I was a kid – Wasteland, an apocalyptic role-playing game. I never really got into any other role playing games – they were all orcs and wizards and spells and stuff – and I hated that stuff. But Wasteland was great. And when the original designers created a kickstarter to raise funds to make a sequel, over 20 years after the original came out, I had to be in. I pledged $100 to Wasteland 2. The project was aiming to raise $900,000 – and finished up with pledges of close to $3 million. In the first week when the amount pledged was going up by the minute, it was fun just to keep refreshing the page, to see how many people were jumping on board!

So that game is probably due around October this year. I can’t wait. But in the meantime, I’ve got plenty of other Kickstarter bits & pieces turning up.

I pledged money to one of my favourite bands so that they could complete the mastering of a new remix CD. I’ve backed a new cartoon by the mad genius behind Ren & Stimpy (John Kricfalusi). That’s due out in a couple of months. I backed a new video game console, based on the Android operating system – that should arrive in March. I backed a build-your-own arcade unit, using the raspberry pi low-cost linux computer – that should turn up sometime in April.

And the one that I’m most excited about – and one project that is still open and raising funds (and that I’d really like to see get to the finish line safely) is this one: We Are Monsters, a film by John Shackleton. This is a local film production company, who filmed a lot of their previous film (Panic Button) just down the road from where I work in Cardiff Bay. The film that they are raising funds for is expected to be shot in the South Wales/Bristol area predominantly (the project is based out of Cardiff, which is how I found it). And I’ve pledged money so that I can spend a day on set, be an extra in a big crowd scene at the end of the film – and GET MY NAME IN THE CREDITS!! How awesome is that? For a measly £100. The production team are all being very active on twitter and facebook too. The Producer/Director John Shackleton is taking questions over Twitter & Facebook, and there’s regular announcements of everyone who pledges. I’ve included links below for anyone interested in either pledging or just want to know more about the film. If you’ve ever dreamt of being in a movie, or seeing your name up there in the credits at the end of a movie (and are probably not going to end up making one yourself), then here’s your perfect opportunity.

While I’ve backed predominantly media-related projects (games, animation, films, etc.) there’s still plenty of other things to back on Kickstarter that are just awesome. Just go to the site and search for projects in the city closest to you, and I’m sure you’ll find something that is worth donating to/backing – even if it’s just to feel proud of being generous. As an example – I stumbled across this one; a community bakery raising funds for a new oven, in a building just opposite the Liverpool football ground in Anfield Road. People trying to improve their local community, build a business and create a community. I don’t live anywhere near Liverpool, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to back them, even for just a few quid.

So, go on, take a look at Kickstarter. And while you’re at it, take a look at Sponsume and Indiegogo too. I might not be the most creative person in the world, but I love backing people who are.

http://www.facebook.com/wearemonstersmovie

http://www.wearemonstersmovie.com/