Hello, backers!
It’s been a turbulent month for our core volunteers. One had to take a break for health reasons, one had to step back when things got crazy at work, and one has...
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Essential Randomnesss
about 1 month ago
It’s time to S-S-S-S SHIP!
Hello everyone,
It’s time! Our most time-consuming projects are winding down, our rewards are ready to mail, and our packing elves have assembled, which means it’s time to smash...
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Essential Randomnesss
about 2 months ago
A Good Time for Goodies – Your Digital Goodies Pack Is Here!
If you've been following along with our campaign updates, you know we've been working hard to get our promised pack of digital goodies out to our backers—and now it's finally he...
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Dove
about 2 months ago
Collecting Volunteers, Distributing Merch
Hello, backers!
We’ve decided to add a “general company news” section to our backer updates for anything not explicitly related to fulfilling our BackerKit campaign obligations...
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Essential Randomnesss
3 months ago
Reminder: See You at CitrusCon this Friday!
tl;dr: we'll be presenting our talk "Rebuilding Community on the (fujo)Web" at CitrusCon at 6PM EDT this Friday August 23rd, and you can send us questions using this form.
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Dove
3 months ago
CitrusCon + Campaign/Finance/Law
Greetings, backers!
“Heads up: there's a stream today at 3 PM PDT if you want to jump in! We'll be working on some wallpapers for your digital pack.”
We here at FujoCoded LLC ...
It’s been a turbulent month for our core volunteers. One had to take a break for health reasons, one had to step back when things got crazy at work, and one has had to stop work for two weeks and counting due to an unresolved internet outage. Yikes!
There’s no denying it slowed us down, but we know these kinds of personal setbacks come with the territory of having a small, volunteer-driven team, and we certainly didn’t let it stop us. We’ve got plenty of juicy updates for you this month 😉
FujoCoded, LLC: Company Credit
Ask And Ye Shall Receive: We got a great response to our request for volunteers! We’ve taken on two people to assist with video editing, and an experienced project manager to help us tackle task management. Work has already started, and we’re looking forward to sharing our progress with you in the following months. Still, we can always use some more help in these areas! If you’d like to join our new volunteers, reach out at [email protected]!
Taskmaster Torch-Passing 1: Our beloved task coordinator, Leedie, is taking some time off due to a busy time at her day job. We’re very grateful to Leedie for sticking it out through three major multi-part tasks: digital reward pack, digital zine preview, and backerkit reward shipping. With Leedie’s help, the team was able to coordinate work despite our highly decentralized and “slipping-work-in-the-cracks-of-dayjob” environment. We look forward to more adventures together when she’s free to return!
Taskmaster Torch-Passing 2: …and we were very very lucky to have a new volunteer come in to help us design a system that is less labor-intensive on the task coordinator side—we’re finally in the market for some dedicated task management software rather than relying on a hand-coded Google Sheet. Our new taskmaster took a hard look at our practices and made a great list of recommended improvements that we’ll work on implementing in the coming months.
Secret $upporter Store Section: As mentioned last month, our new intern Fox has been assigned to work on the delivery system for our $upporter perks. Our first perk-delivery method is to add a $upporters-only section to the FujoCoded store, where supporters can use a password to access exclusive items. The necessary coding tasks are all laid out, and Fox has been familiarizing herself with React and NextJS to prepare for the work! Hopefully her internet will be restored and allow her to dive in soon.
Recent Progress on our BackerKit Campaign
Signed, Sealed, Delivered—it’s yours: We sent out the Digital Goodies Pack! A couple of supporters alerted us that the goodies couldn’t be downloaded as a group due to how GDrive shortcuts work. We quickly added some pre-made zip files to address the issue, and everything seems to have been smooth sailing from there. We hope you enjoyed your rewards. If you haven’t seen them yet, take this chance to go check them out! The announcement is in your email box, but let us know if you need the link sent again…and what you think 🤔
Locked & Loaded: The “confirm your address” email went out last weekend, and now all your shipping addresses are locked in! If you believe there’s an error with your locked address, please let us know at [email protected] as soon as possible and we’ll do our best to catch your order before it goes out.
Pack dynamics: A friend of Ms Boba’s came to stay with her out here on the (way too) sunny West Coast. Given the trying economic times, said friend has opted to pay rent in packing assistance and much-needed moral support during scary indie horror games. The two of them have been hard at work this week making sticker packs. All the sticker-only reward shipments have been packed, with tracking numbers inputted into Backerkit and everything. You know what they say—friends ought to stick together!
What’s Next for the FujoCoded BackerKit
Dis-Countdown: The store discount system has been implemented and the discount codes themselves have been assembled, so all that remains is sending them out! You can expect to get them in your email sometime in the coming week.
Pack, pack, pack, pack it up: Packing sure is full of unforeseen perils! As she was getting the sticker shipments together, Ms Boba ran out of thank-you cards to include in the packages! Once these difficulties are resolved, packing will recommence, to be followed by shipping. Those of you expecting physical rewards will soon receive tracking numbers via email. Wish us luck wrangling BackerKit’s system🤞
Around the FujoVerse
Word on the street
FujoTube: Remember that talk our founder Ms Boba gave at CitrusCon? It’s now available for anyone to watch on the CitrusCon Youtube account. Multiple viewers said it restored their hope for the internet, and we’ve also had some great discussion of the content here on tumblr. If you want to help us spread the good word, you can find our talk release announcements on all major socials: Bluesky | Tumblr | Mastodon | Twitter
Seeing Skies of Blue: Appropos of Musk’s latest nonsense, we decided to fill in our social media grid all the way by getting a Bluesky account for FujoGuide. Now, as they say, "all skeet skeet, motherf****rs!"
Editorial Oversight: In the Fandom Coders discord server, the need for a high-quality all-purpose post editor that can be used across different fandom projects is a recurring subject. Many projects need a modern, next-gen editor that feels good to use, including not only BobaBoard but also future projects FujoCoded is considering. Our founder Ms Boba had thus already been having thoughts in this direction herself, and will be inviting any interested Fandom Coders folks to join her in discussing the broader question and tackling some of the practical aspects in the coming months!
Hang Out with FujoCoded Live on Twitch 💬✨
Once the digital preview of Vol. 0, Issue 1: Git is sent out, our founder Ms Boba will need to start replenishing her personal finances while continuing to build up FujoCoded LLC…and that means finding contract work. Her first step will be to tidy up her personal/professional website to showcase her work and skill—and what better time to do that than on a weekly stream? In early November, she’ll return to streaming twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. Her Thursday schedule is below, but you can double-check her streaming schedule page for information about potential Monday streams.
October
Thursday, October 24 @ 3pm PDT: Let’s explore the Astro Content Layer
Thursday, October 31 @ 3pm PDT: BobaBoard Stream - Connecting to Discord via API
November
Monday, November 4 @ 3pm PST: Let’s build MY Webs…Résumé!
Thursday, November 7 @ 3pm PST: A Fandom Editor Polish-Up
Monday, November 11 @ 3pm PST: Résumé Website BTS
Thursday, November 14 @ 3pm PST: A Fandom Editor Mystery Episode
Monday, November 18 @ 3pm PST: Résumé Website BTS
FujoStore Highlights
Charm Offensive: This month, we’re highlighting some of our pre-FujoCoded merchandise! Everything in the Charm section was designed and produced as BobaBoard merch and features BobaBoard’s (and now FujoGuide’s) mascot Boba-tan. These clear acrylic charms go great on a phone case, where they can remind you to relax and read some fanfic instead of getting into yet another argument with somebody who’s wrong on the internet. Or add one to your key ring, to give you some much-needed whimsy on your daily commute!
If you want to support our project and look cool doing it, make sure to grab one 😎
Since last month’s request for help went so well, we’re asking again! This month, we’re wondering (🥺) if anyone wants to help us do the following:
Draft or coordinate technical writing (for BobaBoard): Getting new coding volunteers up to speed is easier the better our documentation is. We’re forming a dedicated documentation bubble, and would love for people interested in or experienced with technical writing to join us. If you’ve been wondering how to get more technical writing into your professional portfolio, look no further!
Recruit volunteers (for BobaBoard): Ever done volunteer outreach or onboarding, even just for fandom events or hosting a party? We’re getting together a group of volunteers to brainstorm about volunteer outreach, onboarding, and management. Yes, this means we’re asking you to help onboard yourself! We’re meta like that.
Grow a Patreon audience (for FujoCoded): Bridging the gap between our BackerKit campaign funds and our projected future sales income from the Fujoshi Guide to Web Development and other consumer-facing projects requires cultivating a base of Patreon supporters beyond just people who know Ms Boba personally. We’d really love to consult with someone who has insight into Patreon best practices.
Make pixel art (on commission): Unfortunately, the artist who created the 88x31 pixel art badges in our digital reward pack won’t be available for the foreseeable future.This means we’re now putting out feelers for an interim pixel artist interested in our cause and willing to take paid commissions. If that sounds like you, or you’d be up for other types of commissions in the future, go ahead and fill out our artist info form (and tell your friends!)
If you’d like to try any of these roles, or if you’d like to get involved in other ways, let us know via [email protected].
Alright, that's the long and the short of it! Keep your eye on your inboxes, and we'll see you next month.
It’s time! Our most time-consuming projects are winding down, our rewards are ready to mail, and our packing elves have assembled, which means it’s time to smash that “lock addresses with final notice” button 👇 Once we do that, you’ll have two days to update your shipping address in your BackerKit survey!
After addresses are locked, we can finally start shipping your rewards. The current plan is to start from easier-to-pack reward sets, like those containing only stickers, and work ourselves up to bigger and more complex bundles. This means different people's rewards will be shipped at slightly different times. Don’t worry though: you’ll receive an email once your package of rewards has been shipped out!
To summarize, your next steps:
If you need to review your shipping address, return to your survey by clicking the link in your survey email or requesting your survey link under "Lost your survey?" on our BackerKit project page at https://fujocoded.backerkit.com/.
If you need to change your shipping address, make sure to do so within 48 hours.
If you need us to hold your package, let us know at [email protected].
Wait for the shipping confirmation email, and let us know if you don't receive it within the next couple of weeks.
Enjoy your rewards!
And if you are one of the 12 people who haven’t completed their survey email yet—hey, we get it!—you can still do so, just be aware that your shipment may be delayed.
If you've been following along with our campaign updates, you know we've been working hard to get our promised pack of digital goodies out to our backers—and now it's finally here!
Inside, you'll find the following (in alphabetical order):
Your campaign badge: show off your support in 88x31 format! You can proudly display this badge on your website to show off your support, and (optionally) link it back to our website to help spread our mission.
Behind the Scenes: thousands and thousands of words about the world of FujoGuide, its characters, and how it all came to be! The publicly-available material is only scratching the surface of what we have in store… and now you too can know all the deetz we’ve been holding behind (the scenes)!
Emoji: our one and only set of beloved Boba-tan emojis, as seen on all our Discord servers and beyond! Use them to decorate your chats, servers, and even your blog posts!
Logo Assets: ever wanted to talk about our projects on your website or otherwise link to them? Here’s all our logos collected for ease of support!
Paper Dolls: as you might have heard, the exercise behind Volume 0 Issue 1 revolves around a certain character’s love of playing dress up... But while we can’t bring you your own, physical HTML to decorate, we can give you the next best thing: a paper doll set of all the clothes featured in our exercise!
Wallpapers: want to decorate your desktop, phone or laptop with our characters and the other amazing illustrations on our websites and merchandise? Our folder of wallpapers is sure to have something for every taste and interest in fictional characters.
Website Goodies: fun things for your website and beyond. These include: Boba-tan’s “work in progress” graphics for your yet-to-be-built pages, repeating background patterns to add some pizzazz to your favorite shrine (or use as a wallpaper), and our commented code + art to add shimeji/corner buddies of our characters to any website! Make sure to read our READMEs and code files, as they’ve written to be their own learning material.
Check out the link in the "exclusive content for backers" section below!
Make sure to let us know what you think! We’d love to hear what your favorite parts are, so we can offer more content like this in the future, and shower our team and contributors with love for their efforts! You can @ us on our socials, comment here, or write to us at [email protected].
We’ve decided to add a “general company news” section to our backer updates for anything not explicitly related to fulfilling our BackerKit campaign obligations. Enjoy, and find the campaign-specific progress right below!
FujoCoded, LLC: Company Credit
College Accredited: Fujocoded has a new intern! Foxinboots, known as Fox, needed a technical internship to fulfill a college credit, so with the school’s blessing, she’s going to spend the next couple of months helping us help you. In good FujoCoded tradition, we immediately threw her in the middle of the action: her introductory task is to use her HTML and CSS (and artistic) skills to finalize the wallpapers for our digital pack, created using our open source web-based Wallpaper Maker (https://github.com/FujoWebDev/wallpaper-maker). After that, her top priority will be finagling the delivery system for our $upporter perks, letting us finally start offering more consistent material rewards to our paying subscribers. What a way to boost that GPA! 💯
Turning it off and (patre)on again: Since last month, Ms Boba’s personal Patreon has been fully rebranded as FujoCoded LLC’s Patreon. The support page on Ms Boba’s own website still allows visitors to support her directly, but you’ll see that rebranded too as we transition out of our “seed money” crowdfunding phase and begin to beef up the company’s recurring monthly income.
Sociocracy for All: As previously mentioned, we’re taking steps to build FujoCoded, LLC, as a sociocratic organization—one that distributes decision-making power evenly throughout its organizational structure, rather than concentrating it at the top. The core FujoCoded team met this past week to discuss a step-by-step proposal detailing how to divide the company’s functions into departments and distribute decision-making power one domain at a time.It’s a delicate and potentially slow process, but one that’s also very near and dear to our founder’s heart—she certainly doesn’t want to get stuck having to make all the important decisions forever, and is looking forward to repurposing that mental energy for more AUs for her many OTPs!
Recent Progress on our BackerKit Campaign
Contractually Obligated: Our call for additional legal help bore fruit—we’ve acquired our first dedicated legal volunteer! With this very-welcome volunteer on our team, we are making some serious progress on the legal homework necessary to craft mutually beneficial creator contracts. Their first areas of focus are our article-writing contractors and our character design rights; more on why below.
CitrusCon Crunch: Ms Boba was invited to present a panel at CitrusCon (and killed it, thanks for asking 😉 Read ‘Around the FujoVerse’ for more!) In an effort to make the most of the spotlight, the whole coding team came together to get our storefront online and operational in time for the con. As one of our campaign goals, this storefront has been on the “To Do” list for a hot minute, and CitrusCon was just the push we needed to get it up and running. Take a look for yourself! Merch from Aprils past is available there, as well as some exclusive new items—like the ‘RAWR’ paddle that recently made a cameo onscreen.
Digital Goodies GET: We are in the process of delivering our first and most virtual reward: the digital goodies pack. It is being delivered via Google Drive Link, and should land in an inbox near you in a matter of days. Make sure to check it out, and if you find yourself overcome by how amazing everything is, don’t be afraid to tell us 😘
The Full Package: All physical rewards are now under the loving stewardship of Ms Boba. We’ve got shipping boxes, updated insert cards, and all the merch you could shake a stick at. Gaze upon the beauty that together we have wrought!
What’s Next for the FujoCoded BackerKit
Article Re-Allocation: After reviewing our priorities, we have decided to push our NPM article to the top of the list, above the Terminal article. This is a pragmatic decision, as we already produced a short Terminal quickstart guide to prep people for FujoGuide Vol. 0, Issue 1: Git. If things go according to keikaku*, that quickstart guide will give people enough information on Terminal to use NPM, and NPM lets people access the amazing world of JavaScript tooling, which is what they’ll need to team up with our trusty sidekick Astro. (Want to know more about why you should care about Astro? Read Ms Boba’s writeup on the magic of Static Site Generators here!) We’ll be able to write a more in-depth exploration of Terminal when our other topics have all been covered.
*Translator’s note: keikaku means plan
Contract Scaffolding: Before we can officially hire someone to write the NPM article, we need a workable contract. The contract is currently brewing with our legal recruit, but in the meantime, we’re nailing down key parameters like “What exactly are the deliverables we’re paying for?” and “what points do we need this article to cover?” The journey of a thousand words starts with a single contract, and we’re excited to take our first steps through your support!
Coupon Clippers✂️: One of our campaign rewards was a 20% Off coupon for all our backers. Now that we have a store to use coupons in, we need to figure out how to enable them. Once we have the “honor this coupon” feature turned on, you can expect your coupon to be delivered through BackerKit digital delivery.
You’ve got mail…to send!: Now that all the rewards are in the same place as the packing materials, there’s nothing between our beleaguered founder Ms Boba and the task of packing itself. Ms Boba has to tie up some zine work before she can turn her full attention to packing, but we anticipate things will kick off by the end of this month. What we need from you is to keep an eagle eye on your inbox: before mailing your package, we will send out a “final notice” allowing you to update your shipping address if necessary. This will give you 48 hours to make any final changes to your info. If for any reason you need us to hold your package, send us a shout at [email protected].
Around the FujoVerse
In the press
The talk our founder Ms Boba gave at CitrusCon went off without a hitch and was, dare we say, incredibly well-received. It will be publicly available once CitrusCon publishes their recording to their CitrusCon 2024 YouTube playlist, but we’ve got our own recording (plus the associated slide deck) available on our Patreon if you just can’t wait.
Hang Out with FujoCoded Live on Twitch 💬✨
Now that CitrusCon is over, Ms Boba is back to doing one stream a week. Tune in every Thursday to get a peek behind the curtain and hang out with FujoCoded supporters and team members in Twitch chat!
September
Thursday, September 19 @ 3pm PDT: Digital Pack Wrap Up
Thursday, September 26 @ 3pm PDT: BobaBoard Stream: Life of a Post
October
Thursday, October 3 @ 3pm PDT: I’m Sure We’ll Be Done With The Zine By Now
Thursday, October 10 @ 3pm PDT: If We Aren’t Done With the Zine I’ll Riot
FujoStore Highlights
Restocks, Sales, and Limited-Time Offers
We have our first “limited time” offer in our new store: an exclusive RAWR charcuterie board, created in honor of the old-school yaoi paddle seen recently in a certain hell-themed animated show.
Buy your very own limited-edition chibi or hime paddle in our store…or share our social media posts to share this opportunity with your followers and fellow fans!
This month, we’re reaching out to see if anyone would be interested in volunteering with us in the following capacities:
Video editing (for BobaBoard): Our founder Ms Boba does a BobaBoard-related stream every month, passing her knowledge of how the software works down to the community. To make them truly useful, however, these streams need some polishing and some of the downtime cut out before we can upload them to our YouTube channel! If you’d like to help out (and especially if you’d like to get some professional experience in video editing onto your resume) hit us up!
Video highlighter (for the FujoVerse): In addition to her BobaBoard streams, our founder also builds FujoVerse software in public once a week. While these streams are more often "watch a professional work" than outright teaching, there's a lot of useful web development knowledge buried within! If you'd like help us go through our archive to find these hidden pearls so we can cut them out and make them available to the community, let us know!
Task coordinator: If you can look at a list of task deadlines and ping the people assigned to those tasks to see how they’re getting along, we could use your help! We’re experimenting with how to make this role easy and low-friction, so even if you have zero project management experience, you could be a huge help here.
If you’d like to try any of these roles, or if you’d like to get involved in other ways, let us know via [email protected].
Okay, that about covers our August-September campaign developments! If there’s anything you’d like to hear more about, you can use the email address above or reach out to us on social media. See you next month!
The FujoCoded LLC Team
(a bunch of human-shaped chibi and hime cheeseboards with surprisingly lewd inscriptions)
tl;dr: we'll be presenting our talk "Rebuilding Community on the (fujo)Web" at CitrusCon at 6PM EDT this Friday August 23rd, and you can send us questions using this form.
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Salutations fujoshi fudanshi fujin and friends!
Just a reminder of our presence at CitrusCon this Friday, August 23rd! CitrusCon is a free, virtual 18+ convention dedicated to BL, queer media, and all things fandom.
Our founder Ms Boba has been invited as a speaker, and will give a talk titled “Rebuilding Community on the (fujo)Web”. To attend, all you need to do is register (for free!) by August 22.
Here’s the abstract:
It’s hard to agree about anything on today’s internet… except that it isn’t the place it used to be! In this talk, we will explore the erosion of community on the modern web and the challenges in the way of building a more user-centered online ecosystem.
There will be some time to answer questions from you all, so submit them (before Thursday) at this form for a chance at getting them answered and to spare us some awkward silence. They can be about anything that has to do with fandom, community and the social web!
Excited for the talk? We sure are! Here are some slides for your (early bird) pleasure:
We sincerely hope to see you there, The FujoCoded Team
