an introspective look at my own spending habits and hobbies, crowdfunding projects

It took me just over 10 minutes but I have unsubscribed from emails for every project I have ever backed on kickstarter. I have also uninstalled the app from my phone. Is it bad that while I was going through the list of projects that I've backed I was like huh thats a lot less projects than I thought? Since 2010 I have backed 673 projects in various levels of success and fufillment. No one do the math on how many projects that is per year and no one do the math on how much fucking money that could be. The second math I can do myself (did you know you can export a spreadsheet of every project you backed, how much you pledged, the estimated due date given, and the total amount you've pledged?)

Now the reason behind why I unsubscribed from the emails is because JFC I get so many emails. I have to do the same eventually for Gamefound and Backerkit but thats a future Imani problem.

Every once in a while I think to myself that I should make a compreshensive list of the state of all the projects that I've backed. And I have! Once! I went through to check what I did and didn't get, what I actually used vs didn't use, and what I regret having backed. Shockingly given the high number of projects I've backed a VAST majority of them have eventually delivered, there have been a couple of stand out fuckups that simply never happened and not in the "this was a scam that was never gonna happen" way but in the people are bad at planning what they can and can not realistically deliver and the math just don't math and they give up. I'm not mad about almost any of those because I have and continue to know Kickstarter is for funding IDEAS. Yes getting the thing is expected but one of the first projects I backed was a classmates senior film in college, its a short film that happened and I even watched it but what the IDEA vs what we got where not the same thing because shit happens and that's how I've looked at Kickstarter and crowdfunding since day one. Yes some of these are way bigger than a college kids senior project idea and that is frustrating when they fail to plan but at the end of the day you're giving someone one for a hope and a dream.

Which is why the hard pivot people have made to using Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms as a pre-order/interest gauge machine irritates me more than failed to deliver projects. It's one thing if you're a huge brand/company/person trying something new to you for the first time, I'll use Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere TTRPG Kickstarter as an example. Like you know theres a built in fanbase who will buy your thing but you're not sure if that same fanbase will buy not a book from you but a tie in TTRPG so you use crowdfunding, that I understand but if you do it again for a second book now I'm annoyed (as far as I know there is no second TTRPG campgain being planned thats why its the example).

This ties back to me being a person who looks at a space or a platform and its intended use and gets annoyed when people pivot the platform into something other than its original purpose then everyone acts like thats the way its always been. Like no no no there was pivot! A change occured! Just because you came into the space after the pivot happened doesn't mean people who have been here all along can't look at what we had before and miss it.

Anyway this is a meandering post that has gone slightly off topic. The origina reason I was writing this was because I think I'm going to do another crowdfunding audit and maybe film reviews of various things I've backed. What I use, what I don't use, what surprised me, what disappointed me (though probably not a lot of these because why should I waste my energy talking about something I don't like?), and so on and so forth. It probably won't be until January 2027 for various reasons (moving rooms in my apartment, PAX Unplugged, actually doing the project audit, etc). But yeah I've backed a lot of things and one of the things that I love doing is telling people about cool things that I like. So please look forward to it.