The Basics – Payments, Behavior
This document deliberately foregoes dense abstruse legal jargon in favor of clear, straightforward language. Most of the information here won’t apply to most users of the site. If you’re a subscribing member or customer – if you have a login at this site either directly or through Patreon, whether paid or not – then this information is important to you. If you aren’t, then it’s really meaningless; whatever information I collect from you amounts to HTTP headers which every other website on the planet collects and few ever read.
With all that said, here’s how I run my site and the lines I need you to stay inside of, how the money works, and so forth:
- Membership Payments, Refunds, and Time Periods
- I don’t offer refunds on memberships or contributions.
- If you have an ongoing membership and want to terminate it, you can do that on this site with your account membership page unless you are a Patreon Patron. If you are a Patreon member, you can manage your contributions, including changing your levels and ending your membership, through your Patreon membership management tools at their site.
- Please allow 2 business days for full access to account benefits like forum access or members-only content access.
- For members who register through this site:
- Your membership will renew monthly on the date you subscribed.
- For members who register through Patreon:
- Patreon bills at the beginning of the month. This means that if you become a Patron on the 27th, you’re going to be billed again within a few days for the second “month,” after which your payment cycle will settle in properly. Please be aware of and prepared for this if you subscribe through Patreon; this applies to all Patreon memberships, not just me.
- Terminating your monthly subscription will end your subscriber benefits at the end of your current subscription period. Canceled subscriptions are not pro-rated or refunded.
- Payments in General
- Payments are processed through PayPal and Stripe, depending on your choices during product selection and checkout, and all of their terms and conditions are, as the lawyers say, “hereby incorporated by reference.”
- I don’t have any of your payment information on any of my servers, anywhere, ever, unless you deliberately post it in a forum message or put it in your user bio or something, which would be incredibly stupid and you won’t do that so I don’t know why I mentioned it. I just don’t have access to it; it’s all processed as pass-through transactions by the payment processors, and then they kick information back like your e-mail address or whatever I need to fulfill your order.
- The world’s best hackers could take this website apart byte by byte and still never find your financial information, because it simply is not here and never exists in this space; all that stuff happens “behind my back.”
- In case of human error or some other issue, please contact me as soon as possible (!!) so we can get it taken care of. Please note: I’m a hand-to-mouth operation, have automatic payments scheduled, and so forth; if you accidentally zig when you should have zagged or added a few extra zeroes or something, it’s imperative that you let me know as soon as possible (!!!!!) because the longer you wait, the more likely it is that some or all of the cash won’t be there anymore and it’ll take time to get it back to you. If you catch me before the money goes back out, I should be able to do a fast, one-button refund through PayPal; Stripe refund processing, I don’t know what’s involved because I’ve never done it, but we’ll work it out.
- For information specific to merchandise orders, please see the “Merchandise” section of this document.
- Acceptable Conduct Policy
- Regardless of your subscription status, I don’t like jerks. If you start abusing people and being a dick in the forums or the comment section, I’ll delete your account. Even if your name is Jeff Bezos, you don’t have enough money to use my platform to hurt people. While the obvious boundaries apply – racism, sexism, incitement to violence, things that look uncomfortably like a plan of action involving criminal behavior, common sense stuff – in the end the decision is mine to make. So don’t be a jerk. And yes, that includes to me. I’m a public figure; I’m not a dartboard for insecure incels on the internet to take out their frustrations at their dad on.
- If you’re such a jerk that I nuke you, and you ask for a refund as a result, I’ll laugh at you…and I won’t issue a refund. That’s official policy.
Merchandise
This site offers a variety of physical and non-physical merchandise both for direct sale and as incentives and bonuses for membership subscriptions. The following information is specific to customers who are ordering merchandise.
Membership Rewards
Several membership options include physical merchandise offered as “perks” or “thank you gifts.” These are non-taxable, and fulfillment of orders will be on the same terms as ordinary merchandise orders, as described below.
General Info & Processes
The merchandise here is fulfilled through various vendors, for example Spreadshirt.Com. In some cases these are presented as “affiliate” links where you order directly and I get a percentage; in others these are presented as direct orders, where you pay me and I submit the order information including your shipping name and address to my vendor.
In no case is your payment information ever on my server at all, let alone stored there, but in order to have an account you have to provide an e-mail address, and in order to have merch shipped I need your shipping address. If you want this information deleted, I will do so, but there are some restrictions and hoops that are unfortunately necessary to discuss “out loud.”
- IMPORTANT! Because information deletion and retrieval requests involve personally identifiable information that could allow a third party to compromise your identity, and in compliance with EU regulations, if you ask to delete your account or provide all the content you’ve posted (note that this functionality may be in your hands, e.g. in the forum or store account management pages; this clause refers to asking me/”us” to do it for you), you MUST PROVIDE A COPY OF YOUR STATE-ISSUED VALID ID, WHICH WILL BE KEPT ON FILE, OFFLINE, FOR OUR RECORDS, ALONG WITH THE E-MAIL ADDRESSED USED FOR PAYMENT/ACCOUNT ACCESS. I know it’s a pain in your behind and it’s no walk in the park for me either, but this is to protect you and me from bad actors, and in the EU it’s the law. It’s also likely to take at least a couple of months to get the process completed.
- It is neither necessary nor advisable to request your account be deleted simply to cancel an ongoing subscription payment; you have the ability to do that, very easily, through either your membership account management page here, or through your account control panel at Patreon if that’s how you subscribed.
- If you ask me to delete your information, you will no longer have an account on this site. Anything you’ve posted like forum messages will be automatically removed, including any private messages you’ve exchanged with other users through the forum’s message systems. You will no longer have access to any site benefits like the forum, members-only content, or on-release work diaries.
- Some information like your e-mail address may remain in third-party systems (e.g. PayPal) over which I have little to no control. There is a very slight but non-zero possibility that this may result in you being contacted by me in the future as part of a mass communication.
Advertising, Sponsorship, Reviews, and Endorsements
Ads on this site: This site currently runs ads served by Google AdSense. That content is controlled by them, and its’ use is governed by them. They just rent a little screen space, so if you’ve got an issue with an ad, talk to them.
“On-Air” Sponsorships, Promo Consideration, & Production Credits
There are several options to contribute to my work that involve being credited verbally, visually, or both during the performance of live or recorded content. For all these options the following rules apply:
- I reserve the right to refuse service, period. I’m not going to get roped in to advertising for the Nazis or something just because they filled out a form and sent me a few bucks.
- If I think you’re legit trying to get by me or get over on me by conning me (or bribing me) to promote something I find ethically abhorrent, I will take your money and put it to work opposing you, and I’ll openly brag about it while I do it. So don’t. (Sane people may think I’m nuts for including this; consider that there’s a reason.)
- I reserve the right to terminate sponsorship agreements with or without full or partial refund, at my discretion, in the event that the entity being mentioned becomes somehow problematic after the sponsorship begins. (This is your “morals clause.”) For example, if Bob Bobertson buys five show sponsorship spots for a month and then halfway through the month gets arrested for running a heroin ring or something, I’m gonna not continue running Bob’s ads and Bob might not get his money back.
- Additional situation-specific terms and conditions may apply. Please refer to your specific agreement for details.
Product Endorsements and Reviews
I will be happy to review your product if you want to give me one. I don’t guarantee you’ll like the review.
I don’t do paid endorsements. Period. If I endorse something, it’s because I personally use and believe in that thing. If I endorse your thing and it does you some good and you want to say thanks, awesome. You can make a contribution, or buy a sponsorship, or what have you, and it won’t change my endorsement. Similarly, if I don’t use your product, buying a sponsorship or making a contribution will not induce me to endorse it; you’ll get the same credit as anyone else would for your sponsorship level. There will never be a time when John Henry says “I use this and recommend it” just because someone paid him to; not only is this a matter of personal policy, it’s a matter of public integrity. If my audience sees my endorsement as something that can be bought, it’s not worth paying for – if you buy it, it’s worthless, if you get it for free, it’s priceless.