Hey there everyone. Been a minute since I last updated here on the Supporter’s Portal, largely due to life in general and I frankly haven’t been doing a whole lot worth talking about. That’s changing and I thought it was time for an old-fashioned work update.
Let’s see if we can get you caught up and tell you where we’re at now!
ICYMI
I notice that it’s fully been 15 months since I made an official post here, so here’s a brief summary of what’s happened since October 2023 in case you missed it:
- In December, I moved to Portland, OR from Kalamazoo, Michigan.
- Currently working a part-time low-wage office job. It almost keeps me fed, but that’s about it.
- Tore down the entire whole-ass JohnHenry.US website because it was running on an engine that had last been installed clean sometime during the Obama administration.
- Ended up spending a whole lot of time reflecting on what I’ve been doing, what I’m trying to do, and how to get it done most effectively
- Gave serious consideration to just walking away from all of the activism and creative work, finding a broom to push somewhere, and riding out the clock, but that’s just not me for a million reasons. Still, I definitely wrestled with the idea for a while.
- Also have been doing some side-work here and there making movie posters for the monthly screenings in the Paracinema series at Cinemagic here in Portland. These are used as promo posters, and I also sell them at the shows printed on decent stock. I’ll be working those into the website store along with a bunch of other stuff over time, RSN.
- If I remember correctly I’m at around 40K words on “the book.” Haven’t spent much time on it lately, but I will be.
- All within the context of the ongoing world around us.
What’s Up Now
After a long and unexpected period of low productivity in the sense of my usual work, I’m back to work in a meaningful way on “content.” I don’t have everything nailed down just yet, but I’ve finally, actually, for real got new content coming along.
I was about to write that I might have something published tonight, but then realized it’s already almost 8pm on the east coast (past 9 now…) and I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to just do the written piece and the graphics, or if I’m going to jump in with both feet and generate a long-form audio-video thing and maybe some vertical shorts or something. I’m seriously inclined toward the latter; if I”m going to have gone through this whole down phase and semi-resetting of everything, I should “do things right” beginning immediately.
That means generally speaking any time I write an article it also needs to be a full-length audio/podcast episode, plus a video (mostly using stock footage and the graphics I use for the article), and then we can chop that up into smaller bits for short-form platforms like TikTok (or whatever replaces it), Facebook “Reels,” and so forth. That also means what starts as a Facebook comment that takes fifteen minutes to write becomes a production that takes a day or two to complete and publish.
The first piece is about 85% written right now and I’ve got the graphics done for it. Recording the audio could stretch it out another day, depends on how I feel for the rest of tonight. I’m coming up on , and I’ve got a movie poster than I need to have drafted by tomorrow afternoon and ideally sent to print by tomorrow night or Friday morning at the latest. Then I have to work the day job on Friday. We’ll see how it goes, but something’s gonna drop between now and next Monday. The sooner it does, the fewer variations and derivatives there’ll be, but I’m leaning heavily toward trying to at least do an audio segment/”version” and if I do that much then it gets really easy to staple it over some stock footage and other graphical content for uploading as a video. Then oh hey, audio right? Podcast seems quite the obvious thing to do, I’d say. But that requires more setting up of various tools and so forth, tracking down and updating all my old accounts (or deciding to create new ones) etc.
I feel…90% sure that’s what you’re going to see out of the piece I’m working on right now, which for the record is a review of a viral tweet that made a really good point in a really terrible way, deconstructing it and explaining why doing it right matters and so forth. And that the majority of my work of this type going forward will fit into the same mold.
I’ve completely shut down my autoposters, at least for now. Clearly with the recent ding I took for “unoriginal content,” reposting key content once every quarter or so is just not acceptable. I don’t have the side-quest space to go hunt down other solutions nor to re-calibrate how I’ve been using Blog2Social for the last few years, so for now I’m just shutting the tool off and may revisit that or something else down the road. As it stands I can handle most things by hand, but there are definitely certain articles that should re-run at certain times, e.g. my “Apology To Rush Limbaugh” needs to show up on his birthday and the anniversary of his permanent sobriety every year.
What’s Up Next
Future plans, I’m trying to get out of the habit of going into too deeply. That said, this kind of writing does help me sort and focus, plus it forces me to pay a little more attention to what I’m saying just as a sanity check on the way out the door.
That said, there is definitely A List, or at least A Concept Of A Plan To Make A List. Clearly setting up at least one audio podcast “stream” is in order, and probably at least two. There is also the long-anticipated and slowly impending relaunch of The John Henry Show. I’ve actually got titles done for that and licensed some music from an old friend (too lazy to add links & such right now but I’ll definitely be putting them over in due course!) I feel like I can sort of frame things as partly covering my own work over the prior week or whatever as well as having some guests on to present and talk about their own stuff be it music or writing or some kind of live gimmick or a book or whatever, but that’s all still pretty fuzzy and will develop over time, likely in unexpected ways.
I’m softly hoping to have a regular slot scheduled for that and to be “in production” on it no later than Valentine’s Day, and hopefully four weeks sooner. Have to see how it fits in with everything else. I’m also still going back and forth on whether I want to live stream any of it. That is my inclination, but it also tends to be more chaotic and less well-planned and well-executed, which is a problem I need to address. Ultimately I’m *thinking* there’ll be one pre-recorded formal “show” that will likely contain replays of significant parts of other content from the prior week, and maybe some responses to the comments I get about it on social media and what have you.
When I’ve got that rolling with some reliability and smoothness, then I hope to add a weekly live show that’s of the same nature but includes any ongoing live feedback that happens, plus I’ll find other so-called “value adds” that bring things more in line with my previous style of live-streaming but also opens up possibilities for collaboration and so forth.
Each show could go thirty or sixty, depending. Thirty seems like a short time to get seriously into anything, but producing two hour-long shows a week, one of them live, is a lot of workload that I’m not sure I’ll be able to handle, especially while I’m having to maintain a day job to have any income at all to speak of.
Which reminds me: I’m going to be firing Patreon back up as well as the merch store, doing all the fundraising stuff and hopefully a lot more of it quite frankly, all along the process of getting my content back up and in order. I may eventually put this whole site back behind a paywall, or maybe not, it all depends. I want to give some kind of additional value to the people who support me, but I’ve also made the error multiple times in the past of getting in the weeds with trying to establish and maintain the infrastructure necessary to do that. I’ve also found a huge yawning disinterest in merchandise perks as any sort of incentive for people to contribute. Indeed, almost universally contributions will come with an explicit message to not worry about any “perks,” just keep doing what I do.
So clearly there are some things to work out, there. Unfortunately the need exists right this minute, and it’s pretty intense due to being in a slow period at work and only getting about 1/4 of the hours I normally do. I’m not putting this post up as any kind of “pitch,” but if you do want to help out, there are definitely some options available even while the merch store’s offline.
If you want to make a one-time contribution, you can do that via PayPal at https://paypal.me/johnhenryus or via either Chime, CashApp, or Cash.Me using the “cashtag” $JohnHenryUS.
I’ve also been using the page at Support Our Work – JohnHenry.US [BETA] as a sort of “landing page” for all matters funding-related for quite some time; there’s a quick link there for one-time or recurring payments via PayPal (for those of you who don’t care to go through Patreon to engage in ongoing support), as well as links to my Ko-Fi page and whatever else I may add in the future.
And that’s where things are. I kind of let myself get sidetracked from finishing that article to write this one, and now I’ve been working on this for a couple of hours when you account for setting things back up to post here, creating a new graphic, and all that stuff. I’m gonna shut up and move along for now, but definitely keep your eyes wide open, starting now…and please help out if you can. I’m gonna be real hungry here in another day or two, I’ve got a bunch of recurring bills like my phone, hosting, and adobe that are going to hit soon, and yeah. I need help, please. Thanks.
Love y’all, talk soon.
