This is Damn Interesting.

Alan Bellows here, founder of Damn Interesting.

For the better part of 20 years, I kept this project afloat by working part-time engineering jobs to pay the bills,

and spending the other halves of my work days researching,

writing, editing, and podcasting. But in recent years, the landscape has shifted and those

part-time positions appear to have gone extinct. Employers want all or nothing, at least those

willing to respond to an application from a greybeard. So a few years ago, after months of searching, I finally had

to just take a full-time position. I had always been a bit of a bottleneck around here,

but now I'm a downright cork. Meanwhile, a dull-as-dishwater tsunami of AI slop

sloshes over most of the internet. Clearly, something must be done. So I'm trying an experiment,

a one-off fundraiser. I know the timing isn't ideal, but the goal is restrained. My hope today,

and possibly again a year from today, is that we can raise the same as I used to make with my

part-time salary, which will allow me to return much of my time and attention back to this project

for the next 12 months. If you want to push back against the rising tide of AI and get more

long-form episodes of damn interesting, here's how to chip in. Go to d-a-m.m.m.m.m. slash fund to contribute to the GoFundMe.

This fundraiser is entirely separate from our Give a Damn donation system, which aims to cover

damn interesting monthly expenses, web hosting, subscriptions, usage licenses, link curation, and that sort of thing.

An amazing array of donors support us through that system, and those lovely people are the

reason we survive to this day. This new experiment is specifically so I myself can afford to

spend more time writing and running the site. Thanks for listening and for helping out if you can.

The cover image for this episode is the 20-sided die from inside a magic eight-ball novelty fortune

telling toy, invented in 1950 by Albert C. Carter and Abe Bookman in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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