AMBER LOVE 11-AUG-2015 Thank you to all the new patrons for hopping on board the wild ride that is AmberUnmasked and Vodka O’Clock. And thank you for all the birthday tweets, comments, etc. I tried to reply to each one. I hope I did.

For years, I would not publicly put my birthday on Facebook’s visibility. I pretty much hate my birthday. I always have. As a kid, it sucked ass having a summer birthday. And in my formative tween years, my family moved days before my birthday so I was uprooted to a strange weird life in the country with no friends and no place to even roller skate or ride bikes. Throughout my life, people have tried hard to make me enjoy my birthday, but I’ve been dealing with depression for so long, I can’t even figure out how long this has been going on. My best birthday that I can think of was with a bunch of ladies, hanging out in New Hope (one of my favorite towns), drinking a lot of delicious cocktails. I think that was my 40th. Today, I got lots of lovely messages, ate delicious Vietnamese food, and saw Felicia Day.

Getting back to the new pledges: If you’re new to Patreon, I wrote up a post about the basics of how things work – or at least how I think they’re supposed to work. You can set up a max pledge. You can cancel your pledge at any time. Charges are only processed on the first of the month. If you front-load your pledge – meaning put in your max amount once – that means the first paid post is what you’re paying for, but as far as I know even after your max is reached, you can still see the following paid posts. I guess if you wanted to make a one-time tip, what you would do is set up a pledge for the amount and then make that your max pledge so it would only be counted once. Then after the first of the month (September, in this case), you would wait for the processing then cancel any future pledges. Unfortunately, there’s no “one -time tip” option right now. Patreon can take days to answer questions, but they will eventually get back to you. I’ve had 50/50 luck with getting the answers I’m looking for, but usually I can find someone who has been doing it longer and they help out.

So for my birthday, I stood in a very long, suffocating, hot line to get Felicia Day’s book signed. Back when I began a part time job in pop culture and was writing for Dynamic Forces, Felicia was one of my first interviews right after she started The Guild. No, I didn’t mention it. I barely had more than a few seconds to talk to her.

I blurted out that it was my birthday and I was spending it in her line. There’s a delightful *derp* photo where she looks like she was going ask if I’m a crazy person. Then she said something I can’t even remember. And eventually asked what else I was doing. My answer was pie. It was really hot and I was fangirling. Pie was all that came out of my mouth. Pie! I’m gonna pie! Or something. I don’t know. Something embarrassing.

She looks a bit terrified in the photos after that.

Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AmberUnmasked.com and Vodka O'Clock Podcast. Author of The Farrah Wethers Mysteries, comic book short stories, prose, and non-fiction. Cosplayer and figure model.