The Massively Overpowered Kickstarter campaign is nearing $69K with over 1500 backers — we’re still blown away by that! We’ve got just a week to go, so I wanted to mention a few meta bits.
First, we’re crossing our fingers that we meet our first stretch goal at $75K. Originally, that stretch goal was going to allot us funding to send someone to the major conventions this year. Behind the scenes, and thanks to your generosity, we’ve already committed to sending Eliot to PAX East next week (the timing wouldn’t let us wait until the campaign is over since the event literally begins the day our campaign ends). So yay — we’ll be at PAX!
Second, we’ve buffed the $75K stretch goal with another perk: a Mo comic strip. Mo has been a huge staff- and fan-favorite ever since Larry dreamed him up, and we think he’s the perfect goofy protagonist for an MMO comic. Larry and Jef will be bringing him to life in a weekly, four-panel strip that will run for the remainder of 2015… if we make our stretch goal, of course! We tucked a preview sketch into our most recent KS update for anyone curious about that plan.
Third, Frankengadget happened. We all awoke this morning to find that our former corporate overlords had unceremoniously merged Massively-that-was into Engadget in the most flabbergastingly brainless way imaginable. If you were linking to any categories or static pages on Massively, those links are now dead and redirect, uselessly, to Engadget’s front page. If you had direct links to articles, tags, or editors, those should still sorta work; they’ll direct you to a copy of the old article (though poorly formatted now) on Engadget. All comments have been lost. If you don’t know more or less what you’re looking for, it’ll be very hard for you to find anything, especially old columns. It’s distressing to us, maybe even more than losing our old jobs, as we were proud of what we’d done, and to see it mothballed into a dark corner of the internet is salt in the wound, especially since we — and probably some of you — still relied on our old work and back links and searches to inform Massively OP.
In any case, true thanks are due to the people behind the Internet Archive, where you can still access pretty much everything without giving clicks to you-know-who. Cheers.
Let’s end on some happy notes. I have some good news for Firefox users: Livefyre support tells me it’s fixed the bug that was causing random comment threads to refuse to load in that browser. Big thanks to all the Massively OP readers who wrote in with helpful tips about the bug, especially Roger, who pinpointed the javascript error that made it easy for Livefyre to address. I know there are still some extant display bugs, but that one should be licked. If it happens to you again and you’ve eliminated all the usual cookie/cache culprits, drop us a tip with as much info as you can so we can pass it along to support.
We’re gearing up for the end of our crowdfunding campaign with one more video on the way for you all next week, and MJ is plotting a STREAM TO END ALL STREAMS all day Friday. We’d love to see you all come out for our big party!
Happy weekend everyone, and as always, thank you so much for your support — every penny, tweet, and comment is appreciated.
-Bree and the MOP crew
