Paul: If you’re a Gold Club member or donor, first of all, let us again say thank you for your support. Thank you! You are terrific and you’ve made us sustainable and better as a site, as well as happier and much less stressed as people. You’ve enabled an awful lot of fantastic things to happen with and to Shut Up & Sit Down.
It’s been a while since we last billed our subscribers. We’re going to be doing it again at the start of December, but on a different, monthly schedule. We wanted to make sure you knew what was happening beforehand as a) you might be surprised to be billed for the first time in a while and b) you might also wonder why we stopped in the first place.
We don’t want to bill you when we don’t think we’re providing what we intended to.
We’ve had our fourth Gold Club bag in the works for a while now. I don’t want to give away everything that’s in it but, yes, I might have done a weird thing again and there might be something involving fantasy and monsters, or there might well be a papercraft model of an SU&SD team member but that definitely wasn’t my idea. We wanted to send you excellent things that would make you excited, not least because that also makes us excited.
Having said that, this will also be the last Gold Club bag that we do, possibly ever and certainly for the foreseeable future.
The Gold Club has been great for us. It’s been a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. Yes, we know we previously said we were happy to put that time in. Yes, we know some of you told us not to, told us to focus only on the site, told us you didn’t pledge because you wanted things and told us a better use of our time and effort was doing what we usually did. Okay, maybe you were right, but lots of people also loved their bags and we were pretty happy to send them out and provide postal pleasure all around the world. I mean, wouldn’t you be?
Matt: But lately it’s been a lot more difficult for us. The whole team has been slowed down by personal problems over the past few months, and it’s looking like I’m in for a rough time for the indefinite future. We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved over the past year with the Gold Club, but we can’t help but feel that this mad passion project has started to detract from what the site is about.
I guess we were all busy having too much fun doing it to notice that we were creating a secret comedy club in a community that was designed to be inclusive and open. The Gold Club was a wonderfully ludicrous side-project cooked up in better, simpler times.
Paul: Lately we’ve felt that the site has been lagging a little, while we definitely have. Matt’s been happy to spend his time whipping up elaborate things to post around the globe, but that time could be spent with him in front of a camera, or behind a camera, or making Quinns and I a never-ending flow of hot tea.
You might well want to change your subscriber plan. We fully understand if you’d like to stop, or switch to making one-off pledges, or knock your pledge down to a lower amount. We’re entirely aware that this is likely to happen, but it’s more important to us that Shut Up & Sit Down continues to be a site focussed on making great stuff for absolutely everyone.
One benefit of donating to us is instant access to our forums, which we’re very proud of. We have a place on the internet where people are open, friendly and actively inclusive. Now is a great time for me to say a huge thank you to our mod team. Tom, Clare, Erik, Alabaster, Cyrill, Dan, Ian, and Jon, you have been excellent every single day. In the new year we’ll also make it so that anyone who’s a subscriber can get access to all of the downloadable stuff we’ve made so far, and we’ll also put up some PDFs for some of the other stuff too. Hooray!
Matt: Starting from next year, you’re going to see a change. No time faffing about planning and writing and designing & packaging means more time with the team together filming and playing and writing and laughing. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved this year, but we want next year to be even better. This is the way that we do that, and I’m pretty sure I speak for the whole team when I assure you that this is exactly how we do that. Also hello from Quinns who is on holiday and not dead we promise he’s not dead.
Paul: Definitely not.
