When you opened this page, did you notice the big paywall notice blocking your entire screen and demanding you pay to remove it?
No?
How about the huge popup bragging that my content is FREE if you’ll give me your information so I can constanty pester you with spam and sell your data to other spammers?
No?
Surely you saw the big autoplay video at the top of the page blaring out a commercial, which when you hit “stop” merely shrunk down, moved to the corner of the page, and immediately tried to play again?
Not that either, eh?
But you must have noticed the box telling you that I use cookies to IMPROVE your reading experience and demanding you accept them? Or the adblocker blocker? Or the barrage of blinking, flashing, jumping, sliding, up-popping ads that make it difficult to concentrate on what you’re trying to read even when they don’t block your view?
The reason why you don’t see any of these is of course because I DON’T USE THEM. That doesn’t mean I’m independently wealthy and can comfortably provide content every day for free, yet still pay my bills out of some endless pot of cash; it means my principles won’t allow me to hold your wish to read my work for ransom. So please consider subscribing via one of the handy plans in the right-hand column, or contact me using this link to custom-design an arrangement that works for you. Because though I’ll never actually put a block between your eyes and my pages, I may soon need to start letting advertisers share the screen with my thoughts in order to keep the lights on. As of right now, I’m $3000 short of my operating budget for this year; from now until the last day of Christmas I’ll be displaying a little fundraising thermometer in the right-hand column. I won’t be harping on it, but I do want to keep a reminder around for awhile that while you aren’t billed for a resource like this blog, that doesn’t mean it costs nothing to produce.
