December points bonus

[denise]

Hello, all! It's December, and that means two things: 2020 the awful hellscape of a year is almost over, and it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

For the month of December, all orders in the Shop of points and paid time (whether for you or as a gift) will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

This bonus only applies to orders of paid time and points: rename tokens and bonus icon slots don't receive bonuses. If you buy paid time for a friend, the bonus points will be sent to you, not to them.

The order must be completed in the month of December. IMPORTANT: "the month of December" is defined by server time (which is in UTC), not by your local time zone. So, for instance, if you're in EST, the promo ends on December 31 at 7PM your time. Every year a few people think that they have more time to make an order than they do, so if you want to take advantage of the promo, it's a good idea to do it before the last day.

This is our annual way of saying "thank you" to our supporters. We don't accept advertising, we don't sell your data, and we haven't taken venture capital or outside investment -- and we never will. This year, in among the hellscape of 2020, we've seen a lot of national conversation about the evils of social media and the algorithms that control what we see. Those conversations usually degenerate into me wanting to throw something in under 30 seconds, because they always act as though the giant, corporate-owned, billion-dollar social media properties are the only ones that exist. They aren't, and we've all been proving that together for the last eleven goddamn years. (Oh Lord, where does the time go?) By choosing to upgrade your account, you're part of why we can continue to stand as an independent, user-funded space on the internet where you can be 1000% sure that we're not selling your data or accidentally destroying democracy because The Algorithm™ prefers controversial posts.

(I mean, you could be 1000% sure of that no matter what, because we have like eight billion other things to do other than rearrange your reading page to get more pageviews to show the metrics to the advertisers we don't have, but you know what I mean.)

So, as always: thank you. Thank you for believing in our experiment, even when this horrible year just keeps screwing us all over. (As an example, I'm currently typing this on my wife's laptop, because I can't get a repair appointment for my dead laptop, because ha! It's 2020!)

Thank you all for being a light in the darkness. We hope you all have an excellent December (or at least as excellent as it can get), and whatever holidays you celebrate, we hope that you can find a way to celebrate them safely, virtually, and with as much joy as possible. I'm not going to say that I hope 2021 is better for us all, because I don't want to jinx it, but I've got my fingers crossed.

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