End of May Update: Shafter's Shifters, Department of Mislabled Bottles, & Hypernode Connect Discord Server

Greetings Patrons,

We’re nearing the end of the month, which means now is a great time to check your pledge and make sure you’re subscribed to the pledge level that you want for June. 

We now offer annual pledging if paying annually is easier for you to track. In May we were posting a chapter per week of Shafter’s Shifters Chassis of Chance to the $5 Officer’s Corp Tier. The next novella won’t be ready for June, so it will be a quieter month. At some point in the month we'll be offering a digital file for the Department of Mislabeled Bottles project, which is a project born from a twitter thread. Per most twitter conversations it is in pieces. You can catch up here and read an update here. In June Howard’s time is going to be much occupied with the sketching of XDM2e books and Sandra’s time will be taken with the shipping of those books. We’re hoping to have the second novella ready for posting in July, but we’ll have to see how June goes.

In other news: We have a Discord server!

Many of you already know this because when we used Patreon integration with Discord any of you who have connected your Discord account to your Patreon account were automatically slurped into the server. This was a surprise for everyone! But we turned it into a pre-party and have been having fun conversations.

If you’d like to join our server, we’d love to have you there. There are two options.

1. Connect your Discord and Patreon accounts. (instructions here: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/212052266-How-do-I-connect-Discord-to-Patreon-Patron-)
2. Click this invite link and join our server without connecting your accounts together (Invite link). But you won't have access to the Patron-only channels.

Benefit of connecting your Patreon and Discord accounts: There is a Patron’s only section of our server that you will have access to if you are a Patron and if you have connected your Discord and Patreon accounts. We’re still exploring the kinds of things we’ll put there.

Possible drawback of connecting accounts: If you connect your Discord to your Patreon account, you will be automatically put into every server for every Patreon you support that has a connected server. Even if you leave those servers, you will be dragged back into them at the beginning of the month every month. For some people this is less than ideal.

If you have connected your accounts for some other reason and you DON’T want to be part of our Discord server, but do want to continue being a Patron, you have these options:

1. Email schlockmercenary@gmail.com with your Discord ID. We can block you from our server. This should prevent Patreon from adding you to it. You can request unblocking via the same method if you want to change your mind later.
2. Let the server appear on your Discord list, but left click on it to mute the entire server. You can even group the server with other servers you’re ignoring and hide them.
3. Find an option that we haven't thought of and suggest it to us by emailing schlockmercenary@gmail.com so we can implement it.

We’re still exploring the options that are available in Patreon/ Discord integration, so we’ll have them linked for the next 3-4 months while we are learning how to do stuff and what stuff we want to do.

That's it for updates right now. We'll post additional messages when we have digital files available for you. Thank you so much for supporting us!

Howard and Sandra Tayler