The Nathan Rabin Happy Place Patreon: Now With Patreon Created and Distributed Tee-Shirts, Prints, Stickers and Mugs!
A few months back I had a free consultation with a very nice woman from Patreon. I think I appealed to them as a creator who has a following and was making a nice amount of money for myself, and by extension Patreon, but who could clearly be making more money and have a bigger, more lucrative following.
Her main suggestion was to reduce the number of tiers I offer. That made all kinds of sense, because my tiers were a mess, with way too many options and not enough coherence. She also asked me whether my patrons pledge to the site because I offer them cool premiums and rewards they want or because they value me as a writer and Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place as an institution and want the site to continue to exist and for me to be able to make a living doing what I love for an appreciative audience that understands me.
I told her that I feel like my patrons give me money because they love the site and think that I should be able to make a living as a pop culture writer twenty three years into what I like to think is a unique and, at the very least, extremely interesting career.
I could be wrong, but it sure feels like the 590 beautiful souls who make Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place possible through their generosity are doing so because they believe in me, and believe in both the dream and the reality of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place to the extent they are willing to use their own hard-earned money to keep it alive in a world where beloved websites and institutions are dying at an alarming rate.
It sure as shit does not seem like patrons pledge to Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place out of a desire for stuff because that has been one element of the website and Patreon account where I have not done an amazing job, with the exception of Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, which has almost single-handedly kept the website solvent.
I am subsequently very pleased to announce that Patreon, god bless them, has a program where they will not only produce merchandise for creators, but ship rewards out to patrons as well, essentially taking all the hassle and guesswork out of the whole process.
I could not be more overjoyed about this development. I have fallen head over heels in love with the amazing work Felipe Sobreiro has done for the Weird Accordion to Al book. It’s just too funny and beautiful and weird to be relegated exclusively to an awesome book that everyone should buy when it comes out on February 4nd, 2020 (AKA 02/04/20, bro!).
With that in mind I am introducing no less than four amazing new items of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place/The Weird Accordion to Al merchandise I really, really, really hope will pull the Patreon out of its pervasive slump/death spiral.
Sound unbeatable? It isn’t! Next up is an AMAZING full color mug with Felipe’s illustration for “Pac-Man” riffing on the iconic Abbey Road cover but with Pac-Man and his ghost nemeses in place of The Beatles above the words “I got the high score at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place!”
I love the idea of the Happy Place as an idea and an ideal, like Albuquerque, not just a web address and these items all play on that, re-imagining the Happy Place as, alternately, a 1980s video game arcade and an obscure tourist trap.
For thirty dollars, patrons can get a tee-shirt based on Felipe’s starkly gorgeous illustration for “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota”, with the family and Bernie atop a giant, perfectly round twine ball with the words “I got “Weird” at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place” in imitation of the kind of tee-shirt the characters in the song would proudly, mindlessly acquire in their travels .
Looking at Felipe’s design for the tee-shirt, I found myself thinking, weirdly enough, that now that I’d designed an awesome garment/piece of merchandise I knew how Kanye West must feel. Not sure why, maybe because no one in my world has been more public about their earnest desire to make fashion than Kanye.
Finally for 27 dollars patron can get their hands on a 12 by 18 poster of Felipe’s illustration of “Bohemian Polka.” It is freaking gorgeous, the kind of thing you could, and should, get signed by Al at a convention or meet and greet.
There’s never been a better time to become a patron at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. You get the good karma and spiritual satisfaction that comes with personally helping keeping a worthwhile enterprise in business AND now you get cool shit sent to you by Patreon as well. That is some win-win type shit. I know on a purely selfish level I am very much excited about getting sent my samples. I may wear the tee-shirt every day for the foreseeable future, but not in a narcissistic way or anything.
So please do consider pledging at any of the new merchandise tiers, or bumping up your pledge to these new tiers; I’ve decided to shamelessly embrace materialism and offer you some sweet-ass stuff you can hold in your hands and drink coffee out of and wear to a “Weird Al” Yankovic concert or stick on the back of your computer to let the world know that you like this weird website and its weird proprietor and a certain weird musical legend generous enough to let me tell his story and the stories of his songs in words as well as images.
Check out the new tiers at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace