The Resurrection Protocol
Thought Punks Lives
Support direct: PayPal | Credit/Debit | Ko-Fi. Or rent Rev’s brain.
okay. OKAY. oh my god.
Hi. It me. Rev. The weirdo who does Thought Punks. Still here. Kind of amazed I get to say that. Because I sat with a lawyer yesterday talking about what the Thought Punks catalog was worth. Not in a good way. In a “I’ve run completely out of road and need to know what I have left to sell” way. IP disposition. Asset value. Very clean professional language for a door closing with sad quiet instead of slamming. The fundraiser stalled. Bills and needs, all of it on fire at once, none of it kind or patient. I was writing a last ditch post, but really I was writing a goodbye.
Y’all were not having it.
I don’t even have words for what happened next, and I work with words professionally, so that’s saying something. The immediate medical costs got covered. I found a phone and ordered it (cracked screen era: officially over). Got utility downpayments made.
And then Baba Yaga looked at the whole situation from outside, saw it clearly in a way I couldn’t from inside the middle of it, and just built a whole stream-a-thon for April 24-27 around the momentum. Matching donors already lined up. Real structure. Real push. And the people who’ve already stepped up with sponsored matching donations… it’s too much. YOU ARE ALL TOO MUCH. Cried an embarrassing amount and not even a little sorry about it.
Every coin dropped, every boost, every kind word that landed at exactly the right weight at exactly the right moment: thank you. I mean that from the whole chest. The goodbye isn’t valid anymore. But the road’s not done either. Here’s what’s still left and what it actually does.
First Light (~$950)
$120 already in toward the bike. I needs to hug every single one of you. Getting my body able to actually move through the world where the rest of my life is happening. I can’t easily get to school, appointments, fieldwork placements, any of it, if I literally can’t get there freely. Plus down pays on utilities don’t resolve the other bills or needing not trash clothes. It’s that stupid basic right now.
Clothes for showing up right ($300): Two reasonable thrift runs. Counseling school means clinical placements and interviews and orientations and rooms that form opinions based on the threads before anyone says a damn thing. Know too much about how that works. Need to take it serious. Not giving up ground I don’t have to give up just because I couldn’t get to a thrift store.
Dent in the bill backlog ($370): Not all of it, but relief. Enough that the number of simultaneous fires drops below the point where tracking them all eats the part of my brain I actually make things with. The part where Vermillion Vespers came from. That’s where everything comes from.
The Long Dark (~$985)
“Almost caught up” sounds fine until you’ve lived there long enough. Bleeding late fees and compounding interest every single month and the grinding overhead of life lived entirely in reaction. It just quietly eats the open wandering part of your brain, the part that goes weird and comes back with strange things. Survival mode makes everything but survival hard, if not feel impossible.
That wide-open part is where the games come from. Where the joy lives. I need it back.
More bills clearance ($635): What First Light doesn’t touch, this does. Bring me up to almost current, but sustainable, not bought-a-little-time “current”. Every dollar here really reduces load instead of just kicking it down the road to get heavier.
Bike battery ($350): Currently charging to only 65% of full capacity, no warning system for the day it decides to just stop mid-ride. Replacement means transportation I can actually build a real schedule around instead of gambling on it every single day and a mere $30-40 difference is 25% more range, getting me to my farthest appointments.
The Crossing (~$800-1600)
Here’s the thing about the program nobody warned me upfront about. Before I have program health insurance, there’s a window where I have to cut my day job hours to complete required pre-program prep and internship orientation. Non-negotiable. Doesn’t care about my income situation at all. And in that same window my body has medication needs that don’t care about any of it. Out of pocket that runs $1,600 for one month.
The whole goal for this tier is just half of that to soften the blow. Even halfsies on a month of medication can mean when the prep window hits this summer before the internship I walk in actually stable. Not fighting just to survive my own brain while also trying to start the one of the hardest and most important things I’ve ever done. I spent years learning to sit with people through their hard times, like people have sat with me, the ones where you’re fighting to become who you’re becoming and just surviving the crossing is the part that feels like it might break you first.
And truth? I earnestly love doing it with all my heart. Taking the next step to be an addictions counselor gives me a clear high-demand career path and a guarantee I can afford to live long-term. That’s what’s over on my Avalon. $1,600 is what making it across in one piece will cost in hard unforgiving math.
April 24-27: THE BIG PUSH. BE THERE!
Baba Yaga built something real and I’m still not fully over it. A multi-day stream-a-thon with matching donors locked in, organized momentum behind it, a genuine shot at pushing me from “no longer actively going under” to “actually is stable for the big life transition”.
Between now and then: Put this somewhere real. Your Discord. Your Bluesky. Your group chat. The friend who found Vermillion Vespers the same sideways hypnotic way you did and hasn’t quite stopped thinking about it since. Every single signal boost is another stake through the heart of the undead capitalism beast draining me dry. The people who would show up, who wanna show up if they just knew, only need to know there’s a door.
what’s waiting next
I can see Fall from here. Not in the seeing Russia from my porch way, but in the standing on a hill and seeing the creek snake through valley way. Just yesterday I could barely imagine doing more that a fire sale next week.
There are games that need making. There are so many things in my slushpile made that need just a little love and polish. All the strange, silly, contemplative, and just outright alive things that need this chaos mess of trauma and obsession and joy. A chaos mess is right in the middle of getting a clinical license added to it. Dunno yet what comes out the other side. I know it’s going to have beautiful things to share.
It’s still getting made. I dunno who that Rev is yet. I wanna meet him. I wanna discover what he sees. I need to reach that lookout point. Help me get there.
Love for all my other friends in the night, all those Othered by a business hours world that has no room for them. I feel seen by you especially in this moment and I see you in return. One of the greatest parts of all this is finding a place in the world where, while there’s clear professional obligations, I’m allowed to be weird, allowed to be broken, allowed to be forever striving. It’s a world where it’s normal for my work peers to have lived experience with mental health struggles, TBIs, severe trauma, addiction history, and/or neurological struggles. Which is part of what I really liked about doing peer support (for which that lived experience is a requirement). My professional place with other weirdos like me is just across that bridge.
Share this. Your group chat, your Discord, your Bluesky, your table. Every signal boost counts.
P.S. Why not Throne? They stopped accepting Amazon and general store links so everything converts to cash anyway with their fees stacked on top. Direct links do the same job without paying them to host my wishlist. Simple as that. Let’s bypass the machine and just build the bridge ourselves!
