July Progress: With Digital Goodies For All

Fujoshi, fudanshi, fujin, friends, romans, countrymen—lend us your ears! We’ve got a lot to cover.

Cross-Campaign Reward: First up, we’ve got something that affects both the recent FujoCoded LLC BackerKit campaign and last year’s Fujoshi Guide to Web Development Kickstarter campaign: our Digital Goodies Pack! This pack was included with all the pledge tiers on Kickstarter, and was also an all-seeder reward for hitting “100 shares of the campaign post across social media” on BackerKit, which means almost all our supporters will get it!

The description of the pack promised you wallpapers, emojis, and “other oddities we can scrounge up featuring our characters,” so this month it was time to find out what oddities we could conjure! The fulfillment team held a brainstorming meeting, and here’s what we came up with:

• Wallpapers (desktop + phone)
• Emojis (for Discord)
• Campaign badges - get credit for helping us succeed!
• Web decorations (shimeji pet + Under Construction web banner)
• Behind the Scenes of FujoGuide character creation
• Paper dolls (based on the dress-up exercise in the FujoGuide)

Now that we have the goodies figured out, we’ll be assembling the high-res files for distribution. The delivery of the Goodies pack will align with the delivery date for the physical rewards of the FujoCoded LLC Backerkit campaign—probably mid-August or early September, according to how long manufacturing takes. We’ll let backers of both campaigns know exactly when to expect something shiny in your inboxes!

Read on for more updates on our current major projects.

Recent Progress on Our Backerkit Campaign

Fulfillment Survey Locked In: Last month, we warned FujoCoded LLC backers our fulfillment survey was about to hit their inboxes. Hopefully you all received your surveys, because the last day to fill them out was Sunday the 7th. There may unofficially still be a couple of days until we charge cards and officially lock new entries for any last-minute stragglers, but replier’s add-on preferences are now locked in. If you do realize you need to make a change, please contact contacts@fujocoded.com. You’ll still be able to change your shipping address until we get closer to shipping.

Bonus FujoGuide Article Section: We’ve been working on the section of our website that will contain our free educational articles, including our stretch goal from the campaign: a how-to article on using the terminal.

• Our existing team has written the first draft of the article on Terminal to serve as the base for a future version.
• This rough base definitely needs love from a technical writer. This is where the money our BackerKit backers helped us raise comes in: while we’re still working on the legal and logistical side, we’re raring to engage the help of a dedicated contractor.

Lawyering Up, Part 2: Electric Boogaloo: After a few scheduling disappointments, we have some progress to report on the legal front:

• We met with a SELC (Sustainable Economies Law Center) lawyer about FujoCoded LLC’s membership structure and for help understanding the intricacies of employment and contract law.
• We’ve had our initial meeting with a fandom-friendly IP (Intellectual Property) lawyer recommended to us during the campaign. In the meeting, we made sure we were a mutual fit, established our legal priorities, and discussed what kind of research and prep work we would need to do in order to keep legal costs down. It looks like the contract draft we’ve been working on had the right idea! We’re getting closer to proper contracts with our artists and helpers.
• We’ve gotten in contact with a potential employment lawyer, and will schedule a first meeting in the following weeks. There’s lots of research left to be done on our many, many legal options. We hope to have even more to share next time!

What’s Next for the FujoCoded Backerkit

Stocking Up: Now that we’ve locked in everyone’s preferences with regard to physical rewards, we can get everything in production! That covers:

• Ordering all the stickers/totes/T-shirts/etc
• Our founder Ms Boba lovingly crafting all the FujoBoards and bottling all the Catboy Bathwater
• Purchasing shipping supplies in bulk Next month, we’ll try to have some more behind-the-scenes snapshots for you. By then we’ll have all the merchandise in our hands (we hope) and be able to show off the goods!

Volunteer Opportunity - Legal Research: We’re looking for volunteers ready to brave legal language and documents to create the initial drafts of our contributor contracts by piecing together existing templates. Help us complete our prep work and move forward with IP rights agreements for our character designers, illustrators, and writers! No formal legal experience or license required (although appreciated): all contracts will be extensively reviewed by paid legal professionals before being put into use!

If you’re interested in helping out, please reach us at contacts@fujocoded.com.

Recent Progress on the Fujoshi Guide to Web Development

Vol. 0, Issue 1: Git

• Playing taskmaster: Our step-by-step plan has been very helpful in sharing tasks and knowledge among our team, but as often happens, getting to work on a task reveals even more subtasks hiding within it! Technically, our to-do list is now longer than it was when we started, but that’s only because we’re in the thick of getting work done 👍
• “Be gentle, it’s my first time!”: This issue is taking longer than any future zine because we’re building our zine-assembling software (with Astro and VivlioStyle!) and figuring everything out for the first time. Some of our toughest challenges, like style choices for callout boxes and auto-generating content indexes, will carry over for future issues. In our next zine, we won’t have to reinvent the wheel!
• Easy, breezy, beautiful: We commissioned one of our long-term contributors and character designers to create the cover for this issue. We aren’t ready for the design reveal yet, but we know you’re going to love it!
• All plugged up: To assist with one of the more difficult aspects of zine-making, we’ve created a suite of plugins that allow us to go from markdown language to a polished and fully-styleable zine with ease. Astro users and anyone else curious can find the styling suite in our new plugins repo here. You can watch us create some of these plugins live in this Twitch recording.

Vol. 0, Issue 2: GitHub

• Getting Beta: Some of our beta readers have completed their GitHub issue read-through! We’re waiting with bated (beta’d??) breath for everyone to turn in their feedback for our Beta Coordinator to assemble in a final report.

FujoGuide’s Online Counterpart: Work continues on our new companion website where we’ll be hosting the digital resources referenced in the first issue, among other tutorials and explainers. This online part of the guide will be available to the general public, providing an onramp for essential startup steps like how to install Git and how to use Terminal commands. By freely sharing these fundamentals, we hope to be of help to all aspiring online coders!

What’s Next for FujoGuide

Asking the big questions: After some reflections on lessons learned from FujoCoded LLC campaign fulfillment and insight gleaned from the Vol. 0, Issue 2: Github beta, we’re considering offering our Kickstarter backers a split-delivery schedule. We’re weighing the benefits of delivering Issue 1 ahead of Issues 2 & 3, vs our original plan of scheduling delivery only after all three issues are complete. You can read the full breakdown of the split-delivery option here on Kickstarter.

If you’re a backer, we will soon send out a supporter survey that will help us make a final decision on how best to fulfill our commitments to you. Please only vote once (we trust you🤞) and let us know what you think of this possibility!

To ship or not to ship (our issue 1 preview): As we assemble all the necessary components of our first issue, we get closer to the moment when it’s time to make the final call on revealing our work to our backers. A lot of the big complex items are out of the way, but we’ll soon be faced with the biggest item of them all: doing one final styling and readability pass to make our guide as pretty as it can be and to try to catch as many typos as we can!

Hang Out with FujoCoded on Twitch 💬✨

As mentioned in last month’s communications, our founder Ms Boba will be streaming only once a week (instead of twice a week) for the foreseeable future. There’s always a chance of an unscheduled bonus stream, so keep an eye on either your Twitch notifications, our social media feeds, or on Ms Boba’s permanent “streaming schedule” page.

Here’s the schedule for upcoming Twitch streams—while we have some work tentatively scheduled, for the most part you’ll just get to hang out with Ms Boba as she works on campaign fulfillment stuff and other company needs. This month, the bulk of the work will be the Issue 1 preview and digital rewards fulfilments, so if you’re curious about those come on in!

July

• Thursday, July 18 @ 3pm PDT: Let’s Build a Wallpaper Generator! (recording, generator)
• Monday, July 22 @ 3pm PDT: No breaks, zine only, FINAL DESTINATION

August

• Thursday, August 1 @ 3pm PDT: BobaBoard Stream: Issue Tracking Edition
• Monday, August 5 @ 3pm PDT: Coworking time!
• Thursday, August 15 @ 3pm PDT: Coworking time!

Okay, that’s everything we wanted to share with you this month! 😌Phew. It sure feels like we’re keeping a lot of spinning plates in the air! Thanks as always for your continued interest and support.

The FujoCoded LLC Team
(life-size human-shaped goodie bags)