News You Can Bruise for 2012 July 31

As I write this I have backed 269 Kickstarter projects. I've also been posting the word "Kickstarter" to my Twitter feed every day for the past month. (In my defense, it was always in a sentence along with other words.) So you might imagine that people who are hustling especially hard on their Kickstarter projects might discover me and pitch me to back their project.

Throughout Month of Kickstarter I've gotten a lot of recommendations from friends. Some I've backed, some I haven't, some I'd already backed when the friend told me about it. But from strangers? Not too often. Earlier this month someone asked me to back their video project about (I think) how to do video projects. It wasn't really my thing so I ignored it. And yesterday Daniel Davis asked me to check out Urban-Jazz Violinist Daniel D.'s New Album Project! I actually saw this project when it launched, and decided it too was not really my thing, but what the hell. It's a fine project, today is the final day of MoK 2012, so let's go out with the abandon that marked last year's observance. I've backed Daniel's project and two others:

• Practical Python: Learn programming for the real world! By backing this project I can make sure that the author talks about Beautiful Soup 4 in the web-scraping section, and not Beautiful Soup 3.
• Balance of the Planet, "An educational simulation of environmental-economic issues." That's the kind of description that usually spells trouble on Kickstarter, but Chris Crawford is behind it, so... well, it still may spell trouble. But it's a very cool idea, and the project page promises "no dancing dolphins," which is good because I handled the dolphins yesterday.

Thus ends Month of Kickstarter, coincidentally on the same day as the serialization of Constellation Games. But just like last year, the fun doesn't stop when I stop backing all these projects. Once the projects complete (or fail) I'll be updating the graphs I made last year, when I said things that sound ridiculous now, like "realistically you're not going to get more than 350 backers." What's the realistic number of backers now? We'll find out.

This year there are other people crunching numbers on Kickstarter projects, notably Kicktraq. But this year I've gathered a lot more data than I did last year, and I've got my own ideas for how to slice it up. See you then!