Category: General

Ways for an Amateur Sports Team to Raise Money

  1. Charge membership dues
  2. Make use of membership base to hold social events, music shows, etc; charge entry fee
  3. Put together bus trips to sporting events, include food, drink, etc; charge entry fee
  4. Acquire sponsorships from local businesses
  5. Sell apparel to the team, team family and community
  6. Start a bar game tournament (trivia, maybe beer pong), hold weekly sessions, charge either the players or the bar.
  7. Organize charity events (races, banquets, etc), split proceeds between charity and team
  8. Rent a table or booth at games and tournaments; sell food, or apparel, or both
  9. Have “guest bartender” nights at sponsored bar; member of the team tends bar, 10% of the take goes to the team (or something like that)
  10. Rent the team to the community, for a fee, spend a certain number of hours at someone’s disposal – maybe mowing a lawn, maybe weeding a garden, maybe cleaning out a garage, maybe running security at a birthday party of 11-year-olds.

Story Ideas

  1. Man loses his job. Plot follows his existential crisis, but is actually about world-building: he lives in an America that is different than our own in interesting ways. Shown, not told.
  2. Scientist/Artist team sets out to build a map that in fact is the territory; a perfect representation. They succeed, but the metaphysical implications drive them insane.
  3. A young married couple rides the Trans-Siberian Railway. The hours alone in the stark environment cause them to see each other in new ways. Maybe they split?
  4. A hobo in the year 4000. How does a hobo make do in a spacefaring society? Probably dies at the end.
  5. Some kind of thinly-veiled parable that exposes in a subtle, humorous and elegant way the immense bullshit that motivates homophobia.
  6. Mother and son engage corrupt local political machine. Scandals, drama, etc. Eventual victory.

Reasons Print Media Is Alive And Well

  1. Electronic media is only accessible to a certain part of the population; anyone who can read can pick up a book.
  2. There is something really nice about the tactile feel of a book or a newspaper.
  3. The costs of today’s electronic devices, in terms of resources per item, cannot scale in the way that paper goods can.
  4. You can’t fill the shelves on your bookshelf with digital files.
  5. Academic publishing houses would lose enormous amounts of money if textbooks auto-updated to the newest edition.
  6. Electronic media is still lacking when it comes to interesting design; you’re limited in terms of screen size, shape, etc.
  7. Electronic images can’t match a photo book; not yet. Maybe this is nostalgia.
  8. Paper comes from renewable resources; iPads come from non-renewable minerals.

Reasons Print Media is Dead

  1. Electronic publication is more environmentally sustainable, as each additional copy does not require additional material inputs
  2. As access to the internet becomes ubiquitous worldwide, material copies of literature will lose value and become anachronisms of an earlier age.
  3. Electronic literature takes up less space than paper.
  4. Electronic literature is more mobile than paper.
  5. Electronic literature can automatically update to new editions, saving end-consumers significantly, especially students purchasing textbooks.
  6. The cost to distribute paper literature is absurd compared to electronic literature.
  7. Advertisements in electronic media can be adjusted to suit the particular reader, rather than the readership in general, making ads more attractive and thus more valuable.
  8. The explosion of self-publication rewards electronic media; self-published works are more easily accessible to the electronic-based consumer, as many of these are printed to-order.
  9. As electronic media becomes available on more devices (phones, tablets, computers, TVs, etc), the audience will become broader and broader.
  10. The best and fastest forms of news today exist only on the Internet; blogs, Twitter, etc. To be well-informed one must read digitally.