Damn Interesting founder runs a fundraiser to buy back his own writing time

Alan Bellows, who founded the long-form site Damn Interesting, explains that he sustained the project for nearly two decades by pairing part-time engineering jobs with research and writing. Those part-time roles have dried up as employers increasingly demand full-time commitment, so he now holds a full-time job that has made him the site’s bottleneck. He frames the effort against a broader backdrop of AI-generated ‘slop’ flooding the web.

To address this, he’s launching a one-off fundraiser—possibly repeated a year later—with the modest goal of matching the part-time salary he used to earn. Hitting that target would let him redirect much of his time back to writing and running the site for the next 12 months. He’s careful to distinguish this personal-time fundraiser from the existing ‘Give a Damn’ donation system, which covers recurring operational costs like hosting, licenses, and link curation.

He closes with a characteristic Damn Interesting flourish: the Magic 8 Ball, invented in 1950, weights its icosahedral die toward optimism, with ten ‘yes’ answers against five ‘no’ and five ‘unclear’—making a positive reply twice as likely. His self-aware verdict on whether the fundraiser will succeed: signs point to yes.