Good morning, good afternoon or good evening (depending on your state of mind) and welcome to ReallyCoolNews!

ReallyCoolNews is a part of ReallyCoolSite.org, which has been various things over the years since it was founded in 2001, including a site devoted to TechTV comic strips, a personal blog site, a site devoted to original comic books, and so much more over the last 23 years.

Since November of 2021, we’ve been primarily known for our daily “newspaper,” with news articles devoted to covering first amendment auditors and first amendment adjacent figures.

We use the word “news” in the basest and loosely format possible as despite the fact that we’ve had journalistic training, unlike everyone else in the field, we’re not using the label of a “journalist” because we don’t want to get lumped in with every other knucklehead in the field who is calling themselves that to get away with bad behavior.

The term around here is “blog” and “blogger” and “blogging” and we’re very happy to be our own little thing, far away from the idiots who are “working on a story” to excuse their stupid and often illegal behavior.

Conveniently, our database on the website completely died last week and we’re in a rebuilding phase.  Most of our older articles contained links and items such as coverage of daily live events or daily featured videos that won’t be coming back as there’s waaaaaaay too much work involved in tracking each one down.

If you want absolute proof that we’ve been around for years, probably hit up discord and find our links quietly posted on many of the “anti” first amendment auditing servers since 2022. Or the internet wayback machine. Up to you, not up to us to prove.

As we put articles back up from our old Word and Text files, if the links are there and *the links haven’t been removed by their owners* we’ll include them. Don’t like that? Tough. We have nothing to prove. We’re old, we’re tired, and frankly, we don’t care.

As with every publication, there are times when we get things wrong. We’ll be the first to admit that. If you have a correction to make or want to get in touch, best way to do that is through e-mail at jamesknine@gmail.com. We’ll work with you if it’s a true error or if we really fudged something up. If it’s just a bit of wishful thinking on your part because “they’d never do that,” you probably won’t get a reply.

Our articles try to take on a neutral approach to our coverage. We’re not here to insult, demean, project an agenda, etc. There are times when we do take humorous approaches to stories, and there are times when we may cross lines you may not be comfortable with. We’ll listen to your feedback and learn from it as we move forward, but know we’re not out to insult, demean or hurt anyone. We’ll poke fun at people, but there’s no malicious efforts behind it.

We reserve the right to delete and ban anyone from our site or our YouTube channel for any reason at all. Your first amendment rights don’t apply on a private server or a private service. We’ll nuke, ban, carry out horrible things at the slightest whim if we need to in order to keep the peace. We’ve been working in social media since before the term was coined and have run communities on some of the biggest companies in the world.

Don’t like the policy?  Eh, sorry about that, but it is what it is.

Sometimes we heart and like posts just to heart and like posts. It encourages people to post. Do not take our likes and loves as endorsements of anything but the almighty YouTube algorithm. We’re not dying on your hill. We’re not advocating for you. But if we can give your comment a fair shake, we will despite our personal feelings on it.

That said, personal attacks on anyone – including ourselves – are not permitted and our mods have ban hammers for a reason. Attack the idea, not the person. Since YouTube’s moderation tools suck, sometimes things will fall through the cracks, but if we see things that violate our guidelines, they’ll be removed without warning.

As far as our “horrible” “robotic” “worst thing in the world” “oh I can’t stand it,” voice in our videos. That’s our voice. We don’t use AI (PANTS would kill us). We’re slowly but surely improving our craft. If you don’t like the voice, switch to reallycoolsite.org and read it for yourself, or not.

Lastly, while we’ve been around for quite a long time (which has made restoring the site a miserable process), our YouTube channel started as a full-time thing in May of this year. We’re a tiny channel covering a very niche subject. We know we don’t have 601,000 viewers or pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars from our work (or anything right now since we’re not monetized). We’re entirely comfortable in our own shoes right now and we’re going to keep on keeping on exactly like we have been when we had 10 viewers and just a handful of friends placating our efforts.

That said, have a wonderful morning/evening/afternoon and thank you for contributing your time to our efforts. If you’re inclined, donation links are everywhere to keep us fed. Thank you in advance.

Jim