Martin L. Shoemaker

I offer X Subscriptions. I have had great success with my game designs. While there are certainly designers with more DEPTH than myself, I can't think of many with more BREADTH. I've won awards and made a mark with tabletop RPGs (Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, Ghostbusters, Cthulhu Mythos for D&D, and more); with digital games (Doom, Age of Empires series, etc.); and with board games (Cthulhu Wars, Planet Apocalypse, Hyperspace). For some time now I've been doing subscriber posts three times a week. They range from game design advice, to anecdotes, to scenario ideas. Today for instance, the subscriber post was a magic item for D&D - a cursed mirror made from a damned soul. Join my subscriptions if you want to see what I offer. Also you get the sincere gratitude of a man seeking to ensure a safer old age for me and my wife. I also have been doing articles, which you can find on my home page pretty easily. So far none of the articles are subscriber-only.

@alt_w_v_g @Fire_Chief 47 minutes would’ve been great. I canceled repeatedly for months, and they just kept billing me. I finally told them to cancel or I was filing an attorney general complaint. That got them to cancel.

Ran some diligence on SiriusXM this weekend Not because anyone asked Because my 14-year-old nephew connected his phone to my car via Bluetooth, played a Spotify playlist, and asked me what the "SXM" button was for I didn't have an answer So I pulled the 10-K SiriusXM is an $8.56B revenue company with nearly $10B in debt and a $7.4B market cap Read that again The debt is larger than the company Their business model, simplified: 1. Pay automakers to install radios nobody asked for 2. Give every new car buyer a free trial they didn't request 3. Hope they forget to cancel 4. Charge them $25.99/month for something their phone does for $10.99 That's it. That's the model. They have 33M subscribers. Sounds impressive until they lost 301,000 self-pay subscribers last year. And hundreds of thousands the year before that. Revenue has declined three consecutive years The average subscriber is 35-64, male, household income over $150K. Over half have been paying for 10+ years. These aren't loyal customers These are people whose spouses haven't noticed the $25.99 charge on the Amex yet The crown jewel of the portfolio is Howard Stern. They pay him roughly $100M a year. He works three days a week. His show averages 125K daily listeners. That's $800 per listener per year My analyst did the math three times because he thought he was wrong He wasn't For that price, you could buy each listener a Spotify family plan, an Audible subscription, and still have enough left for AirPods Speaking of Spotify. Nearly 290M premium subscribers. Growing double digits. $10.99/month. Available on every device ever made. SiriusXM. 33M subscribers. Shrinking. $25.99/month. Requires a satellite. Spotify's full-year revenue grew 19%. SiriusXM's declined 2%. Spotify trades at 74x earnings. SiriusXM trades at 5x. The market is not confused about which direction these businesses are headed Their growth strategy is called the "trial funnel." There are 7.3M people driving cars with free SiriusXM trials. The conversion rate is not publicly disclosed. Probably because it's embarrassing They have 180M "enabled vehicles" in the U.S. They have 33M subscribers. That's an 18% attach rate on hardware they already paid to install. 82% of the cars with their radios in them are generating zero revenue In any other industry an 18% hit rate gets you fired In satellite radio, it gets you a seat on the NYSE Adjusted EBITDA margin is 31%. Looks healthy. Until you realize "adjusted" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting in a company that posted a $2.08B net loss the year prior. Adjusted EBITDA was $2.73B that same year The distance between those two numbers is called addbacks And they're working overtime 2026 guidance: flat revenue, flat EBITDA, slightly fewer subscribers. The CEO called this stability and meaningful progress. On Wall Street, we call this managed decline Warren Buffett owns 35.4% of this company. This is the most confusing part. The man who said "be fearful when others are greedy" bought a satellite radio company in the age of Bluetooth. His entry was a Liberty Media arb play that accidentally became a long-term hold. The stock is down over 50% from its highs. I don't know why he's still in. You don't know why. His shareholders definitely don't know why. The bull thesis: SiriusXM has 33M people who have been paying $15/month for a decade and have no plans to stop. That's $6B in recurring revenue from people who may not even remember they're subscribed. Churn is 1.5%. Lower than most SaaS companies. The bear thesis: Every teenager alive today has never used a car radio Both are probably right SiriusXM's competitive moat is not content. It's not technology. It's not brand. It's the 47 minutes it takes to cancel over the phone SiriusXM isn't a bad company. It's a case study in what happens when your moat is consumer apathy and your growth strategy requires General Motors. Plz fix. Thx. Sent from my iPhone

@LouJBerger My hope is that first-one-free results in more money toward the author. I can’t prove it’s working, but I decided to try.

@ShoemakerSpace Read it. Loved it!! THANK YOU!! I paid for it though. Money flows TOWARD the author.

Free ebook! BoboButtons.com Bobo Buttons, Private Eye Murder is no laughing matter. When Jock Robin is murdered in the middle of his clown act, Bobo Buttons is pressed into service as the circus’s private detective, tasked with keeping the authorities out of the show’s business while tracking down the killer. But in the circus, misdirection is the rule of the day. Nothing is what it seems. When another trouper falls victim, can Bobo unravel a generation of hatred before the circus itself is assassinated?

@ShamashAran Amazingly, that’s practically all I noticed they stripped. Drew Goddard did a surgical adaptation.

Project Hail Mary was pretty good. They stripped all the nerd shit out, but it was still good.

@SandyofCthulhu I would write software even if no one paid me to write software. It’s what I do, who I am. They pay me so they can tell me which software to write—but not how to write it.

I am a full time game designer, and I've had this job from 1981 to now. Until I founded my own company in 2013, EVERY SINGLE GAME except one (Lightspeed 1991) was assigned to me by a corporate suit. The Man, if you will. Think of it - I'm considered inventive, but I don't get to invent what I want. Call of Cthulhu was given me from Chaosium (I admit I was champing at the bit). Doom was the game being made at id Software when I was hired. Age of Empires was assigned. It was all someone else's idea that I had to implemente. Now, I'm not complaining - the Man treated me well. I had a decent salary, generally good benefits, and a fun work environment (i.e., I wasn't at EA or Disney). But from Call of Cthulhu to Halo Wars, I didn't pick the topic. Was this bad? Not necessarily. The Man paid my way - he ought to have a say in what I do. But how did I deal with it? Easy. I made every game my own. The suits weren't micromanaging every step - or at least when they tried I could push back. For instance, around 2005 I was told to create a game about pirates, but like Diablo. Diablo Pirates was not a topic I would have chosen, but I plunged into it. I researched pirate history from 1500-1750, I forged an entire campaign. I developed enemies both natural & supernatural. I worked on ship combat. I created random & fixed foes, miniquests, and so forth. I also created pirate classes: the Brute (Blackbeard was the achetypal Brute), the Sea Dog, the Dandy (Captain Hook was a Dandy), the Weird, etc. I created a whole complicated campaign, By the time I was a month into the game, I and my small team were dedicated to Pirates Diablo to the point we evangelized it to others at Ensemble Studios. Then Pirates Diablo got cancelled, by the suits, and we were all moved onto something else. That's the dark side of corporate picking your game project I guess. But hey I got paid for my time (probably about 3-4 months of effort). Since we weren't at EA we didn't all get laid off either. We just went on to other things at the same company.

@StephenFleming Thank you! If that one got to you, brace yourself for chapter 16.

@ShoemakerSpace Alright. Chapter 10 of “The Last Dance” just brought me to tears. I didn’t expect that. Wow. Well done.

A one-hit wonder has one hit. How many do you have?

A sweeping epic of Mars’s fight for freedom—an unforgettable saga of war, family, and civilization on the red frontier. Pre-order Travis J.I. Corcoran's Red State Mars now! @MorlockP @travis4nh passage.press/products/red-s…

Technically the paperback and hardcover aren’t released until tomorrow (the 17th), but Amazon is taking orders now. a.co/d/016YZz2X Fall of a Sky Dancer When Bobo Buttons, Private Eye takes a side trip to visit Jock Robin’s grave, he sees a family conducting their own funeral. To his surprise, he recognizes one of the mourners: an acrobat from a rival show, a man whom Bobo recently saved from prison. The deceased is the acrobat’s wife, and his family and others think he killed her. The fall of this Sky Dancer is tearing the circus apart. So the show’s Governor hires Bobo to find the truth. Bobo goes undercover in hostile territory to dig up the real story, secrets that someone has already killed to conceal…

Applications for Launchpad are now open! launchpadworkshop.org Launchpad Astronomy Workshop is a free, invitation-only weeklong workshop on astronomy for writers, editors, artists, producers, directors, and other creators. The goal is to help us put better science in our science fiction. One thing that’s not in the workshop description is the Launchpad alumnus private mailing list. That in itself is an amazing resource. I can ask all sorts of space science questions for my stories, and get feedback from amazingly smart people. This workshop is deep. Really deep. I have been studying space science as a layman/writer my whole life. When I attended, I was already known for my hard science fiction in Analog. I knew my stuff. And I still emerged with 50 pages of detailed notes. Space is vast, but spaces are limited. Apply today!

Yay! I’ve been targeted for cancellation! I’ve arrived!

Bobo Buttons, Private Eye Route Book 1: The Killer with a Thousand Faces Now available as a free ebook: books.shoemaker.space/t1sc9uug74 Murder is no laughing matter. When Jock Robin is murdered in the middle of his clown act, Bobo Buttons is pressed into service as the circus’s private detective, tasked with keeping the authorities out of the show’s business while tracking down the killer. But in the circus, misdirection is the rule of the day. Nothing is what it seems. When another trouper falls victim, can Bobo unravel a generation of hatred before the circus itself is assassinated?

@BRT_EMH01 @SandyofCthulhu It helps if you understand going in that it’s a parody of a Bruce Willis action film, that just happens to star Bruce Willis. The logic is often sacrificed for the joke.

@ShoemakerSpace @SandyofCthulhu I still to this day have never seen HUDSON HAWK.

These three go together in a perfect sequence. I admit the middle one isn't a movie. The Black Hole - prequel Doom - what happens Event Horizon - the sequel

@SandyofCthulhu We had a player who learned habits in another group, where they apparently prized speedy play. He would roll attacks and announce damage before I asked him what he was doing. He got really annoyed when I disallowed it.

As a gamemaster, my eyes roll so hard when a player rolls that Nat 20 (or in a 1d100 system, an 01-05) when it's not needed, and then thinks, "Well I'll hang onto it until my next roll is called for." What. The. Heck. I've actually watched players roll their dice again and again, as if it was a nervous tic. Then when a good roll came up on the dice, they "saved" it. That's not how it works, pal, though I understand the temptation. My solution is I say, "Well, roll just once more - then you can save THAT roll instead, because it's announced." Also - hard never-broken rule. If your die rolls off the table, it must ALWAYS be rerolled. You NEVER get to count a die that landed on the floor, your lap, or elsewhere. This has two good results: 1) everyone gets to see the die roll. Not that I don't trust you. 2) now people don't like seeing their dice roll off the table.

@MoonsOf94909 @SandyofCthulhu By that definition, there was a time in the past when Jupiter and Saturn weren't planets, despite being the second and third largest bodies in the Solar System.

@SandyofCthulhu "Clears its own orbit" will always be one of the most ridiculously stupid criteria I've heard. Round, ok. Orbits the sun, ok. That's all I need. Pluto's a planet and forever will be for me.

A planetologist told me, bitterly, that in the conference where they literally voted to downgrade Pluto’s status, they waited till late one night until AFTER the planetologists had all gone to their hotel rooms. Then the other astronomers had their vote. He called it a “coup” and claimed that almost no planetologist was on board with the change. Is this true? I don’t know. But if I can’t confirm a story I always believe the more interesting version.

A road rage confrontation escalated when a woman got out of her car and approached a man during a heated argument in traffic. According to the video and bystanders, she was the clear aggressor and struck the man first. After being hit, the man retaliated and hit her back, turning the argument into a physical fight. The incident raises a tough question about responsibility and self-defense. If someone starts the violence but the other person strikes back, who is really in the wrong? Does a man have the right to defend himself against a woman in this situation?

@MrWhiteMAGA It's on video. Charge her criminally.

Casino Royale with David Niven and the rest of the all-star cast.

What is your favorite British film?