Stuffing the Passer - Tinker Tailor Soldier Sockface

So, first of all, you people are all heroes.

If you haven't heard, the Stuffing the Passer pledge drive obliterated its goal on day 4. That is, like, mind-blowingly incredible. We hemmed and hawed for a good long time about our fundraising target and worried about whether it was overambitious. So much for that!

We'll keep you updated on our capital improvements over the offseason once the dust settles, but needless to say the puppets are going to be in fighting trim come next season. We're really touched by the outpouring of support, and by how well this crowdfunding approach has gone. We're going to sort of treat this like Muppet Public Radio from here on out, working hard to produce some entertaining content for you fine people free of charge and advertisement-free and rely on the selfless kindness of our viewers to pitch into the tip jar now and again to keep our basic operating costs covered.

Programming note: we'll be on hiatus through the holiday season and on lockdown for the title game, gnawing our fingers and toes down to stubs in anxiety. After a week of R&R post-championship game, we'll bring you the season finale, which will consist largely of the lines you submitted in the donation drive. So, if you donated $25 or more and have not e-mailed your line to houserockbuilt-at-gmail-dot-com, be sure to send that over by let's say the Saturday after the championship game. Remember, there was some kind of error in the form, so if you typed your line into the box on the donation form, it did not get to us.

And with that, puppets:

What? Oh, no, this? This is for... nutrition. Yeah.

Stuffing the Passer - Pledge Drive

So, first puppets...

Hi iCarly!!
Now for the real stuff. Gang, fightinamish here. I'm loath to do this, because I'm sure you're all being bombarded on all sides by friends and acquaintances looking to take advantage of your inflated feelings of brotherhood and goodwill toward men in this holiday season and beg you for money for their non-profit, charity, bail, or tattoo removal. Nevertheless, we're opening up shop for the first ever HRB/Stuffing the Passer pledge drive to help keep delivering idiosyncratic sui generis entertainment to you fine folks. Between now and the title game, we're hoping to raise funds to keep this bird flying at our fundraising site: http://rally.org/stuffingthepasser


Many of you have enjoyed four jam-packed seasons of nearly-weekly Stuffing the Passer episodes, and some of you have even been around long enough to know that the House Rock Built has been blogging at varying degrees of torrid enthusiasm for seven and a half years now, wriggling its gasping protoplasmic corpus onto the sandy shores of the blogosphere in 2005 after a late-night realization that Purdue's coaching staff had an incredible and unholy arsenal of mustaches and GOD DAMMIT SOMEONE HAD TO ALERT THE WORLD.

Since then I, along with the priceless if maybe sometimes elusive help of my loyal co-defendant irishoutsider, have taken so much joy out of lobbing our brain farts in your general direction and seeing our weird brand of humor resonate with some kindred spirits out in internet world. You may have noticed that in those seven and a half years, there has never been any advertising on this page (or any updates to the design -- urk! Sorry! Going to fix that this offseason), save for a few months when I tried out Google Ads, which I took down after I realized that I wasn't in this for the dollar a month I netted in royalties at the expense of mangling the layout of the page. The thrill was in making content, connecting with readers, and the cool cachet of amateurism that makes this whole subculture awesome.

But now looking forward to next season, we've come to the realization that we need to make some capital upgrades if we're going to keep delivering the puppet fun that we feel you all richly deserve. Our camera records on honest-to-god video cassette tape (younger viewers, ask your grandfather or the old guy with the eypatch at the VFW what those are) and now squeaks like a bastard thanks to a worn out servo or whatnot. Also, our creative ambition and vision has overtaken our current editing software capability. I'd rather not tell you what a tragically pointless Herculean labor it was to create this split-screen effect in a ten-second gag on free pre-bundled editing software, but it was insanity. Our viewers deserved that joke, though, so I soldiered through. But, in the interest of delivering that in the future, we need to go semi-professional for our software needs.

Beyond that, we're hoping to get a basic green screen so we can actually have episodes in places other than bedrooms and bathrooms, and if there's any money left, an extra puppet or two wouldn't hurt. Anyway, I know it's a hassle, but we wouldn't be asking if we didn't think it was worth it to make sure we're giving you the very best we have to offer. Anything you have to offer is appreciated: a dollar, a penny, a rotting crate of Kalishnikovs, anything. We'll make good use of any of the lawyers, guns, or money you send our way. Thanks for sharing these seven years with us, go Irish, and HEY WAIT WHAT HAPPENED WE'RE GOING TO THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP!