So, in 2021 I put up a post outlining a plan to donate a portion of the proceeds of PacifiGo to charities. I then proceeded to do precisely nothing with that plan, partially out of laziness, partially because I literally never made enough profit to hit the scale. When this was the bulk of my income it made sense, but I’m currently lucky enough to have another source of income so I’m less dependent on PacifiGo to pay my bills. (As I’ve outlined recently, PacifiGo is not terribly profitable as a business – I run it basically as a non-profit to help people get into go. Profit is nice, as…

Just a quick update. I’m very much still intending to re-open PacifiGo ASAP, the main slowdown at this point is finding a company to make custom boxes for shipping (go stuff tends to be an awkward shape and size, necessitating this step). Normally this is fine, there’s a few which do it, but the two I’ve managed to drag numbers out of so far have given $14 and $17 per box. I cannot absorb that price, and I doubt you’d be willing to pay that. For comparison, the last place was closer to $1 to $3 per box. That price does come down if you order more, but if you’re…

So, a few days ago I put up a post saying that the odds of PacifiGo continuing to run in anything resembling its current form were quite slim. Well, sometimes slim odds come up. Short version: I managed to figure a way to make the numbers less horrendous, and I will be continuing PacifiGo from Melbourne. There will be a hiatus during the move and re-organisation (I’ve disabled payment options on orders so you shouldn’t be able to complete any, and any that slip through I’ll just cancel and refund when I have a moment), and possibly a price increase to help absorb some increased costs, but we’ll see how…

For reasons that don’t matter here, I will be moving to Melbourne from Brisbane in the very near future. Nearer than I’d like, but one downside of the housing crisis is timeframes get super-squeezed. As in, the end of next week. For years I’ve run PacifiGo essentially out of my garage, in large part because as much as I genuinely believe PacifiGo has helped people get into go by providing a way to get decent quality sets at a reasonable price, it doesn’t make nearly enough to justify paying for storage. This has been fine. However, the place I have ended up in Melbourne does not have workable storage sufficient…

So a few minutes ago I received an e-mail claiming that the website was hacked, and the hackers were going to destroy my reputation by selling all the customer’s information and so on and so forth unless I paid them. At this time, I have zero reason to believe the e-mail is truthful; I see no signs of tampering, the passwords are all the same (although I have changed them just to be super-safe), no unusual activity etc. As a result, I have a high confidence that it’s one of those scam e-mails that says “we have damaging information, give us money or we’ll release it” when they don’t have…