We are only about $325 away from unlocking Viking. I bet we could do this by Monday. It always slows down in the middle, usually with a bump toward the end.
Unlike many of the other missions in this series, this one never had an enamel pin version—so the patch will be a fresh render based on the original poster design.
If the title throws you off, it’s because it refers to the combined mission of Spirit and Opportunity, better known as the Mars Exploration Rovers. These twin robots helped redefine what we expect from surface missions, and this patch will finally give them their place in the series.
If you are already pledged, you can now go back in and add the new Shuttle patch, as well as ISS patch which was just added a few days ago.
Save $100 during our launch of High Efficiency Laser Sintered Bodies TODAY
Get our latest innovation as a Body upgrade without having to buy a complete mouthpiece.
Upgrade your current 5MM/SpectraTone Mouthpiece with improved efficiency and reduced weight in seconds. Our Laser Sintered Lattice Topology bodies are designed to take your playing to the next level.
This YouTube video will show how quickly you can upgrade any 5MM/SpectraTone mouthpiece...
Utilizing the latest Aerospace/Medical Topology software and made with multi-million dollar metal printing technology, you will realize the advantages of cutting edge design and manufacturing. Our LSLT bodies are much more than a conversation piece as your range, endurance, and tone quality tell the story.
It's been a long journey, and we appreciate your patience along the way. What began in December is now nearly complete, thanks to your support. Our original goal was to deliver all SpectraTone Red mouthpieces by the first week in April. We've now delivered 96% of all orders from backers who completed their surveys. Eight people have not returned a survey, which means we will choose your body variation and set it aside for you, but we cannot ship without your address and rim selection.
That leaves another few backers waiting on rim sizes that are currently at plating. To our surprise, we had an unusually high number of orders for 660 and 614 diameter rims, which had been made in December, but not all were plated. Those should be back in our shop in approximately 10 days or less. If you are waiting on an order for a 614H rim and would like to switch to a different 614 variation to get quicker shipping, please contact us at 303.657.2747.
Save $250 on Titanium and $175 on Stainless Steel SpectraTone Red, Yellow, or Blue mouthpieces
I have two Titanium mouthpiece bodies remaining, which I will offer to our backers in the form of a complete SpectraTone Red, Yellow, or Blue mouthpiece for $350. If you want one in Stainless Steel, the price is $325. Email me by Wednesday (or order with link below) before they are gone forever. Oh yeah, did I mention all SS and Ti body styles will be retired once inventory is sold out. This is due to the complex production process that is too costly in smaller batches. I made approximately 15% more bodies in SS and Ti than were originally ordered through Backerkit. You can see remaining inventory here.
Laser Sintered ALUMINUM Body
And finally, I want to announce the debut of standalone LSLT (Laser Sintered Lattice Topology) Mouthpiece Bodies in ALUMINUM. I will be offering these to all SpectraTone/5MM mouthpiece owners for HALF PRICE next week. Again, once these are sold out, they will not be offered again. Your next opportunity for a LSLT solution will come with SpectraTone Green in Autumn.
Thanks again for your amazing support, feedback, and musicianship! Jason, Jen, Christine
Jen has been working hard to enter every single order into our system for the past two weeks. The process has been slower than expected as approximately 35% of our backers have requested some kind of change to their order after we closed the surveys, which has delayed all shipments. For this reason, we will no longer consider any future requests for order changes or additions. We really want to ship your mouthpieces!
Here's what you can expect for the remaining SpectraTone Red shipping schedule.
March 12th - remaining Brass variations with no upgrades March 26th - all SS variations with no upgrades April 2nd - all Ti variations with no upgrades April 9th - all orders with upgrades
We will be offering one final option to purchase a new SpectraTone Red and related accessories at a very nice discount. We're doing this to give your friends, colleagues, and students a chance to get in on the fun.
First, the shipping news... Breadberry Starter Shipping
I've just returned from a quick jaunt to my local post office, dropping off dozens of Breadberry starters. For those of you who added the Breadberry add-on, your dehydrated starter is now en-route, secured in the hands of USPS.
For our international backers, we're now in "send and pray" mode for your Breadberry shipments. I've attached international stamps to your regular envelopes, hoping they make it through the labyrinth of global mail systems. Unfortunately it's all a bit of a dice roll, as customs rules differ from country to country. Who knew, for instance, that Spain has a no-go policy on playing cards? And shipping pulverized coca beans to Germany? Nein, danke! You can find more of these peculiar restrictions here: https://pe.usps.com/text/Imm/immctry.htm. Let me know if you find anything about dehydrated sourdough starters in there (e.g., I would argue it is definitely not a live animal).
Special thanks go to Noah, my trusty Breadwinner sidekick as he stuffed many of the envelopes you'll be receiving and has been a huge support during our journey.
If you're a non-US backer waiting for your actual Breadwinner, don't fret - it looks as if the majority of them have made it out of the country and many of them have already cleared customs in their destination country.
How’s it going?
So, for those who have successfully sprung their units from their boxes and are feeding the data beast, how are things kneading out? Some of you have already recorded a dozen feedings, which is fantastic! We're seeing new devices rise online daily, but do feel free to drop me a line if you encounter any glitches or need assistance with your setup – [email protected].
Suggest Features?
To help me better organize and prioritize future development on Breadwinner, I’ve baked up a new feedback system over here:
This is my first time using Canny, but I'm hopeful it will aid in keeping things well-organized and allow you to stay updated when fresh features are baked and ready.
Until next time, keep those ovens warm and the feedback coming!
Greetings, fu(jo|dan|jin) and friends, It's almost that time of the year again, when BobaBoard retrospectives get written and April 1st jokes are planned and (one way or the other) delivered. Before we go heads down again on our Recurring Spring Obligations™ and FujoGuide Issue 2, our current priority, here's the roundup of what we've been up to since you last saw read us.
🌸✨ A FRIENDLY NOTE ✨🌸This edition was written by Ms Boba herself, without much chance for others to stop her help review and revise. Please enjoy her typos, writing quirks, excessive parentheticals (and occasional digressions (and nested asides)).
FujoCoded General News [Omakase]
Note: This is a "omakase" selection of our company's updates. Enjoy the full menu on our website.
Get-ProjectManager’d: Thanks to last newsletter's plea, we have an official Project Manager! While not exactly a fujin (yet?), James is a wise, older, non-binary eldritch horror of knowledge who has been helping fan communities since 1995...and now helps us. Other than guiding the transition from Ms Boba's planet-sized charts to actual GitHub issues, and wrangling our raccoons collaborators in her stead, James has introduced us to Posh-chan, Microsoft's official PowerShell gijinka and absolute BombShell of a... shell. Now that is culture fit!
FujoCoded BackerKit Fulfillment Progress: Recent
Coding in Space(s): There's a new article at the event horizon! Sel and Grubdog joined forces to (space)ship learn@ readers straight into a full development environment by teaching them about GitHub Codespaces. Want to Halo jump into coding your site or contributing to one of our projects without first installing a bunch of stuff? Steal compute from Leverage Microsoft's generous (free) offerings and get a full computer in your browser—Catboys, alas, not included.
One (S)hell of a Breakup: Last you heard from us, we were splitting up NPMarticles to (allegedly) improve their readability. Having acquired a taste for dramatic breakups—in, you know, true fujo spirit—we've proceeded to tear more articles apart: "What is a Terminal?" and "Choosing your Terminal" have, alas(?), separated, and we've also thrown the absolutely-not-quick Terminal series out of "quickstarts"."HTML & CSS: Editing Basics", now alone, claims it's nice to have the section all for themselves, but we know denial and mutual pining when we see it.
Spec-tacularly Written: Speaking of moving out on your own, our community is stepping up to help us create the learn@ we all wish to see on the web. But this very appreciated collaboration, while "just as planned hoped", adds the extra challenge of *deep breath* creating a cohesive creative vision across a variety of creatives. To (style) guide us, Rie has updated—and even PR'd!—our community@'s learn@ writing specs. Incidentally, we've also discovered the Diataxis framework, which has helped us all get on the same (web)page not just about the how but the what we're writing. Wish us luck sweat, but eventual success!
License to Learn: Nothing like having to make legal decisions reminds you the ol' 9 to 5 still has its perks. Thankfully, rather than giving into despair and dusting off our resumes, we put on our bravest attitude, faced our fears, and worked out a dual-licensing model for learn@ articles. In a few words: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial for the public (so everyone can copy and remix our articles—but not sell them), and a more permissive license for FujoCoded (so we can write our paid Zines and coding offerings without legal anxieties). You'll hear more about this in future newsletters: the legal ducks are, after all, ever waddling 🦆🦆🦆
FujoCoded BackerKit Fulfillment Progress: Future
Nearly Viable Manuscript: Now that we're in the future (section), you may wonder where our article on installing NVM is at. TL;DR(eview): Submerged in an avalanche of "//TODO"s, we left the most complete article for last...then found it needed just a bit more style-guide polish to fit with its peers. While we didn't have time to give it, there's no need to despair: we're currently pushing and pulling pronouns, tenses, bulletpoints, and assorted Starlight components, and will publish this excellent article as soon as we've bestowed it the appropriate ~learn@ vibe~.
Taken for (April) Fools: We have so many great things cooking, and they all deserve their time and space to simmer! Between polishing articles, our ongoing FujoGuide rewrite, and FujoCoded's LLC #1 Company Holiday slash Prime Immovable Deadline™—that is, our April 1st fun(d)raiser—we'll keep Learn@ work going in the background so it can properly absorb all those creative juices.
Intermission — A Word to our $ponsors
This update (and ongoing work) is brought to you by our lovely Patrons: our raccoon-employees demand the fanciest of trash, and those legal ducks will only waddle on premium grain—we couldn't feed them without you all!
If you've not boarded our ship yet, jump on our Patreon now! Tiers start at $3/month, and give you access to coupons and discounted or limited-edition merchandise. We're working on a $upporters area so you can (among others) showcase your blorbo on a big wall!
Did you know? Studies show our Patrons are 47% more likely to have their OTP become canon...or have them explode in a juicy cloud of drama—whatever their preference.
Around the FujoVerse
In the Git(hub)
Welcome to the GitHub: A warm shoutout to the newest first-time contributors to our GitHub—and for some GitHub itself: Ev, Hyena(✨first ever!✨), deepspaceaxolotl (✨first ever!✨), and Rie(✨first ever!✨)! Whether with a PR, a review, or a README, their generous contribution keeps us going and (not going to lie) makes us shed little tears of gratitude. Thank you for making the FujoVerse a little bit shinier ✨
Astro-nomical Fanfic Data: Scraping AO3 data is fun, but you know what's even more fun (and simple)? Using AO3 data in your Astro webiste with our Astro AO3 loader plugin! This plugin's first official release now works with Astro 5, and supports series in addition to works. Plus, Ev (our valiant hero) gave it a proper README! So go forth now, load fics on your Astro site, and call it "learning webdev"...cause it totally is!
AO3.js goes Adult: Our AO3 scraping library/Official "Fan Bait" Project™ got a bunch of upgrades: we've added support for adult works (we see you 😎) and listing tag synonyms (for internal purposes Certified Shady® 🥷), exported Zod schemas for ease of integration (e.g. our Astro loader plugin 👀👆), and overhauled error handling. Check out the release notes for the full changelog.
FujoStore Highlights: Restocks, Sales, and Limited-Time Offers
You've (hopefully) already seen our RobinBoob relaunch and associated "limited-time offer", which officially expired...almost a week ago.
That said, and stop me if you've heard this...what is time, to real love?
To celebrate finally making it past the writing a lot of copy (an avoid setting up another promo) we're extending RobinBoob's Valentine's Day 15% off (with code LOVE_IS_TIMELESS) until March 14th!
Want to help us help the fandom web? Are you a social campaign expert wishing for some monetary return (💰), or a GitHub connoisseur willing to donate your time to The Cause™? Read on!
[🙏]One Peer to Herd Them All: We're not quite ready yet (the draft needs a few more weeks), but we'll soon be looking for a volunteer beta readers coordinator to help wrangle FujoGuide Issue 2 Beta 2. The gig: sit in a Discord group DM with 6-7 fannish beginners as they brave our GitHub zine, and help them surface unscathed. You don't need deep GitHub expertise —just enough familiarity to get beginners unstuck. If this sounds like your thing, reach out NOW so we can hit the ground running when it's time. DM us or write us at [email protected]!
[💰]Social Media Campaign Lead & Copywriter: Are you a fandom person (or adjacent) with a penchant for capturing the hearts (and eyes) of your fellow netizens?We're looking for a paid contractor to plan/write social media launch campaigns for our projects and products—think Bluesky threads, cross-platform posts, and short newsletter blurbs. You'll own the campaign timelines, wrangle the content delivery, and work directly with our founder to help us sound like ourselves...just uncharacteristically on schedule. This is a per-campaign role ($150–250/campaign), and we welcome experience from non-traditional avenues: fandom, zine promo, indie launches, crowdfunding, or anywhere you've had to get people excited and rallying. Apply here!
That’s All, Folks!
And with this, it's all for these months! It took us a long while, but we've made it on the other side...somehow.
FujoGuide updates aside (follow them on our socials), we'll see you on the other side of March 31st 👀 until then, "good night, ship tight, don't let the discourse bite!"
Thank you to everyone who has already filled out the shipping survey for the 1:350 Klingon D7 die-cast model from Star Trek™.Without your support we would not be able “To boldly go where no man has gone before” - Captain James T. Kirk.
We are continuing to extend the shipping survey so if you have not completed it, please do so ASAP. You must provide your address and payment information in the shipping survey for your order to be finalized. This is for all regions including the US, CA, and UK. If you do not fill out this shipping survey, your order may be cancelled.
If you are not receiving reminders about this shipping survey through Backerkit please contact our consumer services team at [email protected] or 1 (800) 704 8697 for help!
We are currently in the tooling stage of the production process. To share this month, we have a sneak peek of the poster that is currently still a work-in-progress by Matt Cushman, please see below.
In the meantime, if you have any questions, please reach out to TOMY+. For US & CA please email [email protected], or call 800-704-8697 Monday-Friday from 8:00AM to 4:00PM US-Central Time. For the UK, please email [email protected].
Hey everybody sorry it's taken me so long to put this together but I was finally able to get survey for Snarf finalized!
We've just sent out a handful to make sure there's nothing set up incorrectly, so expect the rest to be sent out sometime today or tomorrow. So be on the lookout!
Thanks so much for your patience while I worked on this! Let me know if you have any questions!
-Michael
PS - Several of you asked for the option to be able to help offset the loss we're incurring from a pricing misquote for Snarf. So we added an item called "Misquote Offset" and here's the details from that item. Thanks again!
"I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" may be Darth Vader's motto, but it isn't ours, so when we found out a misquote from our factory was going to inflate prices $7-12 per knife, we in no way wanted our Snarf backers to pay towards these additional costs.
That said, because we were raising our prices for late backers, we wanted to explain the price change to our original backers.
When we did, we inadvertently created a bit of a firestorm.
Our backers came out of the woodworks asking for a way to help offset the price change, so here it is. But first, some ground rules:
1. First and foremost, don't feel any pressure to chip in, especially if it puts any undue pressure on you. We'll be okay, so put you and your family first.
2. Just know we have a solid relationship with Scikio, our manufacturer, and the additional cost we now have to cover reflects only half of the total misquote. They're covering the other half.
3. In the interest of transparency, (not intending to influence whether or not you give), here are the additional prices per knife over and above our original quote.
Again, please don't feel any pressure to contribute to this. We just appreciate you being a part of bringing Snarf to life!
-Michael and Melody, AKT
PS - for the folks who want the full scoop, the misquote came down to several factors. We originally had a different version of the utility blade locking mechanism and didn't have milling, so the first quote reflected a different level of manufacturing. Once we had upgraded to the Jab Lock and added milling, Michael reached out to Laura at Scikio and asked if the first quote was still good or if we needed to wait for a different quote. Laura said "yes," meaning we needed to wait for a different quote, but Michael interpreted "yes" to mean the first quote was good. We only realized the miscommunication a month or so after the campaign closed once we were making the down payment. Both parties felt they dropped the ball and we decided to meet down the middle with them covering half the added expense and us covering the other. So there you have it, and lesson learned for next time!
This Sunday, March 1st 2026, we’ll be (once again) haunting the virtual halls of CitrusCon—not with a talk, but with a “Q&Ad-lib”, an innovative panel format where Ms Boba attempts to prepare in advance, runs out of time, and is then forced to improvise live. Luckily, she’s good at that! …or is she?
If you want to help her—or, you know, the opposite—send in your questions here. We’ll be focusing on the future of the fandom web and how we can build it together.
Valentine's Day Promo: Time-Crossed Lovers Edition
Rejoice, Shippers! Come hither and feast your eyes on the new, improved RobinBoob, featuring a week-long, 15%-off-all-ships Valentine's Day bonanza.
Now, some naysayers might cry: "but how can you have a Valentine's promo, when February 14th was more than a week ago?" Irrelevant! What is time to real love? And what are other powerful, terrifying forces like, you know, launch deadlines?
In Top Shipshape: What better way to spend New Year holidays than to revisit one of our most beloved moneymakers April 1st jokes? RobinBoob came out the other side of 2025 with a serious "new year, new me": we added PayPal (our longest-standing request), braved database optimization so searches aren't painfully slow, and snuck in a handful of quality-of-life improvements ready for you to discover on your own. The short version: everything's faster, smoother, more featureful—and, of course, ready to take your hard-earned money in exchange for meaningless JPEGs (...or are they?).
Certified Gift-Giver: In true Valentine's spirit, you can now officially gift ship certificates to other people. No more putting in your bestie's email at checkout and hoping Stripe won't forward your credit card details (it wouldn't): we've built a proper gifting flow, complete with a notification email and personal note, so your giftees will always know you're thinking of them thinking of fictional characters smashing. If you haven't sent a proper Valentine's yet, this makes the perfect gift for your partner, your best friend, or even just yourself. Already sent one? Well, you know what we think: time means nothing when you're sharing some love.
Return of the Ship-Watchers: Remember when the RobinBoob Twitter account used to post every ship purchase, uniting us in celebration of each other's excellent taste, or (for some), in the pleasure of inflicting our questionable palate upon others? Unfortunately, having fallen to "imperscrutable business acumen", that tradition was lost...until now: starting today, Ship-watching is back on all our store socials (tumblr,mastodon, and bluesky)except Twitter. Subscribe, spectate, and judge celebrate accordingly—and obviously, buy some ships to add to the feed.
P.S. to honor this relaunch, we'll be reposting one ship from our archive every 6 hours (in chronological order) until we're all caught up. If you see yours, make sure to boost it with your very own certificate!
