curiosity kills me

How I can go from just looking up when the Notre Dame Cathedral fire was (2019!), to looking/reading about gargoyles, grotesques, a rooster reliquary which "miraculously" survived, the Last Judgement, the Babylonian Talmud, Babylon...
and what makes a church a cathedral.

The Last Judgement part was the longest read and left me wondering if Christians believe someone can to to Heaven after death but then end up consigned to Hell after the Last Judgement. So then I looked up that, and ended up reading various people's inconsistent and contrasting beliefs on that and similar topics on Quora. Ugh.

That is not how I wanted to spend the last two and a half hours, dang it.

Patreon billing models

I was going to sign up for a new Patreon membership, but the page indicated I'd be charged right away for the first amount, and then on the same day each next month. The new donation amount wouldn't be combined with my other Patreon membership charges which are all taken out on the first of each month.

This is what Patreon calls Subscription Billing, and it is the new default (since September 2022) although creators can opt to switch to the legacy billing models. It seems that patrons can't choose when they want to be billed, except by waiting until that day to sign up for a new membership. That is what I plan to do on February 1 (if I don't forget), so that the new amount will eventually be combined with my other amounts in a single payment each month.

I can understand that many people likely prefer the new billing model. But it would be nice if Patreon were to give patrons an option to sign up now and not be charged nor get any benefits until the first of the next month (or whatever payment date they chose), so they could keep getting a single combined charge for all their memberships. Surely that would benefit Patreon the company too, as a single larger credit card charge would have a lower transaction fee than multiple smaller charges.

I also noticed recently that Patreon now supports annual billing, if the creator offers annual membership plans. That pleased me to see, but I don't think most creators have enabled it. And if I'm going to have monthly charges for some creators, I may as well have monthly charges for all of them, rather than some monthly and some annual. Although with the new Subscription Billing model, the annual option makes more sense (being charged on a different day for each creator's membership but only once a year).