Donations are entirely optional and help to support my personal financial situation as well as giving incentive to continue working on the site, videos, and coding projects. Because I do not collect any metadata from visitors to this site - all nginx access and error logs are disabled - indeed it really just tells me people are reading the website and are interested. There is no benefit to donating versus viewing the site for free.
Zelle is recommended, as the most money reaches me directly with Zelle without any fees - however, it is bank-to-bank, and does not work with credit cards.
If you prefer, you can make a donation to the Free Software Foundation instead - or any other project supporting free/libre software and free cultural works.
For anyone curious, and in the interest of transparency, my domain name (persrex.xyz) costs $20 a year through Squarespace, and the VPS from Vultr costs $6 a month. This totals to around $100 a year with tax to run the site.
Zelle money to xerxes@persrex.xyz
PayPal money to xerxespersrex at PayPal.me
Venmo money to @EthanEMasse
or xerxes@persrex.xyz