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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Pretty much all of my open source. It's not literally zero, but over the whole time I made as much from open source as I make in two hours in my regular job.
So yeah, two hours paid out of over a decade of open source is basically $0.
I don't make any ground breaking stuff, so I don't expect to live off of it, still would be nice to buy a lunch once a month from stuff thousands of developers use.
Legend. I appreciate you.
You open source contributors are heroes 🙏🏼
I grow algae for carbon capture, because exetential crisis. This year I got the process down and pulled 4 lbs atmospheric CO2 into 1lb solid carbon. Can't grow much in the winter but will restart in the spring.
Have a YouTube but their algorithm hates eco projects that aren't scams or whackadoodle science.
I've been writing free D&D homebrew for over 10 years. I occasionally use it in my own games and some other people in the community do use it, but it's rare and generally thankless. If anyone wants to poke a look, here's two examples:
Hell that seem good content! Right now i don't have time to read it but just by looking at in in a superficial way it seems really cool
All the games I've 100% completed.
I guess technically I was paid a small amount for some of those on PS5, back when they still were doing the Playstation Stars program. Trophies earned points and those points could be used to buy games or giftcards. Half my PS5 library came from just 100℅ completing the other half I paid for.
Also: All the ideas I never do anything with. Just pay me to have the idea 😩
I have a podcast called Almost Plausible that I make with a couple of friends. We take an ordinary object (like a pillow, or a zipper, or a ceiling fan) and we create a movie plot based on that object.
We've been doing the show for nearly 4 years now. It's fun to make, but it takes up a fair amount of my time. For me, a "reward" would just be more listeners. That would feel very validating.
Factorio
If I got even 0.001% of what my factories produce every day, I’d be able to immediately end supply scarcity for the entire world. All powered entirely by solar energy.
I made a Halloween mask this year from start to finish. The entire process took 2 months of work but it paid off in a way that if i can get faster at it i might try to sell something one day at a convention 😁👍
Next step in the process is learning about Vacuum Forming! Then we'll really be in business.
Mask in question:
That looks just like my dad
Oof
Constructed Languages. Not for nothing did JRR Tolkien call it a secret vice. It's such a lonely hobby. You can enjoy the work of a chef or an artist or a musician even if you yourself aren't a chef or an artist or a musician, but nobody's going to complement the elegance of your conlang's noun inflection system.
It's bitterly ironic that the whole point of a language is to communicate, but the vast majority of conlangs will never be uttered by anyone other than their creators, and rather badly even then.
I don't want to get paid for my hobbies because they wouldn't be hobbies anymore, but it would be nice to get more than just a smile and nod from people outside the hobby now and then.
Since it seems people are sharing the fruits of their labor as well, here's my most complete conlang: https://www.frathwiki.com/Commonthroat
Lemmying. Lord I wish I got a pound per meme
I've spent some 5 hours just today documenting and writing instructions on some IT tools for my collective. One person said its cool though, so not bad.
The ability to write clear documentation is an invaluable skill. So many open source projects have terrible docs. The docs are probably written by the devs themselves, who perhaps don't realize that end users won't have the intimate knowledge of the thing they're documenting as they do, so they leave a lot unsaid that should really be explicit.
In IT, at least in networking, systems quickly become black boxes even to the person that designed it, and good docs are just as useful to the person writing them.
You sir are a champion. So few of us do documentation and wonder why we have to fix the same problems over and over.
Open source software. Sigh.
I have a librry that has been downloaded 1.9 million times for a VERY specific functionality. Never gotten a red cent.
I mean its ok, its bettering the world as is, but it does suck when you get AI generated issues and GitHub has no way to deal with the spam. Ive thought about moving over to codeberg or something but theres no protection there either.
Thank you for your service 😘
Parenting
my twitch channel
If you have 25 viewers on twitch, you're in the 1% of streamers.
Got a source on that? I'd love to know more.
I'd be happy to receive a portion of the money my Stardew Valley farm makes.
Warhammer 40K.
40K doesn't just pay you $0, it actively takes away money, time, and physical space.
Warhammer 401(k), as in you have to cash in your retirement fund to pay for the hobby.
I'm the kind of guy who devours lore through YT videos and fan wikis without ever touching the actual franchise, and I've been doing that with 40K for years before I thought about buying a model. When I looked at the prices I decided I'd rather eat food.
There is no remuneration amongst the stars.
If someone pays me to play music before I die, it'll feel like mission accomplished.
I have a cool 5 Canadian dollars.
I used to make a lot of Garry’s Mod animations. One such one…
Never did sign my channel up for monetization - I didn’t like the patterns YouTube pushed you into and each animation usually took me many months. You can kind of see on my channel I tended to get distracted by whatever was a current trend. I’m trying one more that took me the better part of this year.
A lot of people remark that “I must really enjoy animating” - I do enjoy the result, but it’s a lot of work and takes willpower to push myself into another 3-hour session of laborious posing to get a scene in my mind on the screen just right. I also really hope for the animations to garner attention, even if just to make someone’s day better.
That's a convoluted answer for me. I hand sharpen knives and straight razors as a hobby. Been doing it for like 30 years and have several hundreds of dollars in diamond and wetstones. I doubt there's 500 people in the country (US) that are better than I am at hand sharpening.
The convoluted part is that I could charge people to sharpen knives. I just don't want to.
Wise person. I got good at sharpening, and I ended up monetising it as a hobby, which I inevitably regretted
I got good at sharpening because I had a bunch of weirdly shaped knives, like this saddler's round knife
Nice. This is my great uncles straight razor. He came from Germany and had a barbershop in the 1940's around Kansas City, so it's around 80 years old.
That is so cool. I went to barber school when the curriculum was changing - we were not allowed to use reusable razors (height of the AIDS epidemic) but did have to learn how to sharpen them, and it's helped me in general. Haircutting shears I have only ever allowed an enthusiast sharpener to touch, like y'all, an artisan.
My answer to the original question is probably food. I grow food, bake bread that would sell for $10 a loaf at today's prices, design fantastic cocktails and cook for big enough parties that I could do it as a side job. I enjoy hospitality, it's so satisfying, but as a job it is like a baby, relentless, no rest. The only way I would even dare is if we were so wealthy I didn't need to make money and could hire great staff, pay them so well.
I’m pretty far in the negative on my company. I’ve invested about $50,000 and 4 years of work into it, and it has not become profitable. But, its operating expenses are pretty low, so I have enough to maintain it for about 4 more years. If it’s still not profitable then, I’d have to look for outside investors. The majority of the expense was lawyer fees for the patent.
Its hard to asses things when i dont know what you are doing, but average for new company to get profitable is about 2-3 years, but its not uncommon for it to take +5 years. Especially if its a new thing like the patent makes it sound.
At the four year mark i would recommend you to take a step back and look the processes you do and try to figure out if there is a way to streamline something on it. Its really hard to notice some inefficiences when you have used to do things in that way.
If you have a lot of competion on your business try to figure what is a thing they do poorly and try to do it better. That way the people who are disapointed for that specific thing have good reason to switch to use your product. You dont need to be better than everybody at everything, just find the group of customers that find you as the best fit.
Also if you chance something you do, dont get too stuck in fear of loosing customers. If some change makes you loose 10 customers, but makes you 20 new ones thats not a loss.
If you are operating at loss raising the price is not unreasonable thing to do. For excample if you raise the price 5% you can loose 5% of the customers and make the same profit with 5% less work
Well we're all curious now....
Blender at one point, but ive given up on the pipedream as ive put barely over a year in, maybe in 3 more
Went from trying to make money somehow back to just dickin around trying to learn how everything works, 3d just doesnt seem to pay all that well even for ppl with experience, entry level it jobs are nowhere to be found where i moved back home but I may be able to work at a place opening soon, for now I train ai to train myself out of a job, finally getting steady work there after two years of maybe an hour of work a month popping up, as I didnt even realize there were multiple platforms to sign up for, couldve been making money sooner.
Feelin extra greatful for my parents tho, got to just learn blender and pursue other hobbies for a year, mightve been more valuable than working everyday as I no longer have the brain capacity to do tutorials after working for 6-8 hours, dont even want to read comics after and now that I have money, im spending it on distractions like gaming and not potentially productive sht like blender (lol its free). Fk it tho I want a legion go s to play on while shit renders.
My memes, shitposts and comments on here
Chores, organizing, cleaning. I spent so much time working on home projects this summer and when I look around it feels like I lost time. Somehow I've been working consistently without getting a foothold or making progress. Still laundry in the dryer and a mess everywhere.
