#unmonetized

[emmaspolaroid]

I can be trusted with adult money I will not build a budget around fancy pieces of plastic —

[justheblueberry]

handbinding of A Study in Scarlette by kittebasu

There are people who want to live forever, and then there is Shinichi, who just wants to live a little longer than this.

this bind has been in my head since i first read the fic like, three years ago. i dreamed up so many ideas for it, for so long, and now it's finally done! the typeset was actually done in early 2022, back when i was still using google docs, but it went through a few iterations because i was just. so. fiddly. with every aspect of this book. it needed to be perfect (as close to perfect as i, an amateur bookbinder out of my depth, can get) and it had to be absolutely over the top, to reflect the insane amount of love and care that the author put into the fic itself.

the first time i read this fic, i barely knew what detective conan was, much less all of the intricate plot details; i was just along for the ride, but by the end i was completely invested. i went back and watched through the anime as well as a few movies (it took me six months) and then read the fic again. and then a few more times. kaishin and the world of dcmk has utterly gripped me. it's 100% this fic's fault and i love it so, so, much.

i went through a few iterations of visual designs and i'm really happy with the little details i managed to squeeze in.

the entire color scheme is based around red, because 1) it's a murder mystery, 2) for scarlette shinamoto (and the title of the fic as well as the original holmes novel it references), and 3) the irony of "lady red" actually being red. the secret fourth reason is that i think red/gold is a super sexy color combo.

i sewed the textblock with red thread to reference holmes' "scarlet thread of murder".

another detail i love is the five yen coin bookmark, it was one of my first ideas and it turned out even better than i thought.

i wanted the endpapers to evoke a sense of the white marbled floor of the ballroom, with the glow-in-the-dark kaitou kid caricature being the luminol on the floor, and the little pops of red looks like blood that's been mixed in. i lucked out in that the other side of the endpaper was like a lavender-purpley color, i like to think of it as a little wink wink nudge to the color of the actual Lady Red.

the chapter pages got a few reworkings, but i'm happy with the illustrations i ended up doing for each of them. the chapter titles are one of my favorite things about the fic, each one has so much meaning packed into it and flows so beautifully, and i wanted to put as much care into making them pop as possible.

the cover was a linocut carving i designed and carved, which i then printed onto the bookcloth, and ironed on htv on top.

i also threw in a couple of my drawings of my favorite scenes.

this is getting way too long, so i'll end it here. i'll have a separate post detailing the process every step of the way, if anyone wants to take a closer look. this fic is kind of directly responsible for getting me into fanbinding, so it's safe to say it altered the course of my life. i now spend way too much time (and money) looking at book stuff.

kittebasu, if, somehow, you see this and would like an author copy, i would be honored to make one and ship it to you; i would be overjoyed to gift you with any art i have the ability to make, because the fics you wrote have irreversibly altered my brain chemistry, and being able to give back in any capacity would be a dream. (thank you.)

a few postscripts:

i am not selling any copies of this fic. partially because i believe in the gift economy of fandom as well as firmly keeping fanbinding a hobby that will stay unmonetized, but also because it took me months (years, if we are counting when i first finished the typeset) to finish this and i do not have the strength.

however, if you are also a fan of this fic and would like a copy, i honestly, fervently, encourage you to give fanbinding a try! renegade publishing and its discord server are an absolutely wonderful and free resource. i knew nothing about bookbinding and had zero materials when i first started, but i've learned so much thanks to the lovely people there. if you're still apprehensive about getting started, i'd be willing to share my typeset of this fic as well as answer any questions about the making of this book if you DM me.

[olderthannetfic]

I'm so fucking sick and tired of tech bros infiltrating fandom spaces because they see free real estate for their shitty AIs.

This shit's not fair, it's not right, and it completely shits on the authors who spend hours of their life creating.

The creator of this app has already created other AI-based apps, so, no matter what Ao3 does to try and protect their authors from having their works scraped, Miss Vulture here found the perfect way for it to happen anyways!

You can email the site to ask for your fic to not end up in this clusterfuck of a tech bro's wetdream (team@lore.fm), because if you don't specifically tell them you don't want this crap, then you're automatically opting in, but this won't grant complete exclusion: if some idiot has your fic downloaded and uploads it to the app, then the app is going to churn content out of it anyways.

Now... I sincerely doubt the cretins behind this shit know they can't monetize fics, so they'll end up inserting ads and Google will strike it down (Miss Vulture in one comment mentions that soon enough the app will also be able to churn out audiobooks for actual books, which is fucking illegal in every possible way and you must be braindead to not know it), but I'm really hating how the conversation around fandom has turned into a "small business coquette baddie girlboss side hustle" load of bullshit.

Actual writers and artists keep telling them doing this crap is extremely shitty, and yet these morons keep insisting, because for whatever reason lifting other people's works makes them deserving of money.

Sorry for the rant.

--

Sadly, the people who see an unmonetized space and think that was a mistake are not new, but they are infuriating in every era.

[nocturnowlette]

I'm rather annoyed. Apparently, ads are playing on my unlisted text hypnosis video 1/3rd and 2/3rds though. I contacted youtube support and they said they straight up could not do anything. I even asked them to flag the channel as inappropriate to make it unmonetizable but they just went "sorry, can't do that, gonna play ads anyways".

I'm trying to use my connections to talk to someone higher up, but its crazy to me that I even need to do this when peoples channels get entirely unmonetized for far less.

[omg-snakes]

Thoughts on Crab Day

I support this idea and I'll be participating on July 29th.

I see a lot of folks saying things to the effect of, "don't reward Tumblr for making things worse/not listening to their userbase/not adding features I need-want-like." I also see a lot of posts saying that the organizers of Crab Day are TERFs, neo-Nazis, and/or ultraconservatives.

While I agree that TERFs and Nazis (neo and paleo) need to be yote into the sun, whoever started this idea was not wrong about the site needing money to continue operating. Tumblr is a business. That's how businesses work.

Now, they can get money from advertisers and monetization partners, or they can get it from users. If they get it from advertisers/investors, those parties have the opportunity to weigh in on features they think will generate more revenue... like Tumblr Live... which is objectively trash. Tumblr Live is powered by LiveBox, an add-on service provider that enables sites to host live streaming content to generate revenue. Tumblr is also trying to attract users from the X-Twitter exodus by making the interface more familiar to these users. Was this a bad idea? Yes. It's a desperate attempt to attract more users so as to increase ad views and generate more revenue. But, remember, Tumblr is a business. That's how businesses work.

For YOU (and me!), Tumblr is a community. It's a platform for our art. It's a meeting place for friends and like-minded individuals. It's a safe space for self-expression. It's the last mostly-unmonetized bastion of social media in a landscape dominated by influencers, hustlers, and data-miners. For TUMBLR STAFF, Tumblr is a service that they are trying to sell so that they can obtain money that they can then exchange for food, housing, repayment of student loans, etc. If they can't afford those things by selling you their services, then they will literally go do something else. Yes, Tumblr is indeed a business and not just a passion project. That's how businesses work.

So by buying things directly from Tumblr, like a $3 crab-summoning gift, and especially as part of a coordinated effort like Crab Day and/or Crab Week, you are telling Tumblr Staff that YOU are a CUSTOMER, not just a monetizable data point. We are, in a very distant sense, establishing ourselves as a body of influence. If Tumblr sees that we can and will do this en masse, they are more likely to treat us as contributors and potentially shareholders who need to be kept happy. We each have a vested interest in the continuation of this site, and we have a rare opportunity to show the specific value of that interest.

Also, for those who want more accessibility tools, this is a great way to get those implemented. Accessibility for web applications is a big, big business and toolkits and training for accessibility standards tend to cost quite a lot. Training for a single accessibility plug-in toolkit can cost around $2000 per user*. That's about 667 crabs. By participating in Crab Day, even just a little bit or even just spreading the word about it or even just allowing others to participate as they please without pitching a ragequit tanty about it, you can tell Tumblr staff that you're here as a customer, your voice needs to be heard, and your needs are important.

If this doesn't work, and Tumblr doesn't take their userbase seriously after we make a concerted effort to support them, then please by all means go back to whatever version of complaining makes you feel most satisfied. But just for now, let's try something new!

*based on actual costs of a web accessibility training program offered by the agency for which I work

[objuct]

I appreciate all your kind replies. I am definitely going to stick with this decision, the amount of stress and dread I've been getting from like just opening my patreon page daily is just not tenable.

I've unpublished the tiers, and at the end of the EA for this set, i'm gonna delete the tiers, so, no more subs. Feel free to unsub if you want, like, i'll be fine, I know I talk about it helping and it has but I'm not at risk of homelessness or literally starving to death, just life is very tight. The amount i made in that time was a huge boon to make up for the 26 days I did nothing but make free mods, and it was really appreciated. But I can't keep taking money for sims mods, the expectations being put on me by, while admittedly few voices compared to positive ones, is just very mentally taxing when you're someone in my position with my kinds of disabilities. There are people cut out for patreon and weathering those kinds of comments, but I am not one (and if you're seeing now why I'm basically unemployable, this is why. I am not mentally well, i don't do well with this kind of stress that would affect abled people not nearly as much)

I'll still be making content for the sims, but from here on out it's going to be treated like how I treat all of my other unmonetized modding ventures -- I am going to make stuff for MYSELF, and release it to you guys as an afterthought. That is the only way I can mod games in a healthy way. So it'll be likely more weird stuff like object heads, and less horse stuff since i'll just be using a lot of what you guys are making.

To everyone who has been really kind and really encouraging -- I really appreciate y'all. Keep making cute horses and CC, feel free to @objhorseccfinds with your work because I've been doing a CCfinds roundup every sunday on my patreon and I might keep doing that here on tumblr depending on how I feel.

[sometransgal]

Genuinely think permanent unmonetized boops could help save this website

[kunikloj]

You know what’s even wilder about Petscop? The fact that Tony makes, and has made, zero money from it. The videos are unmonetized. There’s no merch. Despite the millions of views of exposure he’s gotten from bigger YouTube channels, he still hasn’t monetized a single video. He could easily make an AdSense account and start benefiting from his fame—even gaining additional algorithmic exposure through the videos’ monetization status—but he doesn’t. Tony made the game, and the videos, and then carried the project on despite its complete obscurity in the first year of its run (and especially the first half of that year.)

Take a step back and really think about this. It’s unheard-of. Do you realize how rare and special it is for something like this to exist in the current YouTube landscape? To have such commitment for your creation and its narrative that you wouldn’t capitalize on its momentum, despite countless opportunities to do so?

And that commitment shows! By declining monetization, Petscop manages to maintain a disquieting realism throughout its run. It really feels like a family channel, and one guarding a secret at that.

I freakin’ love this series, man! It’s so cool!

[madamepestilence]

Okay, so I just wanna bring something up regarding YouTube (and Google by extension, as they fully own YouTube, and also Google [and Amazon] are currently being sued for being illegal monopolies)

So YouTube's bad updates have officially pushed me to Firefox, but I wanna break down some of their recent updates

The first thing they did was removing people's ability to watch videos if adblockers were present, which is borderline legal

There is no law in the US, where Google is hosted, that requires a user to disable adblockers on certain websites, meaning that YouTube blocking people from using adblockers and paying for their product/watching extensive ads instead isn't technically legal, but also isn't technically illegal

This is also the Adpocalypse 2, with ads being anywhere from 10 seconds to a full minute, and ads also run at the beginning of videos, the end of videos, as midrolls, as the starts of every chapter, and when you move your location in the video -

even on some videos that've disabled ads and use sponsorships - and these also run occasionally on videos marked for sleep-aids such as ASMR videos and on unmonetized videos that shouldn't have ads as the person who put up the video doesn't get paid

The next problematic update they put up was creating an artificial 5-second delay for Firefox users (this can be remedied with www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), 5000, 0.001) in uBO), which is in violation of antitrust law

What pushed me to Firefox is that the new update for Chrome (and all Chrome-based browsers), Manifest v3 will completely disable any extensions not directly authorized by Google, and this includes completely disabling uBlock Origin, which forces people not on Firefox or TorBrowser to be bombarded with ads and data scraping.

After moving to Firefox, I've noticed another thing that I'm 90% sure is another violation of antitrust law: In Chrome, there's 1080p. In Firefox, it's split into 1080p and 1080p Premium, reducing the intended bitrate and making videos visibly lower quality - requiring people to pay for YouTube Premium in order to use YouTube as intended.

What the fuck is happening?

[getvalentined]

Something else that I think a lot of people in fandom need to remember—particularly my main fandom, particularly right now—is that every piece of popular media we enjoy is a product.

I'm talking very specifically about popular media here, mass media studio projects with marketing budgets and teams of hundreds or thousands of people, so put down your whataboutisms about indy projects and creating for the love of the craft and please meet me where I am actually standing.

Now, to be clear, good media is very rarely something that the creators see as nothing more than a profit endeavor. This is their work, and they want it to be good! That's why they started creating things in the first place!

However.

The development of popular media is inherently profit-driven, and the act of monetizing that media isn't inherently greedy or predatory. This applies all across the board, really; if you have a problem with the people who made an award-winning piece of media wanting to get paid for making it, you also have a problem with a tiny artist like me having a Patreon. By insisting that any creator trying to monetize their work has to be doing it strictly out of greed and must only have chosen to create because they wanted money is bullshit—in demanding that any creator do what they love to do exclusively because they love it and not because they need to eat and pay their bills, you're devaluing the entire concept of art.

There are legalities at play for some fields—fanfiction is a profitless endeavor because it's illegal to monetize, that doesn't mean those people don't deserve financial support—but that's a tangent we're not going to go off on right now. Again, meet me where I'm standing, not where you might think you found a "gotcha" to disprove my point.

I'm not saying "waaah think of the studios," I'm saying that insisting a work of popular media should be both accessible enough to build a big fandom where you can have a huge global community (hence the "popular" in "popular media") while also having absolutely no monetization in any capacity is absolutely ludicrous. It would be cool if that were possible, but it's not. Not at this scale, not in this way.

If you believe that the only way for creators to prove that they "respect" their own work (whatever the hell that means) is for your favorite piece of popular media to be entirely and permanently unmonetized, released globally and consistently maintained out of the goodness of the creators' hearts, you're on the wrong side of this argument.

At the end of the day, regardless of your feelings or your fandom, one fact continues to ring true:

Popular media is a product.

It always has been. Products need to be paid for, one way or another. Going on unhinged tirades about paying for a piece of popular media in your favorite series because you've decided that creators continuing to create new titles in one of their favorite series to work on means they have no respect for the original work they created is so far off the path of common sense it boggles the mind.

To get more specific to the fandom in question: you know this is a video game, right? The original was too! Whatever copy you played, however you played it, someone paid for it. It was monetized. The sequel film also cost money. So did every other game in the series. Every single title, all of which were developed with oversight from the same team and headed by the same people, the same writers and directors and artists, has been monetized. The only difference with the new one is that the monetization is shittier—but it's also entirely optional!

This game is important to you, I get it—it's important to me too! But as a creator, as an artist, I can't even fathom the mindset that putting multiple years and millions of dollars into the development of a product in one of the most popular IPs in the field and monetizing the result is "undeniable proof" that the team behind it are bloodsucking fiends with no love for their craft and no respect for their audience.

These are the same people that made the first one. The one that you're saying is the best thing ever created. They wrote that, they designed that, they directed that. If they want to keep playing around in the universe that they made, they're allowed, and we can't expect them to do it without seeing the result as a product because THE ORIGINAL WAS ALSO A PRODUCT.

And if you have a problem with any of that, guess what?

YOU DON'T HAVE TO PLAY IT.

Being nasty to the people who are interested, who are enjoying themselves, declaring that you are the true fan and they're all disrespectful idiots and infants with no sense because you don't like that popular media is always a product is, frankly, much more disrespectful and infantile behavior than someone sitting on the bus playing a fucking mobile game for fun.

Also the previous mobile title they did that lasted less than a year was killed because of actual real life financial fraud, not because of a lack of interest, downloads, or concurrent players. At the time that it got the axe, they were in the midst of approving a third wave of ambassadorships, they had active sponsorships running in the game, it was doing well—particularly for being the series' first foray into a new genre. But, to the shock and bewilderment of everyone in the entire world, we are in the timeline where the co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog used his position in the development of a Final Fantasy VII battle royale mobile game to facilitate insider trading. Look it up.

[tinogiehd]

if paranoid and spotlight are about somebody who isn't GNF it's bad for them

in a universe (not this one) where dnf aren't dating and dream actively has an offline partner who paranoid and spotlight are allegedly about and he's still out here like 10+ pieces of art on an unmonetized twitter account directly implying those songs are about george and letting their friends all play into it being about george and not his alleged real partner then droffline drartner needs to wake up and break up like im so serious

[olderthannetfic]

You know what that anon a bit ago who insists that fandom is not a community or a social hobby reminds me of? Those dumbasses who look at fandom from the outside, notice that self inserts are popular and that fic is largely unmonetized, think they're seeing a business opportunity, make a flirt-with-your-Blorbo chatbot, and then wonder why it's not selling.

The chatbot enterprenuers think that fandom is about consuming fanworks. They genuinely believe that no one wants to create -- that we just want to enjoy the finished product all on our own with our own self inserts -- and so they believe that a chatbot makes it easier for us to get the fandom experience we want. They miss the fact that the entire point of fandom is squeeing about the blorbos with other fans, and that a self insert fic is a way of expressing that squee and inviting readers to join in (they also overestimate the prevelence of self inserts, and completely miss why fandom is minimally monetized in the first place, but that's another matter). They also miss the fact that many authors write fic because writing fic is fun in and of itself, not just as a means of producina a finished work.

Anon seems to be in the same boat, they seem to have mistaken fandom for a small production company that produces works for others to consume, and not a losely interconnected system of communities and social circles that exist to share passions.

--

[cloudstrifing]

broke: music elitists who go out of their way to shit on songs/artists/genres other people are enjoying for literally no reason

woke: those people on yt who run unmonetized channels making playlists with titles like "you're at a party at gatsbys house and they just found a menacing rift in spacetime hovering above the pool (12 hours, with crickets)"

[mburley92]

For those who don't know: I have a Ko-fi account and a Patreon account. I use both of them to support my unmonetized disability YouTube channel. Both of them have art for sale, that can be found under the Shop tab on both platforms. On Patreon, patrons get early access to content (planned videos) before it's available on my YouTube channel. If you want the links to one of these, please let me know.

[vtuberconfessions]

In 2022 i asked risu abt the egos thing jacksepticeye made at the time (the iris project) bc i know stuff abt jack and she is a BEEG fangirl of jack but when she read my unmonetized, normal chat (she somehow caught that question idk how) she said she havent seen the ego videos yet (maybe she only watches his popular stuff) and im sad bc idk what her favorite character would be (if its anti im gonna disown her /j)

.

[leniisreallycool]

I'm re-furious every time I remember that fucking Broadway copyright struck a YouTube video I made. Fucking Broadway was so threatened by a 30 second edit of one of their millions dollar musicals on a fucking unmonetized channel that they forced me to take it down and basically threatened that my entire gmail account would be deleted if I did it again