I designed a board game as a personal challenge and posted my notes online along the way. As the game got close to being finished a publisher messaged wanting to help finish and sell the game. Royalties were enough for a couple small family vacations. That experience really helped cement board gaming (and designing) as one of my core hobbies.
That’s super cool how many more games have you made for your family since?
I now have 2 more published games, several expansions to that first game and a few more ready to publish.
Would you like it to be your main source of income and, if so, how far away is that from becoming a reality?
No, that’s not realistic; I would probably transition to video game development if I wanted to make a career out of game design. I’m happy to keep this a hobby.
Ah that’s cool, hope you keep enjoying it. Happy cake day.
I can fit quarters and €2 coins in my nostrils. I used to have a drunkenness level that would prompt me to assert this at parties or bars, and then I’d obviously show people.
Nobody wants their coins back after that, but it’s not very lucrative and I shudder to think now about the diseases I tempted.
Likely got some beta-hemolytic staphylococcus aureus all up in there. It’s a community derived strain of a common microorganism of the skins biome that can kill blood cells. Do you get sore-throats often, itchy nostrils?
It’s been a decade or more since I did it, but I wasn’t very frequently sick at the time, nor am I now. I do get more severely sick than my husband now, but he’s an overweight omnivore and I’m an underweight vegan, so I assume it’s more related to that. Itchy nostrils sound awful, but I’ve never had them.
Nice try, IRS.
I created an open source image gallery (floating image) in my spare time. Some company (Archos) wanted to embed it into their products, but wanted me to add support for 3rd party hosts (I had Flickr, they wanted Google, photo bucket and others). I earned about €3000 on the work and my project got better for it. Not completely unheard of, but probably the most unusual way I have made extra money.
It wasn’t much, but back in high school I basically worked as sort of a personal savings account for a couple weeks.
There was one dude I wasn’t exactly friends with but we were friendly, never hung out or really talked outside of school, but otherwise were on pretty good terms. We often sat at the same lunch tables, had some mutual friends and such, talked and joked around between classes, etc.
He was also kind of an irresponsible druggie. Nice guy, wasn’t out committing crimes or anything besides drug possession, just made a lot of dumb choices, came to school drunk, high or tripping balls a lot.
I kind of looked the part of a stoner back in high school- long hair, sort of a grungy style, listened to a lot of classic rock and metal, etc. so I was in a lot of the same circles as him, but I didn’t drink or do drugs and it was also pretty well known that I was a reasonably smart, responsible, and honest dude.
So a few weeks out from senior prom, he realizes that he’s going to need some money for whatever his post-prom plans were (I didn’t ask, I figured it was probably better that I didn’t know.) He also knew that he couldn’t be trusted with his own money, he’d blow it on drugs or something else stupid.
So he asks if he can just give me money to hold onto, and I agreed. He’d hand me a few bucks here or there over the next couple weeks, whatever he didn’t use from his lunch money or allowance or whatever, and I just held onto it.
But at the end of it, it added up to a pretty decent bit of money (by “high school kids 20 years ago” standards anyway, it was maybe around $100)
And the day before prom I gave it back to him and he let me keep I think $10 or $20 for my troubles.
Good on you. I know a lot of people that would’ve “lost” it.
That’s an interesting situation to be in and to get paid for your troubles. Do you know if he was able to get sober from this or even after high school?
He did eventually sober up, I think he did a little bit of time in jail or prison along the way. As far as I know he is generally doing pretty well now, is married, has a kid.
But he’s still an idiot. I remember seeing I’m parroting some bullshit about Trump being better for the middle class maybe about a year ago.
He did message me a bit after the election saying something about how he felt bad, but I was still pissed off myself and in no mood to hear him out and blocked him. I was within days of deleting my Facebook anyway so I was about to lose contact with him anyway since I’ve never had his phone number.
When I was maybe 13 years old my younger sister and I got paid to clear out trash from the home of a family friend who was a hoarder. This person had enough self-awareness to know it needed to be cleaned out, but didn’t have the spoons to do anything about it and so just gave us the keys and full reign while they spent a week traveling. We dealt with lots of old food, stacks of ancient newspapers and magazines, useless decades-old kitchen gadgets ordered from the Home Shopping Channel and never removed from the boxes, dead mice and their poop, that kind of thing.
In retrospect that was a huge health hazard to be irresponsibly throwing kids into, the job should have been done by a team of expensive trained adults with protective gear rather than two idiot children with some yellow kitchen gloves and lawn-sized trash bags, but we were happy enough for the pocket money at the time.
didn’t have the spoons to do anything about it
I see you dabble in disability. I always appreciated this metaphor for it’s usefulness and kindness
When I was 15 or so I was hired from an ad on Craigslist for photo editing - just basic touching up, but like a thousand or so photos. The caveat was - softcore porn. I didn’t mind, money is money. My very Christian family who found out however - they did mind. My sister ended up finishing the editing for me.
Wait! Sister! What are you doing? Why are you editing those photos while stuck in the dryer? Dod you also run out of pants while editing those photos?
When I was still in school, I was the computer nerd. A doctor in town, who’s son was in my class, asked me to fix an annoyance he had with a software he used. He offered a generous compensation. It took me less than an hour to analyze and patch the program on the binary level. On a per hour base, I earned more money than he normally did…
What exactly does patching a program on the binary level entail?
Well, a software (I.e. a. exe file) is a long list of numbers. Some are commands like “do something when the user clicks there”, some are data, like text on a button.
If you are very familiar with those intricacies, you can change a few bytes here or there to change what the program does.
I’m more curious as to the process than the concept I guess. Open your exe in notepad, hold alt, and mash the numpad?
This all is under the umbrella of reverse engineering or software cracking. This is an old e-magazine (https://www.exploit-db.com/ezines/kr5hou2zh4qtebqk.onion/ARTeam/ARTeam.Ezine.Number2.pdf) showing a rather easy way to add a menu to notepad (Windows XP/7/10) to add functionality. This is in chapter 1. In this case only small modifications are done in the original software (resources and loading a dll), but the changes could have been done without a dll library using code caves or a new section instead.
Reverse engineering is a very large area containing many topics, depending on the software, the methods, the hardware, and even the operating systems. So you need to learn a lot. It starts from crackmes, patching, debugging and reading assembler code. Then it goes to anti debugging techniques, manual unpacking of protections/packers, understanding protocols and file formats, keygenning, custom authentication servers, inline patching, copy protections (disc based and online) hypervisors and drivers and much much more.
That’s for sharing, now im wondering why my highly relevant degree never bothered to discuss reverse engineering!
No, there are tools like “hex editors” that allow to edit a file in a more controlled way. I don’t think opening a binary file in notepad would do anything good to that file…
Not that unusual, but I responded to an ad of an older dude looking for someone who’d go shopping for him. He couldn’t get down the stairs easily anymore. But really, he just wanted someone to talk to. So I’d go to his place, grab the shopping list and money, walk across the street to the nearest supermarket and be back in 20 minutes. And then he’d often cook for me and tell me about his life, travels, the music he composed on his very old computer, stuff like that. I’d get paid for 3-4 hours of which 90% was just talking to this guy about electronic music.
Was any of the music good?
Well, I didn’t like it but I think he had some skills. He was into this minimalistic music, I forgot what it was called. I found it boring, but I could also tell he must have known a thing or two about music theory.
Was working with IATSE setting up a stage for some band. The road crew forgot about us and we missed all our breaks over about three hours (starting almost immediately with our lunch break). There were four union workers just standing there having there contracts broken with ineptitude. We were all payed ~$900 each for watching other people work for three hours. Like, by the end of the third our I think we were getting quadruple time or something.
Unions are fucking awesome. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a de facto supporter of slavery, with extra steps.
I was snoopy at a fair.
The job description said “must be 160 cm or shorter”. I am 161 cm. This one cm was felt for all the 6 hours.
I was also insanely hot and blind so at one point I started and kept dancing macarena to not pass out and stay awake. I kept getting phone calls for three years afterwards because they wanted me to work for them again. No way.
I was messaging a guy on Grindr, and he asked if he could buy my socks — ie the socks that I had been wearing all day. I obliged. I made (iirc) 30$ 😎
going to aldi with a pack of plastic cart buckles and stealing peoples quarters
Like when they were shopping and not looking?
Probably knocked them out first, to be polite.
It’s basic chivalry
I was commuting back to home from the city where I was doing apprenticeship.
I sat next to an elderly lady who initiated a talk with me and soon has asked what i believed her subjects were she used to teach at school. I believe i got it wrong the first time but right on my second try and explained why i thought so.
After we noticed that we both lived/exited in the same village she offered me a price money and asked for my address so she could send it to me.
I know this sounds super suspicious and writing it makes me wonder why i have given her my address, but i was young and there are probably a lot of details i’m missing which would make it totally reasonable. Some days later i got an letter with 5 € attached :)
Others people responses seem way better then mine. I used to burn pirated cds and dvds back in middle and high school. I also used to sell answers to a couple seniors during algebra 2 when they were desperate to graduate. But as an adult other then selling drugs i also sucked a dick for 600 dollars. I also helped a gf sell photos before onlyfans. So none of that seems very unusual now adays.
$600 for just a BJ sounds like a lot of money.
It indeed was. Definitely a kink thing. It was some old rich dude who called my trans friend from awhole other state, gave him 1k just to drive there(he got more later). Then he had him invite someone else, me a striaght guy whos never been with a man over. All i did was talk look at his yacht then blow him. Walked away with 600 in around an hour and a half. Then met up with my friend to party when he got through. And this was a decade ago so google says the inflation amount would be 820.
If hookers even make half that in the same time span makes it seem a lot more appealing.
The moral ride I just went on while reading this is staggering. A slight nod while reading about burning pirated cds and dvds, as there seemed to have been at least someone in each middle or high school that did that. A slight disapproval from selling answers to algebra 2 assignments/tests. And then the rest just seemed wild to me. There was always a rumor/joke that ‘such and such person’ in high school into sex work. But I never went looking nor heard anything in passing. Anyway… glad the person didn’t stiff you for your sex work.
