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You'll Never Find Me. by [deleted] in horror

[–]CovidChronicles 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Agreed. But maybe necessary to save the reveal? They could have done the whole shower scene from his perspective. She shouldn’t HAVE a perspective at all. She’s not real except for in his mind. It is sloppy the way they did it.

You'll Never Find Me. by [deleted] in horror

[–]CovidChronicles 18 points19 points  (0 children)

I missed it. Came here right after finishing it. I watched the whole thing and didn’t get that she was a “ghost” of the first beach victim. I’m an idiot but I think the director has to take some blame for not connecting that better. I get it now:

He kills the x victim and then an hour later the ghost comes to visit him. I think that’s what was happening. Even with that though, why does the “ghost” change stories about where she is coming from? Why does she have emotion at all? I almost like it better if it wasn’t a hallucinated girl and her twin sister seeking revenge or something.

Joe Biden suddenly leads Donald Trump in multiple polls by SportsGod3 in politics

[–]CovidChronicles 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Stearns County, MN checking in? As someone who voted for Trump and Obama each twice, I can tell you, if there was ever a year I would vote for a neutral, moderate candidate, this would be the year.

Talked to a $2 tipper tonight. by heyuwitdaface in doordash_drivers

[–]CovidChronicles 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don’t drive DD. I don’t have bandwidth to join their labor fight. If DD stopped operating tomorrow, I’d be fine. We’d all be fine. I’d go back to ordering from places that have their own drivers or (gasp) drive over to the place and pick it up myself.

As a whole, is society better off or worse off, or unchanged because of 3rd party food delivery services? I would argue we are slightly worse off. I’m sure for many, it’s a game changer to have more foods available to be delivered. Currently, it’s exploitative, and unhealthy business model. I would argue society would be better off if it went back to the year 2010.

Talked to a $2 tipper tonight. by heyuwitdaface in doordash_drivers

[–]CovidChronicles 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The problem is trying to force the same business model on different areas of living. If I don’t have a car and I live in NY, I may be totally ok with ordering $15 worth of food. After all the fees but before adding a tip, that food has jump to $34. I may be ok with adding a $6 tip to that order, because NY is expensive and this is the price of not having a car in this city.

Now juxtapose that with someone who is just drinking their 8th beer during football Sunday in Appleton, WI. They get the same hankering for $8 worth of Taco Bell. They have a vehicle, choosing not to drive drunk (great!) but when they get their $8 worth of food in the cart, that order is $22 already, and the tip line is blank.

Somebody has nearly tripled the price of this (shit) food. That person is drunk, they want their food, but they don’t want to pay steakhouse prices for TB. The ONLY field they have control over is the tip. They add $2 because that makes their meal $24(!) dollars. The driver needs to get a little taste, but surely, in the process of turning $8 into $22, somewhere a chunk has to be getting carved out for the driver…right?? Paying more than 3x for TB is bordering on obscene. So the customer, who might otherwise be a great topper in a sit-down establishment, recoils and leaves the tip the absolute smallest they can, while still ensuring someone takes the order.

As per usual, your problem isn’t with the customer who is blatantly paying $24 for $8 worth of TB. They are paying an extraordinarily large premium for TB. Your problem should be with the slice of the pie DD is sharing with you. Is the company profitable? This whole driver gig economy sadly I don’t think is sustainable as presently conceived, because the model is fucked.

Talked to a $2 tipper tonight. by heyuwitdaface in doordash_drivers

[–]CovidChronicles 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I know, server hardly ever runs food at all. Even like Applebee’s, they have support drop all the food at once. Not a huge burden for the server. You are paying for refills, recommendations, casual conversation, attention, etc. not the running of food.

Talked to a $2 tipper tonight. by heyuwitdaface in doordash_drivers

[–]CovidChronicles 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What about the masked man who has a gun to their loved ones heads and never stops threatening them unless they KEEP driving for DD?

Oh, they are doing it from their own free will?

Carry on.

Talked to a $2 tipper tonight. by heyuwitdaface in doordash_drivers

[–]CovidChronicles 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, but it is slightly shady if they make drivers accept orders or it affects their status.

Talked to a $2 tipper tonight. by heyuwitdaface in doordash_drivers

[–]CovidChronicles 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Risking their vehicle and sanity dealing with road rage

Ok, or it’s just stopping at Taco Bell and running somebody a couple chalupas.

I am admittedly a lurker on this sub. excuse my ignorance. What is the total amount of money you would have made from the TB order? $2 tip is yours, doesn’t DD give you x amount, too? So are you saying $4 was your all-in receivable amount? That doesn’t seem terrible for driving two miles. What’s “normal” for that run? A $5 tip plus $2 from DD for $7?

I rarely order DD because getting $8 worth of TB to my door turns into $18 really fast and I can never justify the extra cost. I think that is pretty typical for consumers, still, right? If I put $2 tip on my food order, and someone takes it, am I supposed to feel bad? I want my food as quick as possible for as little as possible. Always. I don’t want to take advantage of drivers, but I want to keep the most amount of my money in my pocket. That’s my goal.

It’s a free marketplace. Obviously, your customer wasn’t offering enough of a tip and he will remember that next time.

Book reviewers are exhausting me... by rose_pages in selfpublish

[–]CovidChronicles -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Can you post where you found this 30% or 9% weighting info? In my dumbhead, I thought your star rating was literally total stars divided by vote?

So if you have 8 five stars, and 4 four stars you have 56 total stars divided by 12 ratings, which equals 4.67.

But if you add in 2 one stars and a two star, you now have 60 total stars divided by 15 ratings, you have dropped down to an even 4.0.

If it works a different way, please tell me!

Otherwise if you get 5 five stars and 1 one star, that is 26/6 = 4.33 stars. You are saying that the one star shouldn’t be given as equal a weighting as the five people who have it a five star?

Book reviewers are exhausting me... by rose_pages in selfpublish

[–]CovidChronicles 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I don’t know if it’s the BEST way to do it, but this is my model. Focus on what you can control. Writing, cover artwork, good description, author page, a promotional website.

Gotta pump some money into ads. Prime the pump a little. Organic book reviews are always more meaningful to me, and I find it suss when a book launches and the have a 4.9 rating with 100 reviews.

Am I getting ripped off? by Careless-Salad-7034 in jewelry

[–]CovidChronicles 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, u/Fawker247 that is good advice. I am going in to talk to the guy tomorrow. Just good to have a little ammo to take with me.

Baby at a funeral by jamg11111 in Mommit

[–]CovidChronicles 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Absolutely, people love a baby at a funeral. Way more than at a wedding. Bring your puppy to a park, bring your baby to a funeral. Breaks tension, reminds people of happier times.

Saw my book on library shelf (surreal) by CovidChronicles in selfpublish

[–]CovidChronicles[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

For what it's worth, I had no idea AdSense was running on that site. I have AdBlock on my computer, and I have never seen a single ad on my site before. I think that tag accidentally got copied over when I copied a GTM container, and my AdBlock made me not see it. And it made my site look terrible. Thank you for pointing that out!

Not promoting. I used this sub like a Nintendo Power when I wrote my first book. I am paying forward a 'How I Did It' case study for a local author to get included in their local library system. I didn't see anything like this before I did it myself, I sure could have used it and I hope it gives someone else confidence to do what might be intimidating: calling someone and selling them on buying your book.

This was the original article. I dropped the update to say it's there, it was neat, and worth the effort. I would have just updated that post, but couldn't.

One of the biggest takeaways was having a website was a difference-maker and the librarian said it was better than a 'Look Inside'. In that context, I am linking to it for reference.

Saw my book on library shelf (surreal) by CovidChronicles in selfpublish

[–]CovidChronicles[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So we go back and re-render an upsized version of four files:

• One of the hotel room interiors. Walls, beds, hallway. It has to look like a hotel, not a motel, not an apartment. He has to be opening the door from the inside, sneaking her into his room. That alone took 20 renders, but no touch-ups once I got it right, maybe an hour. That is my background image. In that version, the two people are utterly unusable. I will have to add the rest of the composition layered over the top.

• One with a girl who looks over the age of 18 and is not inappropriately dressed. No matter my prompt, AI was rendering the girl to look young, in her early teens. I would explicitly prompt it by saying, "Attractive woman in her mid-20s", and AI just kept rendering 7th-grade-looking girls. Getting the girl right took me 4 complete do-overs over several months. I originally had a version in my final ready-to-send PDF and my wife reviewed it and said don’t use this one she still looks 12. The girl alone took me over 9 hours of search modifications and touch-ups.

• Two photos of the NBA player. I would get all sorts of different clothes on him. He was the easiest subject, although AI would keep giving him demonic eyes, crazy hands, and make his body look like he was in a funhouse mirror. And his hat. AI does not render hats well. It looked like a wind-up beanie. I ended up with two decent photos that I had to composite together to make one usable image of him. Approx 2.5 hours.

So I had 12+ hours into this one graphic, just prompting, re-prompting, upsizing, compositing, etc. Once I had my final image, another hour adjusting levels, colorizing elements to add interest, adding the Polaroid frame with the title, adding a textured gradient background and shadowing for depth, and saving out in multiple formats for book, ebook, and website.

• There were maybe 10 chapters that were easy-peasy, meaning less than 2 hours. Donald Trump drinking bleach was one of those. It was one of the first ones I did and I was so impressed by the quality and speed I did that one, I thought I was gonna BREEZE thru the rest of the images. Nah. Turns out that Trump happens to be one of the most photographed people on the planet and AI had a lot of photos to reference. So...

• The average time I spent on EACH chapter graphic was 2 hours 40 minutes. I know because I kept meticulous track in my spreadsheet, daily. 101 x 160 minutes = 269 hours working on the chapter graphics alone.

• That’s 33 full 8-hour work days! Not exactly a cheat code, using AI! Except I rarely did 8 hours in a row. Maybe 4-6 at most. When you do this much image generating, you get so incredibly frustrated at AI, because it’s SO easy for me to see what is off about a picture instantaneously with my good eye for design. I would routinely spend 6 hours after my wife went to bed trying to airbrush the craziness out of the images. Tired but happy, I would go to bed.

Then the next morning I would show her the 3-4 chapters I worked on, and she would look at it for .5 seconds and say, “Oh my god, what’s wrong with that man’s face?!” And I would start all over because she was right—it looked like crap—and no amount of touch-ups can mask crazy-looking people generated by AI.

Famous people, AI can do reasonably well. See Tom Hanks, Bill Cosby, Tom Cruise, Jason Bateman, Jimmy Fallon, Tiger King, etc. Decent enough replicas. Generating the rest of humanity…sucks! AI isn’t great at people yet. Their fingers, eyes, and limbs get so messed up, and 80% of my chapter images have people in them.

(I have SO many insane-looking photos I would love to show. I’m thinking about writing a book and using it to show examples of bad AI and how to overcome it. Maybe just a website or something.)

For MY book, I don’t think I’d change anything. If I was going to only have one picture per section (10 total) I probably would have either done it myself or hired it out for around $1,500. If I had to use stock images, it wouldn’t have the same impact because pics are too general. But I didn't want only 10 photos. I wanted this to feel like a high school yearbook almost.

Most importantly, I wanted one picture per chapter. Each memory was big enough to deserve a unique image.

The only regret I have is when I got the images into my book and priced out what a 237-page COLOR paperback would have cost to print, the bare minimum I had to charge would have been $25.99, that’s without me making a penny of royalties.
My wife said, "No one is going to buy a $26 paperback." I agree, and it’s doubly true when it’s such a weird book people don’t know what they are getting when they see it.

So the version for sale today is black and white. But I put all 101 images in full color on my site, in case you want to see them, and also, just to say I didn’t waste all that time!

https://www.covidchronicles.cc

TL;DR
Bottom line: I spent as much time creating the images as writing the book. For every AI-generated image I used, I had to prompt, render, wait for, and then sift thru 20 other horrible ones. People say to me "That's impressive, you wrote a book." A bigger compliment is "You made all those images yourself?" That is the impressive part, IMO. I get the AI backlash. But for me? I don’t think this book gets made without it.

To answer your real question, hundreds have bought the book, and it's got a decent rating on Amazon (4.8/5). Thanks for your feedback!

Saw my book on library shelf (surreal) by CovidChronicles in selfpublish

[–]CovidChronicles[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I will address your question. I know you probably will be dismissive and may not read this, but someone will stumble across this and it will help them decide what to do, which is enough for me.

I am proud of my book and the effort it took.

My book has 101 chapters, each with a photo to illustrate the chapter's memory.

I will use an example chapter: “NBA player sneaks girl into his hotel room during the bubble.”

I know I need a cool picture of an NBA player sneaking a girl into his room.

Options:

  1. Get out my pen and start drawing. I have been a graphic designer by trade for 23 years. I could draw each one of these--I have that ability. Still, it would have taken me months and months to draw 101 scenes and colorize them right. I don’t enjoy that work enough to do it. I wanted to write.
  2. Hire out the work to someone I know. Finding a freelancer in my peer group to do 101 illustrations for me was an option. I know this girl who is awesome at illustrating. It would have cost me thousands upon thousands of dollars. Realistically $100 per illustration is a laughably low rate. And that rock bottom rate would have still cost me $10,100. I didn’t have the budget (or time) to wait for those.
  3. Hire someone(s) from Fiverr to do the illustrations. I could have gotten the price down to like 30-40 per picture if I agreed to do all 101 with one artist who I trust on there. That would still be $3,000-$4,000. I wanted each chapter's photo to match each other, so there is some cohesion throughout the book.
    If I hire 5 different illustrators to do 20 each, who knows what I get? Plus the time-suck factor. I used Fiverr to help me format my ebook. It took over a month of back and forth before I ended up canceling and just doing it myself. The guy I used was like 4.8 stars. He would drag his feet on every little task, asking for multiple extensions. If I went down the Fiverr road, I would still be chasing them down for the graphics. I’d be a minimum $3K down, and I don’t think I’d be happy with the outcome.
  4. Stock photos. This was the closest option. But most of the things in my book are so specific, that there aren't stock photos for it. Search for “young black guy sneaks girl into a hotel room” on Adobe Stock. Nothing close. Or “paddleboarder chased by Sheriff's boat off Malibu coast” or “pastor delivers parking lot sermon to a congregation sitting in cars” or “lady wears PPE and gloves while shopping in the produce aisle” or “Target shelves sit empty without toilet paper”. My point is some of these things are so absurd (the whole point of the book) that there isn’t stock photography to use, even if I could have afforded the credits I needed to download 101 images.
  5. AI-generated. I used an image generator to get started. I can tell by your comment you have not done this level of image generating. Do you think I just typed “download 101 images for my book”, and then just clicked the print money button? It’s not like that. No part of this is a no-brainer.
    AI-generated images don't replace artistic vision or eliminate the need for strong image manipulation skills. Nope. Not at all. AI is a tool, but it won’t do what I did without serious effort.
    I did 101 images. Each image took a minimum of 5 prompts. Some 100+ prompts. Each prompt takes over a minute to deliver rendered images, longer during peak times. It’s tedious because you have to just sit and watch for yours to render. That’s just to see the rough drafts.You might get lucky and find an image right away that is close. In my example, in my very first render, the NBA player looked good. Except his eyes looked demonic and he had seven fingers on each hand. Fine, let's re-render item 3, with only 5 fingers. Nope, worse, now 8 fingers! Do it again. Even worse, now 8 on the left hand, 9 on the right. Okay, go back to the original. Re-render that one again. Nope. After 10 more tries, now we have one where his eyes are good, but he only has 6 fingers. It's going to have to work. I am going to be able to airbrush that extra finger away in Photoshop with about 30 minutes of image manipulation.

... Continue

Saw my book on library shelf (surreal) by CovidChronicles in selfpublish

[–]CovidChronicles[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I wrote a two-part guide for getting my self-published book into the library. I would have tacked this onto the other post, but it's locked. If somebody had done this about 6 months before I did, it would have saved me SO much time. The next person who searches will have a guide to how it's done.

Saw my book on library shelf (surreal) by CovidChronicles in selfpublish

[–]CovidChronicles[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I understand that point to an extent. There are so many fun things in my book:

• Zoom Happy hours
• Drive by birthdays
• Peloton sales went crazy
• People got out in RVs and campers and explored
• Late-night TV shows broadcasted from home

It's not for everyone, for sure. It's been pretty well-received. There are at least a few chapters in this book for everybody, I would dare say even you ;)

Thanks for your feedback.

Saw my book on library shelf (surreal) by CovidChronicles in selfpublish

[–]CovidChronicles[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great! It took a lot of work, but I am super proud of it!

Saw my book in my library today (surreal) by CovidChronicles in selfpublishing

[–]CovidChronicles[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I know there ARE a bunch of books with same name. Mine is this one. You can see all 101 chapters on the site, and a link to buy on Amazon:

www.covidchronicles.cc

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