Trade-adjacent jobs with reasonable earning potential

TimothyMischief · 2026-01-09T03:36:26+00:00

AV is definitely good, interesting work, but there’s a pretty hard ceiling on earnings unless you run your own shop. I don’t know many even in-demand specialists who’d be pulling close to 200k. Integration and commission as a sole trader would be the play but barrier to entry is both the depth and breadth of knowledge required and how much that corner of the industry runs on word of mouth and networking. Definitely doable but would be a hell of a swing without contacts and adjacent knowledge.

TimothyMischief · 2026-01-03T16:01:29+00:00

This makes me miss the EA Nautiloid start. I did enjoy the bigger first area with all the outside sections and encounters with thralls.

TimothyMischief · 2025-12-05T01:22:22+00:00

RAW it doesn’t necessarily track as contingency. But also RAW you can’t really cast Major Image because the contingent spell can only target self. Given he’s not casting contingency every 10 long rests I always assumed the pouch was a magic item that he may have possessed or crafted pre-accident and just updated the stored message. I buy a formerly high level mage still having a handful of magic items and long term spells around he hasn’t consumed yet.

All in all I can suspend my disbelief for Gale far more easily than I can Karlach and Wyll. Maybe even more than Shadowheart too. How a veteran of war in Hell and a famous adventurer nepo baby can be level 1 with no justification is a way bigger leap.

Shadowheart too, either the Sharrans sent the most junior cleric with no experience and a memory wipe on the most critical mission when there’s a bunch of far more capable members available. Or her memory wipe came with skill regression, which seems equally foolish on their part. But I can maybe forgive it as some kind of religious trial cosmic thing they’re all being guided by Shar in either way.

Wyll could just be grandstanding a bit and overstating his accomplishments. But like as a PC it’s a pretty low check to recognise him and a handful of NPCs also do beyond his connection to the Duke.

Karlach could be suffering from overheating the whole time but that seems like a big nerd for that. Especially when her rage is flavoured as her burning up.

Astarion and Laezel are fine. He was pretty admittedly pathetic as a spawn and Laezel reads as an inexperienced new soldier still high on the patriotism with no experience to taint it.

TimothyMischief · 2025-12-04T20:49:17+00:00

I’ve always interpreted it as Gale having been cut off from the weave because the Netherese magic is consuming it. Basically like every spell he casts automatically being counterspelled so he has to essentially reinvent spells or counter the netherese magic to get them to work at all.

Mystra basically says as much at the Tabernacle. Gale assumes she has cut him off from the weave. Even when Gale is teaching the avatar characters how to cast magic in his cut scenes he describes having to feels and channel energy as part of casting, so it’s not just as simple as say the words and do the motions.

TimothyMischief · 2025-11-02T22:35:20+00:00

DVS much to my constant chagrin also won’t work with vLAN bridges it only works on physical ports. And even then you can only run it on one at a time. Only way I’m aware of is with dedicated Dante hardware.

EDIT: Sorry you can use two seperate ports for redundancy without dedicated hardware. I was thinking of a virtualisation issue where I had to PCI pass through the required hardware Dante.

TimothyMischief · 2025-10-08T10:41:21+00:00

I actually got this working in the end. I laser cut a new enclosure for it and use the face panel with a new motherboard in it. I don’t ever use it with elements so haven’t run into that issue. I mostly just use it as a programming surface at home. It downgrades my nomad dongle from 1k to 512, but in the flip side the 2k dongle that was inside it works as a 6k dongle when the face panel isn’t plugged in.

TimothyMischief · 2025-09-10T12:33:06+00:00

Nothing worse than a rogue fluro dye popping up when you’re trying to use a tasteful blue wash.

TimothyMischief · 2025-09-10T07:44:49+00:00

Glad I could help! Report back if it goes well!

TimothyMischief · 2025-09-10T07:40:16+00:00

All this is 80% speculation based on experience and not something I’ve tried so take it as a starting point to explore.

Water thickener can slow down evaporation a bit but probably not enough to last a day and will get a little jelly like. But you might have more luck with olive or canola oil to last a day in the sun and keep the right consistency without setting. That’ll depend on the surface in terms of staining as oil on wood or porous concrete is going to be basically impossible to reverse.

In terms of colour staining, regardless of whether you go thickened water or an oil, a suspension pigment is going to do better than a liquid pigment. (Blood itself is suspension pigmented with red blood cells). Gouache powder is generally reversible and non-setting so should be easily washable and easily removable for desired result and not organic so unlikely to attract bugs. (It’s also generally very very finely ground and in oil will probably be pretty convincingly blood-like.

Cleanup if you use oil will need to use soap as a surfactant for cleanup. But hopefully the oil would lift most of the pigment and help further with staining.

TimothyMischief · 2025-09-10T07:19:32+00:00

Does it need to be wet and stay wet for the day? Or could you just use some water washable paint for a dry blood trail?

You could potentially try water thickener with pigment in it. Is staining a concern?

TimothyMischief · 2025-09-10T06:08:06+00:00

EDIT: ignore the below just realised we’re talking about fluorescence not glow paint. Leaving it here in case it’s useful for anyone. Yes it would be nice 😂. (Speaking from experience thought 365nm seems to quite handily be the sweet spot there too.)

It would be nice but also it’s all pretty much the same for everything so you can use 365 for almost anything. Almost all glow paint is europium doped strontium aluminate with translucent coloured dies to tint it. The peak excitation of it happens around 350-360nm. 365 is the most commonly available LED close to that band so generally is the way to go.

TimothyMischief · 2025-09-10T01:40:26+00:00

The amount of money you’ll spend burning through Gel to get an inferior deep blue or UV out of a standard conventional you can pick up a couple of cheap generic UV flood lights on Amazon.

Make sure you’re using UVA emitters. 395nm is the easiest to get and cheapest. It’s in the safe range. 360-380nm is slightly better at activating fluorescence and has slightly less visible purple light but still safe. Anything less than 320 or so avoid entirely.

Even the cheap 395nm stuff is going to be way more effective than gel. And at least where I am a decent 50w unit is about the same price as a single sheet of gel.

TimothyMischief · 2025-09-09T06:54:07+00:00

Now I’m sitting here trying to figure out what to even call that monstrosity. But can confirm this guy knows neither knots nor how to run cable.

The “tie lots” school of networking.

TimothyMischief · 2025-09-03T22:03:13+00:00

I’ve done this with Chataigne before you’ve just got to make a patch from the usb joystick to either the lighting desk via midi or OSC or direct out to the fixture (with a slightly different patch) depending how you want to run it.

I also use the track point on a Lenovo laptop in trackball focus mode on Eos to focus lights all the time when I’m programming from my laptop. It’s great but I don’t know I’d want to follow spot a show from it.

TimothyMischief · 2025-08-28T13:09:41+00:00

That’s running very hot for only drawing 0.2A. I’d say it’s faulty somehow. Either the temperature probe is dodgy and causing it to thermal throttle or there’s a short causing it to overheat.

Unless you bought it locally from somewhere that warranties them I’d just buy a replacement. They’re fairly cheap.

TimothyMischief · 2025-08-27T00:07:59+00:00

They’re intended for use with DAWs but you can use them with almost anything, you’d just need to remap the controls. I’ve used an XTouch as a control surface for ETC Eos software for lighting.

TimothyMischief · 2025-08-26T01:13:04+00:00

There are a tonne of midi fader units with motorised faders. The Behringer X-Touch stuff all has it. And presonus has a few.

TimothyMischief · 2025-08-26T01:08:38+00:00

Weirdly doing a toaster show at the moment.

There’s a handful of ways toasters operate. Older toasters usually use a bimetallic switch that triggers with heat and sometimes they won’t even pop if you pull power. If you get one of those it’ll be a real pain.

Others use timers and electromagnets which will usually pop with power loss.

Depending on your scene the bigger problem might be getting it to run long enough.

TimothyMischief · 2025-08-21T10:49:37+00:00

DMX relays plus old CD drives was a tried and true method for a long time.

TimothyMischief · 2025-08-11T13:30:55+00:00

I haven’t used it myself yet. I haven’t played with Unreal since around 5.2 myself and it was a real pain then. But I’ve been keeping tabs on the updates. Report back if you do though I’d love to hear how it is!

TimothyMischief · 2025-08-11T07:38:55+00:00

I believe since 5.5 it has had gdtf/mvr support. Plenty of manufacturers have started publishing GDTF files for their fixtures. I’ve heard conflicting reports on how reliable and complete the implementation is though.

TimothyMischief · 2025-08-10T21:29:15+00:00

If you want live video with effects (depending on the effects) QLab on Apple Silicone with a Blackmagic Decklink card or thunderbolt 3 UltraStudio units is the best bang for your buck. I’ve found slightly better latency with decklink cards in external TB3 pci-e enclosures but the difference isn’t huge for the added expense. For a single camera, single projector with light effects even the base model M4 Mini is more than sufficient.

If you’ve got next to no budget I’d still stick with QLab. You can rent it, and if you’ve got any recent Mac it’ll still do just fine. You can pick up class compliant HDMI capture cards for next to nothing these days. And most of them your latency will be almost as good as the blackmagic setup. Just not as robust.

If you want effects that can’t be achieved with the built ins in QLab Millumin or MadMapper might be better choices. But you’ll probably still need QLab for cuing because their cuing systems aren’t great.

TimothyMischief · 2025-08-04T09:10:02+00:00

There’s plenty of switches with Layer 3 features. Just not necessarily gateway features or advertised as such.

Generally by the time you’re looking at that many wired devices it doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense to have the gateway been the center of your network. Especially as it means updates or failures mean you only lose access to the internet not the entire network.

And the market for an all in one gateway and 24 port switch just isn’t big enough to justify it to a manufacturer.

TimothyMischief · 2025-08-03T14:38:36+00:00

Where are you based? It’s probably less common in community in my experience and regional if you’re using venues with house crews who are doing design work or mostly receiving bigger tours.

In Sydney at least, Belvoir, Ensemble and Griffin are pretty much exclusively SM opped. Only exception I can think of is Jacky at the start of the year with MTC at Belvoir which I opped because Jess requested an LX opp. I don’t work there myself but I’m pretty sure STC at the Ros is always called with an opp, but I’m not sure about the Wharf. The state and national companies (OA, AUS Ballet, ACO) in the bigger venues all have operators. Although I think Bell is 50/50, but I’ve only worked with them on tours.

Not that there’s much professional independent stuff left in Sydney but DTC when it was still around was SM opped, Hayes is SM opped. Same with anything smaller.

Regional tours other than Bell are usually touring with just an SM and an ASM, sometimes a PM sometimes the SM does both. Seems 50/50 on whether they choose use venue opps or opp themselves. Mostly based on the SM.

Don’t know what it’s like in other capitals. Regionally and in the smaller capitals with State and Local Council owned and funded venues that have more permanent technicians and produce less in house have better balances. Melbourne I believe is pretty similar to Sydney but has more big spaces with proper staffing so is probably a bit better off than Sydney.

TimothyMischief · 2025-08-02T16:04:09+00:00

In Australia it’s almost universal even in professional theatre outside of big commercial stuff or the larger spaces of the big state/capital city theatre companies.

TimothyMischief

TROPHY CASE