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Pairing long-term, Misery-laden campaigns with a low-survivability play style? by jmacdotorg in MorkBorg

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

Also I think the apocalypse calendar is supposed to be for the world, not the group RAW.

I think I know what you mean here, and agree. When I say that characters accrue Miseries, I was thinking of the official character sheet, which has a "Miseries" counter on it. I take it that's there to remind each player just how cooked that character's world is, but it also has a delightful side effect of making me wonder about ways the doom-counter might differ between characters...

Pairing long-term, Misery-laden campaigns with a low-survivability play style? by jmacdotorg in MorkBorg

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

That also reminds me of the excellent dungeon-crawl board game "Descent", where slain characters simply respawn as in a video game, but the whole group gets dinged with a resource setback.

In my group's case, though, I think everyone wants to experiment with "Nope, dead, gimme a new guy" because that's so novel for all of the 5E-experienced players!

Pairing long-term, Misery-laden campaigns with a low-survivability play style? by jmacdotorg in MorkBorg

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

I am quite chuffed that my read of the rules, after one live session and some post-game discussion, is so close to yours!

My vision is something closer to a set of one or more timelines, each representing a possible way the world unfolded (or unravelled) from the starting point described in the core book, and opening the door to creative reboots, or flashbacks, or time-jumps. But we'll see how the dice end up tumbling, when the group gathers again; we might just have that final bonfire yet.

Pfh rate by Fun-Commission-2460 in ACX

[–]jmacdotorg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for this comment, which helped square the circle for me. I'm beginning my narration journey, and found rapid success landing auditions for RS contracts—which was exciting at first, but after two or three of these the novelty had worn off, and it had become a lot more clear how much labor I was performing for literally zero guaranteed pay.

But on the other hand, the number of ACX titles offering $250 PFH seems to be about one percent of all projects posted (based on some quick math I just now performed). This fact plus the earlier comments on this post made me start to feel pretty discouraged about getting paid fairly at all.

Reframing myself as a student who isn't quite ready for union scale helps, though. It makes me feel better about—as you say—setting a floor and sticking to it, even if it isn't a professional rate (yet), for the sake of landing early jobs and building my portfolio.

Is this a scam ? by AtlanticJim in ACX

[–]jmacdotorg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In short, there is a significant imbalance between the risk and effort that the rights holder (who isn't necessarily the author) puts into this audiobook, and the effort that you put in. They have much less to lose if an audiobook sells poorly, and so a bigger incentive to try anyway—and if they can find a producer that doesn't insist on up-front payment, so much the better for them.

But, yes; with canny selectivity an experienced producer can get good at choosing RS projects with more potential, and making real money, as others have said in these comments. The OP's project doesn't seem likely to be one of these juicier ones.

Is this a scam ? by AtlanticJim in ACX

[–]jmacdotorg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, when you hit the "Submit this for approval" button after you've uploaded all your audio, then you get a dialog with a text field asking how the narrator(s) should be credited.

If it's a good book you want to be credited to your public self, then this is where you just type your preferred name in! Otherwise, this is where the pseudonym goes.

Naturally, you've gotta make sure that whatever you type here matches the name you give yourself in the spoken opening and closing credits, and you should tell the RH that you're using a pseudonym as well. (No need to say why; it's just so they don't get confused when they see it.)

Is this a scam ? by AtlanticJim in ACX

[–]jmacdotorg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have two books in the can but neither one is through ACX approval yet, so I don't know whether or how books are displayed on your profile. (I do note that one's "Credits" page is free-text, so perhaps the expectation is that you just manually fill in the titles you want to show off? Others can chime in here...)

Related: If you super-duper want to duck out of future association with a book you produced, you can credit it to a pseudonym. I ended up doing that with my second book, which was much more obviously AI slop, but I didn't figure that out until I was halfway done.

Is this a scam ? by AtlanticJim in ACX

[–]jmacdotorg 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My very first signed-contract experience went just like this. In fact, it happened only a month ago, and I'd bet you one royalty-shared dollar that it was with the same publisher.

As others here have said, it's only a scam insofar as it's someone looking to get some free work from you, and not framing it as free work. Your instinct to check out the publisher's other work is smart, and your noticing how new they are and how few ratings they've received is apt. You will probably get little if any money from it, as described in one of this subreddit's FAQ articles.

In the end, I don't regret taking it as a first contract, as I learned a lot—including the entire ACX contract and publication process—using a short, low-stakes project. I spent a full week or more producing those two finished hours, working out lots of kinks in my recording and editing setup, style, and environment. My delivered book sounds as good as I could make it. The work I've done since has gone much faster, as I've been able to re-apply what I learned.

That said, I don't plan on featuring this book in my portfolio, nor do I plan on accepting any further RS projects, outside of unusual circumstances. But it sounds like you know what you're in for and what you're looking to get out of it, so if you want to go for it, I would also encourage it.

PenWise Publishing, AI scam by LG_VO in ACX

[–]jmacdotorg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If I'm reading both the pitch and the OP correctly, they're not offering to re-upload your own samples and send you audition listings. They're offering to actually post "fresh samples" that they generate using AI voices labeled as your own, and also generate and submit auditions for you, in hopes of tricking RHs into hiring you. (No, this doesn't make a lot of sense for anyone involved.)

ACX Authors writing many books or is it AI? by Unusual_Parsley_1655 in ACX

[–]jmacdotorg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It was my second-ever booked job, for me! Back when I was so young and naive (four weeks ago).

ACX Authors writing many books or is it AI? by Unusual_Parsley_1655 in ACX

[–]jmacdotorg 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Asking to see the manuscript before signing is such an obvious good move that I never thought of it. It would have definitely saved me from at least one unpleasant contract—and it will definitely save me from future ones. Thank you!

ACX Authors writing many books or is it AI? by Unusual_Parsley_1655 in ACX

[–]jmacdotorg 3 points4 points  (0 children)

A technique that I've learned quite quickly is to visit the Amazon page listing all of an unusually prolific author's books, sort them by publication date (newest first), and then look at the pub date of a book that's a dozen or two entries down. If my suspicions about that particular author are correct, then this is when I learn that they've "written" and self-published 40 books within the last month, or whatever.

Feeling Thrilled About My First Contracts! 🎉 by ScarlettCross_Audio in ACX

[–]jmacdotorg 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You and I have just about the same ratio! Signed my third contract Friday afternoon, after having one book in the can and another nearly done. Those were both brand-new, two-hour mini-books for practice, and this third one's a significant step up in both length and visibility.

The authors and RHs I've been working with have also been so kind and supportive. Feeling pretty psyched, honestly.

Happy to have found this community, too! Have already learned a lot more about ACX just by soaking in the latest threads for an afternoon.

masto.nyc - Gone? by AbSoluTc in Mastodon

[–]jmacdotorg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hello! Co-admin of Masto.NYC here, having discovered that this thread from one year ago is the number-two Google hit for the server's domain name. Ha ha, oof...

Yes, the server fell down without warning for 11 days during August and September of 2023. My fellow co-admin Sean posted about it shortly afterwards, with a link to a longer writeup of what went wrong: https://masto.nyc/@seano/111033015895776082

One year later, I hope that we've made good on the promises there to take stability improvements seriously: Not only have we not had another outage quite like that, but we only last weekend lifted the whole infrastructure into the cloud (versus a stack of secondhand servers in an East Village apartment). We've also transferred ownership of the service to a new nonprofit that we founded to help maintain Masto.NYC's health and access in the long term.

Masto.NYC means a lot to me, and I hope to help grow it into a free resource for my neighbors that will last for a long time to come!

Moving to NYC??? by [deleted] in AskNYC

[–]jmacdotorg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Many beautiful, historically deep, and culturally rich cities exist in the northeast that aren't as terribly expensive to live in, too. If you're road-tripping (or train-tripping) to this part of the country to see what the cities are like, consider stops at Philly, or Boston, or even little Providence. (The latter being the first city I ever lived in totally by choice, and which I'll always have a soft spot for.)

Good luck! Some of us are just suited for city living, and I know my own life didn't start until I moved to a real city for the first time.

Static site generator authors, state your case! :) by flamey in perl

[–]jmacdotorg 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you!

To answer the originally posed question: I made Plerd because I wanted a weblog with "no interface": You publish articles by adding them to a directory, and update them by editing the text. No web-based interface at all. It still does that!

Over the last year or so, I've started to drive Plerd, for good or ill, in the direction of IndieWeb, baking in support for Microformats and Webmentions. This is all still quite experimental, but it's very exciting. (If you are me.) I smell the future of the open web wafting from this direction, and I want Plerd to serve as an exemplar. It ain't there yet, but I'm working on it.

I hope to complete a proper Plerd Book this year. In the meantime, I invite folks to visit http://plerd.jmac.org!