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.
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.
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.
Back when I was in 5th and 6th grade, I used to sell pens, pencils, erasers, pencil sharpeners, compass and many other items. It started mainly from me realizing that many people over there nonstop kept asking for spare pens, pencils etc. every day. Some even asked multiple times a day but it was less common. Hell, many didn’t even return stuff I lend them. And I realized I was kinda being used. So, I created a new policy. If you want pens, pencils etc. from me, BUY IT! And at some point, I also realized that some products were a bit cheaper than the shops around my school (yeah, my school was a bit far from my home and I used to travel by bus). So I started buying the cheaper pens and selling them at a higher price at my school (basically at the same price as any other shop near my school).
Hell, I even sold chewing gum one day (which I got as a gift once) and made some money.
One thing I have learnt in life is that if people are in an emergency and they need a certain product extremely in the situation, and you’re the only source at the moment they can get the product from, they will tryna get it even you overcharge them. I did overcharge some people who I had beef with 😹😹
In middle school I rode my bike to school and stopped by a convenience store most days and bought two packs of gum. At school I sold pieces for 10 cents each and selling one pack paid for both, supporting my habit. It wasn’t big money but I felt like a genius.
I would have done the same but packs of gum like that unfortunately are pretty expensive in my country. Since the pack of gums aren’t produced by any of the companies in my country and all available are from abroad lol. + When I sold that stuff, they really got popular in the class, and people were rushing to buy. Hence, many people knew about it and unfortunately on the same day, the principal came to visit the class and he saw some kids in my class chewing the gum during class-time 🤦 They did me dirty by telling the principal that I was selling gum and I also sold it to them 😭 Fortunately, I didn’t get punished in any way. He just left with disappointment and had told me that selling gums isn’t allowed at school.
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.
Had the only printer in my dorm room of about 70 rooms and charged just slightly less than the university did per page so naturally people printed with my printer. Made some scripts that hooked into google cloud print to log users and had spreadsheet to track funds for users and send emails about what was printed and how much funds they had left. I made mony only because people forgot they had extra funds when they moved out and never asked to get it back. Its not a lot but stil strange to me why I put so much effort into a very low profit business.
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$ 😎
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
can you explain this to me ?
Spoon Theory is a metaphor for describing certain limiting effects of a disability to those unfamiliar. It comes from this original post by writer Christine Miserandino which explains the basic idea. Here’s its Wikipedia article.
Cheers
It’s called Spoon Theory
If you ever played a Zelda game, its how many “hearts” you have before you “faint”. It’s a metaphor about how much energy a person has, that can be usefully descriptive when discussing one’s experiences with managing a chronic illness
Wanna shower? That’ll cost ya a spoon. Maybe you’ve got eight of them, so how do you choose to use them? If you run out, you won’t be able to cook yourself dinner, and there’s no amount of “will power” that will help you
Use some medication to help you “push-through” because you’re hungry? That’ll cost ya a spoon on credit (when you wake up)
When it comes to disability — if you over-exert, it can cost you your entire next day while you rest and “restore hearts”. So you have to learn how to manage your energy more conscientiously than you would if you didn’t have “that disability”
The theory can help, not only to teach yourself how to manage your energy for everyday tasks, but also how to discuss the hurdles that your situation presents
In my own experience — it can be especially helpful in discussing how an “invisible illness” affects you… with family, friends, and sometimes acquaintances. And I find that to be kind, because it’s easily digestible for the person who hasn’t had those extremes of experiences
Regardless of my struggles, I’m very grateful for the amount of spoons I’ve been given
Stacking firewood, the summer I was 13 years old. The guy said he’d pay me five bucks a cord, meaning that for every 8 foot section I stacked to four foot high, I got paid five dollars.
Had to bike about seven klicks down a back road every day, to get to a metal warehouse with a yard out back. They kept a log splitter and a conveyor belt set at an angle back there. Strange place, with an old cargo van converted into a flat bed rusting in the tall grass to the side. Their dog didn’t like me.
Hard, hot, heavy work. Firewood sections still slippery and dense from sapweight, and a pile that was liable to collapse if and when you pulled at the wrong piece. I was slow to start and did not improve over time. I believe I averaged about four or five cord a day, which is not bad for a thirteen year old if you ask me.
After a few days of stacking, I had a few rows finished and the pile was getting low. They started running the splitter and belt again, while I was picking firewood from the pile. Once they started that, I couldn’t keep up. This was partially due to the fact that I now had to approach the pile with one eye on the conveyor belt, to time things so that I didn’t get hit with falling pieces. They brought in some other guy one day, who lasted a few hours before getting hit in the hand by a falling piece of wood. I didn’t see him again.
First time I went to ask for my pay, the man counted out 25 five dollar bills and handed them over. He wasn’t lying - it was genuinely five bucks a cord. I was baffled at the time as to why the man would have that many low denomination bills - I learned much later on that he was basically laundering money from illicit sources through this operation, which explained a lot.
I stayed there for about a month and a half, ending my summer with about 500 dollars - enough to buy myself a snowboard with some help from my parents. Strange times.
The Timber Launderer
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…
I’m an artist. I was once commissioned to punt myself around a library on a ladder on wheels, while in drag while singing the One Pound Fish Very Very Nice song operatically.
If people looked game I hit them with my punting rod.
Cleaning the underside of rich people’s boats. I didn’t have access to actual scuba gear so I would snorkel around disgusting harbors, holding my breath and scraping/scrubbing barnacles off by hand.
Wasn’t bad money, but it was gross. People weren’t supposed to release their sewage in the harbor. But they did. Thankfully only did that a couple times before finding much better work.
This makes me wonder what people who live in permanently docked house boats do/are supposed to do with their sewage
Supposed to pay for someone to come around and pump it out. But this was the Caribbean, you don’t get in any trouble as long as you can afford the bribe.
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?
Having my pets pose for chewy pics
