Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

7mo ago

What is something creative that you do but don't get paid for?

64 comments

I play music at home, sometimes recording it. I have zero interest in monetizing it. The most I’d like to do is collaborate and make music with others.
I also ran a YouTube channel for a few years. Made about twenty cents from that.
- Apart from the YouTube stuff, I'm similar. Writing, arranging, recording, mixing, etc. Simply because I enjoy it.
  It's been a while, though. First came kids and other life-related things to take up most of my time. Plus I migrated to linux fully (as opposed to dual booting) in 2014 or thereabouts. But I recently found a DAW that I like, which also works great on linux, so as soon as I find a decent drum and piano synth I'm back in (not doing) business.
  
  Does your DAW not have those built in or are you after hardware?

I used to write Wikipedia articles and blog posts about music if that counts.

Creating memes...

I cook for the family. It's not the cooking that's creativity for me, most of the time, it's the menu planning that is the hardest to think through.
- Omg! I complain about this all the time! Deciding what to make is by fast the hardest part!

Occasionally make movie posters for YouTube videos I download, primarily using low-tech means like cropping, layering, etc.
Mainly because I don't know how to do the more advanced stuff, but I find it kind of fun though to try to do similar levels of quality with lower-tech tools. Kind of like coding challenges but with Paint.NET. Lol. (BTW, that's not a link. Lol.)
- Did you watch that short movie that someone here made a few months ago? It was about a doc who dresses up for Halloween. It was really good and making a poster for it would be cool.
  
  I actually didn't! Do you have the link for it?

I crochet little animals for friends and family.
Unasked, most of the time :)

I do calligraphy!
- This is visually beautiful but makes me long for a few days ago when the weekend was ahead of me.

DM/GM from time to time.
- Do you have a game of choice? I've just finished running a Dresden files accelerated game which was a lot of fun.
  
  D&D and Pathfinder are the main ones, and Genesys sometimes when I can convince my players to give it a try. Currently trying to maybe get something going with Cyberpunk Red.

Decorating my house
Making small games
Writing poetry
Cooking
I do other creative things, but I've been paid for most of them at one point or another.
- I'm so bad at decorating!! I've lived in my house for 20 years and it's mostly a collection of "i guess i don't hate that." I actually hired someone once to help me choose paint colors. Ended up with three different shades of tan.

Knit, crochet, cannabis edibles.
- People want to pay me for my knitting. Too bad for them that the amount they want to pay me is laughable and also there’s no way in hell I’d take the time to knit someone I barely know a sweater.
  
  People have offered to pay me for stuff but i feel i can't produce the quality that it would require. Like someone else here shared, i mostly make and give things that people don't ask for- baby sweaters, blankets, scarves, shawls, dog sweaters. I keep a stash of hats and scarves in my car to give away to people on the corners in the winter. I'm a good starter but a terrible finisher. I mostly see a cool pattern, struggle to figure it out, and then when i get the hang of it I wander away and find another cool pattern.

I try to make electronic music, mostly with a laptop but I also have some equipment. It's really just to scratch my engineering itch.
Photography. I mostly use my phone but I have a proper camera which is for my very specific use case.
I've been doing both of these most of my life, my father gave me my first camera around 10yo and I got into electronic music at about the same age.
My son is using my old camera a lot now, and he's making music on his PC. Which is very pleasing to me.
- My brother is really into making electronic music too. Last Christmas, he said he really wanted a Stylophone. I got him one, but first had him open a gag gift that was a child's toy Xylophone and was like "I heard you really wanted one of these"

Make skirts!
- Cool. Want to share a pic?

Music. I've played guitar for 30 years, can play drums, bass, piano, etc... never earned a dime. Played shows but I'm still in the hole as far as acquired shit.
- I thought I didn’t have much to tell, but turns out, I could have said the same. I did earn a tiny bit at one point when playing local venues and recording demos for local bands back then, but it was basically just gas money for the band most of the time lol

Tabletop roleplaying
- Sigh, I wish I could get paid for it. I absolutely love building a compelling story, but I'm far too nervous with strangers.

Build stuff for burning man

Admining a Lemmy instance isn’t especially creative but at least I don’t get paid for it.

Make Gameboy games. Make music. Cook
- Do you make Gameboy music though? I used to really be into LSDJ. I know nothing about programming actual games though
  
  I made a track for my game, yeah, but using UGEtracker which is built into GB Studio. It's not the easiest to use tbh so it wasn't that fun.
  LSDJ sounds very cool, have you checked out the DirtyWave M8? I ran the cheap version (Anbernic console with a dongle) but I couldn't get over the learning curve. Now I have a Polyend Tracker Mini which I really like
  BTW I'm not really a programmer either, GB Studio simplifies things a lot and it's free if you want to check it out

Cook, bake, crochet, cross-stitch, oil paint, watercolor, party planning etc I hoard hobbies but don't do any of them professionally since I already have a job. They are all hobbies I enjoy

I populate Google Maps. Fill in business names, opening hours, take photos etc. At the start, I was vociferous about it, putting thousands of photos on there. These days, just about everything is there and I only correct stuff and add/remove businesses as they come and go. Oh, and food/menu photos.
Some of my photos have tens of millions of views. Which means people have to see them many times I think. Otherwise every single Australian would have seen the most popular ones, which doesn't make sense.
I'm used to Google just trusting me and immediately doing what I say. But I really had to convince them that Toys R Us really were closing down. That one took three attempts. The more prominent a place, the higher the rank you need to do major edits to it.
- Would you consider contributing to OpenStreetMap?
- I did the same of you. I reached a high level as a google guide, was invited to google map meetings and everything.
  And then I suddenly realized all my efforts were just helping this company get bigger and achieve more monopoly. The terms of use of google maps state that everything you add becomes property of google.
  And then I Found OpenStreetMap.org a lovely community in which you really are building a community effort in which there is no company monopolizing and all data is open. Sadly, you can't import all the work you've done on google maps, because now it is copyright protected by Google. So we have to start again, but it is worth it.
  OSM is the future if we are to hope for a fair future in online maps.
  
  I've contributed plenty to OSM, but not so much as a creative thing. I rarely upload photos to it. The question was about creative things we do.
  While I agree my contributions help Google, I don't do it for them. I do it for the community. And frankly, they're mostly using Google maps.
- Please, discover OpenStreetMap.org and stop being an unpaid Google employee, and make your work truly public and free.

I bake for my families and friends, and i sometime do wood working too.

One might say photo art. Am registered with every group on the net.

On Sunday mornings I fix bicycles at the local community center for free, we just charge the price of materials.
For me is like Zen meditation, it makes my mind focus on one simple task in these crazy times where our attention span is all over the place. And it's good for our community since most of the people that come there are broke college students, families having a hard time and in general people who want to spend time together. Our group is always growing, I'm expecially proud of two kids, children of immigrants, who came to learn from us two years ago and now managed to save enough money to open their own bike repair shop.

I make instrumental music. I write, record, produce, and upload everything myself; but barely earn anything from it. 50k+ streams and I think I've only earned $170 so far.

I paint. I sold through a gallery for awhile but it just wasn't worth it when I could make ten times more for far less work doing my original job, so now it's back to just for fun. Also I hate painting portraits of rich people but if you don't do that it's really hard to make money. I also hated the mandatory social media removed. Engaging in that ecosystem disgusts me.

I enjoy photgraphy, mostly buildings and infrastructure, I have a gallery on a personal webhost, and never really share the link to it except to friends and family, but I have tyeblink to it on my CV.

Performance art is a passion project. There's absolutely no money in it. I'm lucky to get $100 a gig. I also absolutely HATE that I have to use Instagram while constantly facing an uphill battle of PG-13 censors.
What I do get is a shit ton of really cool photos, skills, and props, as well as a loving community

I create Starfield graphic novels.

I'm a huge fan of the game, and there is this podcast called "Starfield with Normal People", which has a Discord server, and they organise a weekly "Starfield Adventure Club". Every week, one planet is selected, and we all go there and take screenshots and create a story.
People are very creative, some publish a captains log, for my part, I ended up creating a graphic novel.
For my part, it's a mix of pure screenshots using the photo mode, some generative AI for the covers, and plain old montage using Figma.

I'm having a lot of fun and I'm not tired of it yet, I've been doing this since February. I discovered I had a talent for storytelling and... Air scripting I guess?
2023 has been a monstrosity of a year in all aspects of my life. This comic is self-care for me.

If you want to read a few episodes, you can find them on my Facebook page, as well as on my DeviantArt page.
Enjoy!

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