#Crowdfunding options

[mtbcleadgenbuzz]

Scaling Your Small Business: Effective Strategies For Success

Scaling Your Small Business: Effective Strategies For Success As a small business growth consultant, I have witnessed the struggles and successes of many entrepreneurs looking to scale their businesses. Scaling a small business can be an exciting and challenging journey that requires strategic planning, effective implementation, and continuous adaptation. In today’s competitive market, it is…

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#Adjusting plans #Angel investors #Assessing readiness #Automating processes #Brand voice #building trust #Cloud computing solutions #Collaborative partnerships #Continuous improvement mindset #Crowdfunding options #Customer retention #effective communication #Identifying growth opportunities #implementation of employee training; employee satisfaction #Importance #Marketing strategies #Measuring progress #Outsourcing options #Outsourcing tasks #personalized experiences #Prioritizing time #productivity #visual branding

[identityquest]

I've been working on this coloring book for months!! And I finally have a finished draft (yea its backwards no bullying). Hopefully within the year I'll have enough illustrations done to have a professionally-printed perfect bound version done.

#strato.txt #digital art #i may make a crowdfunding thing for em later in the year just so i can get a good number for an order #or maybe ill set up a preorder option in my shop. that i havent linked yet LMAO

[s0fter-sin]

Thinking you shouldn't have to pay for Watcher content is you being entitled, actually.

did i ever say i shouldn’t have to pay for it? no, i said it’s disappointing that i would now have to after years of it being free. it would be easier to take if they were completely changing and upgrading their shows or established that the stream wouldn’t just have their current shows and maybe discontinued ones, that it would be different from their youtube channel and worth the sudden charge, but it’s hard not to feel like they’re throwing their audience under the bus

#from what weve seen the shows will still have the same number of episodes so we arent even getting more of the same content #just nebulous ‘better’ content which could mean anything and also nothing when the shows have gradually started to feel overproduced #it is my and anyone elses right to be disappointed by this #and its a personal choice #if you think its worth the money or if youre in a place where you can afford another service then thats wonderful and i hope you enjoy it #but that doesnt make it any less tone deaf to say we as a company need more money when people cant afford to eat #plenty of creators have successfully crowdfunded their own shows without putting all of it behind a paywall #critical role immediately comes to mind #they have literal thousands of hours of content for free and when it came time to ask for money people showed up for them #the answer didnt have to be put everything on a streaming service when there were plenty of other options #its also just a bad business decision but i dont have the expertise to talk about that #tldr people are allowed to feel however they want about this #also acting like its somehow more ‘authentic’ to get money from your audience #instead of advertisers and sponsors who can actually afford it is sus as hell im just saying #mailbox #coming out of my cage and ive been doing just fine.txt #watcher #shane madej #ryan bergara #steven lim

[amber-angel]

Idk man maybe it makes sense to move to a separate site to get out from under the thumb of youtube and advertisers but I think what's upsetting people is that it feels like so many people are doing this, and they're all asking for 5 or 6 dollars a month, which adds up quick. And like other people have said, dropout has a shit ton of content, plus a bunch of new stuff every week. Watcher doesn't have that same output, but they're asking for more money?

#i honestly don't think this is about making art either #maybe we'll be proven wrong when they post some earth shattering video on their new paywalled site #but i wouldnt count on it #i know people are mostly pissed that something they got for free is now being paywalled #and idk #i just look at something like starkid #where they release full length musicals for free and rely entirely on patreon and crowdfunding #but still get to make the art that they want to #and i wonder if that wasn't a viable option #watcher

[phoenix-before-the-flame]

He's finally had enough

#fairy tail #fairy tail fanart #gajeel redfox #fairy tail gajeel #ft gajeel #my art #digital drawing #digital art #phoenix draws #its either do the crowdfunding or start beatin the shit out of everyone and this seemed the safer option

[prism-stone-planet]

*SPONGEBOB VOICE* THERE I AM GARY

#kiratto prichan #prichan #kiratto pri☆chan #from the credits of part two of the PriChan virtual musical btw #you got your name if the credits if you bought one of the options in the crowdfunder

[sundial-bee-scribbles]

they forgot to leave him some snacks

#my video lol #talkloid #vocaloid #blood tw #oliver vocaloid #flower vocaloid #fukase vocaloid #piko utatane #rin and len kagamine #yeah ill just leave the tags at that. i doubt anyone other than me and 1 friend will find this funny hakjdskjgnkg #christ wtf this was stuck uploading in the new post editor for like years but it loaded instantly in the legacy editor. grahgh #new tumblr's features are so annoying sometimes it was good why'd ya fuck it up... bruh #that being said though ive heard abt the new poll thing and PLEASE!!!! UGLY CRIES PLEASEEE I NEED THE POLLS. #ONLY REASON ID USE THE NEW POST EDITOR. POLLS. PLEASEEEE i am awaiting patiently until theyre an option for everyone #as one fellow user put it: '[i need] to crowdfund my bad decisions'

[impriindia]

Why Crowd-funding Through UPI Is The Best Option For Congress Fundraising On 138-Year Anniversary - IMPRI Impact And Policy Research Institute

TK Arun Funding politics directly by the public, with every paisa automatically accounted for, would do a lot to clean up politics itself, and to make parties accountable to the people. Introduction The Congress party has launched a crowdfunding drive to seek money directly from the people, as it finds most institutional political funding, disbursed by industrial houses via electoral bonds, going…

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#138Year #Anniversary #Congress #Crowdfunding #Fundraising #impact #impri #Institute #Option #policy #research #UPI

[khizuo]

just realized: since I need to take classes at my local community college anyways (for academic suspension reasons) I could maybe try to get housing there. pros to this would be that it would streamline the issue of needing to go to take community college classes to return to my 4-year institution, which would be really helpful. it also means that i could probably get my parents to pay for it ("live on their money" a little more, lol). the cons would be that 1) it's probably not the most COVID-safe option (though neither my 4-year institution nor my parents' house are all that COVID-safe either) and 2) i wouldn't be able to move out until fall and this option would keep me a lot closer to my parents than I would like

#my text #but it's a good option! #would probably not have to crowdfund a lot

[devinwolfi]

new motw supplement... means i am wanting 2 play

#SPIEE group dont look at this we wont talk about my horrendous failings #its been a long time since then. but also i have most certainly not improved #also its the last like day or so of the crowdfunding so get it while you can if you want it #i think the lowest tier which is just a pdf and printables is $20 #but they have hardcover and bundle options too #i did only buy it bc the trove is dead and i wont be able to snatch it otherwise

[finnlongman]

I feel like I should emphasise that I'm only writing the second draft of the vampire novel at the moment and it hasn't been on sub or sold to anyone yet, so its (traditional) publication is not guaranteed.* But also I'm enjoying all your enthusiasm so much, I want to believe in a world where you'll get to hold this book in your hands.

* This is the kind of project where, if trad pub doesn't work out, it would probably be viable in the self publishing sphere, so one way or another you'll get to read it one day, I hope...

#gay chaos and vampires #i am pursuing trad pub first because it is easier for me #as i would have to crowdfund to be able to afford to self pub effectively #also my agent would prefer me to go trad because she doesn't get paid otherwise lol #as well as the fact that she loves this book #but since romance can do well in self pub and this book clearly has an audience #i am definitely keeping my options open on that front

[pagesofkenna]

I've been working on a letter-writing role-playing game (my first fully self-designed TTRPG!) for... a lot of 2022, and I wanted to release it digitally before the end of the year but trying to finalize edits while having family visit the last couple weeks of the year, it got to be too much and I decided not to stress over it

plus, the indie TTRPG scene has been doing Zine Month in February for the last few years (an unaffiliated take on Kickstarter's ZIneQuest project), where people design and try to fund zine-sized TTRPGs (or TTRPG-adjecent projects). since an extra months sounds like plenty of time to finalize my edits, I've decided to release my game then (probably February 1st, for maximum hype)

however... I don't want to do another Kickstarter. I did ZineQuest twice and it's kinda fun but mostly a hassle, especially since my game's basically already done and I'd rather get it into peoples hands sooner

but i also really like the idea of doing hand-made zines to sell physical copies of, for the handful of people who might want them??

so, my point is, I think what I've decided currently is that I won't try to do a funding campaign for physical copies, and instead I'll release a physical edition of my game on my Etsy store the same time I release the digital edition on my Itch.io

So look forward to seeing my hyping up Quest Correspondent next month!!

#itch.io also lets you do fundraising but its just regular 'selling your product' with a tracker #so like the goal is mostly optional #i think i'll do that just to get in on the crowdfunding spirit

[prokopetz]

Crowdfunded metroidvania with a "put your OC in the game" support tier, but in order to avoid the "gameworld populated exclusively by tonally inappropriate weirdos who constantly talk about how their quest is so much more important than yours" syndrome that's afflicted similar projects in the past, what you're actually buying is for your OC to be one of the corpses the player character loots an upgrade from. Available options include "embedded head-first in the ground at the base of a tall cliff with only your legs sticking out", "pinned to a wall by several enormous spikes directly across from an obvious spike-launching trap", and "pile of bleached bones with inexplicably mostly-intact clothing at the bottom of a giant pool of acid".

#concepts #gaming #video games #metroidvanias #crowdfunding #game design #character design #ocs #violence mention #death mention

[edandstede]

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/quills-top-surgery

it’s my 28th birthday in march and i’m crowdfunding for my top surgery! going private is the only option thanks to 4-5 year waiting lists for NHS consultations in the UK, and i haven’t even been referred to a GIC as of now. of course i’ll be putting my own funds towards the costs but at an average cost of £5,000-£8,000 it would take me years to save - a position myself and many other trans people are in, which breaks my heart. i wish trans healthcare was better than this.

i am so unhappy as i am. i want to get married in a few years in a body that feels like my own. i want to be happy with how my clothes fit. i want to not wear a binder every day, especially as a chronic asthmatic. i want to not feel depressed and uncomfortable and sick to my stomach about my chest. i just want to live, instead of feeling like my life is stuck on hold. i want to go into my 30s as a new man.

i’ll keep my justgiving page and my tumblr updated as i go forwards with consultations, finding a surgeon, gender dysphoria referrals and all that jazz! i currently have an appointment to get my dysphoria diagnosis and we'll go from there!

if you can’t donate, i appreciate you regardless, and just sharing this will help enormously. thank you so very much! ⭐️❤️✨

#transgender #top surgery #quill to paper #personal

[gb-patch]

Our Life: Now & Forever Kickstarter Is Live! + Trailer & Demo Expansion

The crowdfunding campaign is live🎉‼️

Grow from childhood to adulthood with your two closest neighbors in this near-fully customizable visual novel. It's autumnal, it's nostalgic, it's a good time all around.

🍂 Our Life: Now & Forever Kickstarter Page 🍂

Plus, the trailer has been revealed and the game's demo has been massively expanded. Everything is wonderful now.

Create the protagonist of your story: Pick a first name, last name, honorifics, and have a nickname, too. Use any pronouns you prefer, including using multiple types and implementing your own set. Design your appearance using a dress-up doll, from skin tone, to hair, to clothes and accessories.

Take it Step by Step: Experience four distinct periods of time: childhood, teen-aged, young adulthood, and grown.

Live as you please: Express your personality and preferences through hundreds of choices. You can always change as the years go by, whether that means discovering a new passion, shifting your disposition, or transitioning to different pronouns.

Find friendship, family, and romance: Get to know your own mom, your peers, their parents, teachers, and other acquaintances. There’s a whole community in Golden Grove, and it’s up to you to choose your place in it.

Develop relationships that are truly yours: Use your own judgement to set how quickly bonds develop. Grow closer or farther apart as years go by. Focus on only one of the leads or be fond of both, including the option for a polyamorous relationship. You can express your attachment in whatever way is natural to you.

Enjoy a world to return to: Our Life features a welcoming, sentimental story that can easily be played over and over using new qualities for yourself or different relationship types with those around you.

Read your way: Utilize customizable lettering size and font type, two different textbox arrangements to choose from, and a self-voicing option built into the engine.

You can try the beginning of Our Life: Now & Forever from the Steam or Itch.io coming soon pages. It was expanded with new features and additional scenes on October 10th!

🍄 Steam Page 🍄

🌰 Itch.io Page 🌰

So, that's our game. I appreciate everyone who supports us on Kickstarter, gives the demo a try, wishlists it on Steam, saves it on Itch, shares this post, or gives our project attention in any other way. And even before this began, we've gotten more encouragement than I ever would have thought. Thank you so much for checking it out!

#our life #visual novel #dating sim #interactive fiction #our life: now & forever #qiu lin #tamarack baumann #gb patch games #gb patch

[diedicontroversial]

[discourse] in defiance of the author’s wishes (re: mxtx fandom)

table of contents : context  : moral arguments : addressing the legal side of things  : closing remarks

Context

on March 17, 2018, mxtx posted:

“As long as you don't split or reverse the top/bottom positions of the main couple, I won't mind what you ship. I myself have a lot of fun shipping couples in mainstream shows, and isn't reading all about finding joy? You can imagine freely or ship whoever you like, just don't break up or reverse the top/bottom positions of the main couple.”

(I realise that the 不拆不逆 “no splitting or reversing” rule might be implicit within the entire Chinese danmei fandom, so i do not wish to single mxtx out. for example, i know that Chinese 2ha fans also go around policing people who ship, say, chu wanning with shi mei — so this isn’t just a mxtx thing. although i do not know if other danmei authors have explicitly stated “no splitting or reversing” since i have not been a part of other danmei fandoms.)

Nevertheless, “no splitting or reversing” became the constitution in Chinese mxtx fandom. Fans parade around with the slogan “拆逆死“ which means “kill yourself if you split or reverse”. Since the pronunciation of 拆逆死 (chai-ni-si) sounds like “chinese”, some fans on the Chinese internet have been putting “chinese” in their bios to mean “kill yourself if you split or reverse”.

From now on I will be referring to split/reverse ships as cult ships, as Chinese fans like to call them.

There are two main consequences of the “no splitting or reversing” rule (on the Chinese internet):

You will receive permanent bans with no option for appeal if you post cult ship fanworks in the novel communities on Weibo

It is implicitly agreed upon that you are not allowed to use individual character tags, the novel tag, or the author tag when posting cult ship content on any platform. So, for example, if you write Wei Wuxian x Jiang Cheng, you are not allowed to use #weiwuxian #jiangcheng #mdzs #mxtx. The name given to this conduct of tagging only your cult ship is 圈地自萌, which means “enclose a piece of land and amuse oneself within it”. You are not allowed to step out of your land. 

However, not everyone agrees with the practice of “don’t step out of your land” — this includes people from both sides of the debate. Some official shippers believe that cult shippers should not have any land to begin with, and purposefully leave the cult ship tag unblocked so they can police cult shippers at every opportunity. Some cult shippers believe that because their ship involves the individual characters, originate from the novel written by the author, they are in the right to use the individual character tags, the novel tag, and the author tag, and that people who dislike their ship should just use the block function. 

-

Moral Arguments

There are two main types of moral arguments that Chinese official shippers make.

1. If you split the official ship, you condone cheating behaviour and that makes you a bad person.

The first argument is too trivial so I will leave the refutation as an exercise for the reader to do at home /j

2. You are not respecting the author's wishes and that makes you a bad person.

The author has wished many different things. For example:

Screenshot 1 translation: I strictly forbid any crowdfunding or fundraising related to me, my works, or my characters, regardless of the purpose, whether it be for celebration, group buying, rankings, charity, or any other named activities.

Screenshot 2 translation: Once again, I emphasize: No new social media pages related to my works are allowed, nor organizing readers in a roundabout way, whether it be for celebrations, group buying, rankings, charity, or any other named activities. Please also refrain from flamboyantly organizing any collective birthday events.

Screenshot 3 translation: I've repeated many things many times and do not wish to repeat myself. Could everyone please just listen to my words occasionally.

(A brief aside before I address the second argument, something I used to say when debating Chinese fans: “I don’t think people who violate the author's wishes mean any disrespect. I don’t think they’re shipping or hosting charity events or birthday parties out of spite, but rather, it just so happens that the author prohibits a ship they enjoy or an event they organise. Just because I cult ship, for example, doesn’t mean I hate the author.” And they would respond: “if you really liked the author, you wouldn’t go against her wishes. You do not deserve to like the author. You are a mxtx anti.” And I would say, “I like my mom a lot, but I won’t listen to everything she says, simply because I don’t think everything she says is right. Plus, I don’t think the world can simply be explained by like vs. dislike. Also, Xie Lian said this: [For instance, if you admire or like someone, you won't always treat them well, no matter what happens.]” But then the most hilarious thing happened, in the revised version, a rebuttal for that scene was added:

【”For instance, if you admire or like someone, it doesn't mean you will always treat them well, regardless of what happens."

"Why not?" San Lang questioned. "If that's not possible, it only shows that this so-called 'liking' isn't anything significant."

Xie Lian shifted the conversation, asking, "Then... does it mean that aside from liking someone, the only other option is to dislike them? Are these the only two attitudes one can choose from?"

San Lang chuckled and retorted, "Why not? Right is right, wrong is wrong. To love is to love, to hate is to hate. Why can't things be clear and straightforward?”】

… ah.)

To address the second argument for real, i believe that producers retain no moral authority over the methods by which consumers engage with their products. for instance, i believe that choosing not to follow the official “twist, lick, and dunk” method when eating oreos does not constitute disrespect towards the oreo brand. Or to use another analogy, suppose a farmer selling apples insist that you peel the apples before eating them. I believe that it does not make you a bad person if you choose to eat the apples unpeeled, despite the farmer being the one who watered and harvested the apples from their trees.

I am thinking of potential counterarguments, and the strongest one I came up with is: “but products like oreos and apples are fundamentally different from intellectual property.” And I think the main issue here is that, to employ economics terminology, the content of novels like tgcf is a non-rivalrous good (not the novels themselves but the abstract content), which means that my consumption of it does not reduce availability to others. In other words, unlike Oreos or apples wherein after I purchase them, the specific items I bought are no longer physically in the hands of the vendor; after encountering characters like Shen Qingqiu, Shen Qingqiu still exists abstractly in MXTX’s head. This gives the illusion of ownership on the author’s part. I want to be very careful here because I think it’s easy to equivocate between different uses of the word “ownership”. I am not arguing that the author fails to retain ownership in negation of all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into the creative process, i.e. their copyright. Instead, I am contending that, just as I paid for my Oreos and apples, upon my purchasing of the Seven Seas version, the paperback Chinese version, and the revised uncensored version of TGCF on JJWXC, the author does not own the ways by which I choose to engage with these fictional entities. Once a work is made public, its ontology becomes independent of the author’s intent, and in all its readers’ heads exist distinct versions of the characters, in effect making them belong to all of us.

(There. As a bonus I have also resolved the issue of not being “chinese” enough. Ah, is this a bad place to make a communism joke?)

Addressing the legal side of things

In 2022 I wrote to the legal team at AO3, and here is their response:

Regarding the “moral rights”, that’s actually a thing. Upon receiving lots of spam from 12-yr-old readers that “you are breaking the law”, I did a quick Baidu search (China’s Google) concerning the legality of splitting/reversing ships. Surprisingly, the search results yield “yes, it’s illegal”, and hence the 12-yr-olds' confidence. But that is akin to getting a cancer diagnosis from searching symptoms on Google. So I dug deeper. 

After reading tens of published papers and court cases, here are the key takeaways of what I found:

Given that intellectual property rights are a bit behind in China, they have largely based their laws on US copyright law. As organizations like OTW continue to fight for the rights of transformative works in the US, China probably will just follow suit.

The semantics of “distort, mutilate, or otherwise harm the integrity of their works in a way that harms the author’s reputation” is very vague and debatable. There are at least three ways to interpret it (I think one of the papers I read offered four). The first is that they only have to prove that you distorted the integrity of the work. The second is that you satisfy the condition of harming the author’s reputation. The third is that you satisfy both conditions (integrity of work and author’s reputation). It depends on the court. 

None of the court cases pertained to unserious, just-for-fun fan works. Usually what happens is someone makes a film out canon, for example, and sell it for profit, or someone publishes their own novel which contains characters from another published work. 

And that is for China only^ if you live outside of China, you are under another country's jurisdiction.

-

Closing remarks

I am addressing this issue because it has impacted me and my friends in many ways. "kill yourself if you split/reverse the official ship" is probably the least of our concerns, mainly because it is such a popular phrase that we've become desensitized to it. @/Eleven receives private messages on Lofter on a weekly basis of people wishing her entire family to get murdered. A hualian main friend of mine has been posted to Weibo for following me; and I had to pull a Shi Qingxuan with "hey let's not be friends anymore if being associated with me is gonna get you cancelled".

mxtx has been through a lot and i understand where she's coming from. and maybe, the people who identify as "kill yourself if you split/reverse the official ship" don't truly mean it -- maybe they're just expressing their love for the official ship.

Recently i've been seeing the sentiments I used to only witness in Chinese fandom surface on Twitter and sometimes I worry that western mxtx fandom is going to turn into Chinese mxtx fandom, with the in-group/out-group mentality -- you're either with us or against us. At the end of the day, I do like mxtx, I admire her tenacity and I think she's a brilliant author, I love her works and the characters in them. I simply do not want to be backed into the corner of "anti" due to not following every order she gives.

祝墨香和她的粉丝们平安。

#mxtx #tgcf #heaven official's blessing #mdzs #grandmaster of demonic cultivation #svsss #scum villian self saving system #scum villain #discourse