All the games I’ve 100% completed.

I guess technically I was paid a small amount for some of those on PS5, back when they still were doing the Playstation Stars program. Trophies earned points and those points could be used to buy games or giftcards. Half my PS5 library came from just 100℅ completing the other half I paid for.

Also: All the ideas I never do anything with. Just pay me to have the idea 😩

Pretty much all of my open source. It’s not literally zero, but over the whole time I made as much from open source as I make in two hours in my regular job.

So yeah, two hours paid out of over a decade of open source is basically $0.

I don’t make any ground breaking stuff, so I don’t expect to live off of it, still would be nice to buy a lunch once a month from stuff thousands of developers use.

I grow algae for carbon capture, because exetential crisis. This year I got the process down and pulled 4 lbs atmospheric CO2 into 1lb solid carbon. Can’t grow much in the winter but will restart in the spring.

Have a YouTube but their algorithm hates eco projects that aren’t scams or whackadoodle science.

I’ve been writing free D&D homebrew for over 10 years. I occasionally use it in my own games and some other people in the community do use it, but it’s rare and generally thankless. If anyone wants to poke a look, here’s two examples:

• Witch class (5e24)
• Koradi (plantfolk) race (5e14 & 5e24)

Warhammer 40K.

Factorio

Lemmying. Lord I wish I got a pound per meme

my twitch channel

I have a podcast called Almost Plausible that I make with a couple of friends. We take an ordinary object (like a pillow, or a zipper, or a ceiling fan) and we create a movie plot based on that object.

We’ve been doing the show for nearly 4 years now. It’s fun to make, but it takes up a fair amount of my time. For me, a “reward” would just be more listeners. That would feel very validating.

Constructed Languages. Not for nothing did JRR Tolkien call it a secret vice. It’s such a lonely hobby. You can enjoy the work of a chef or an artist or a musician even if you yourself aren’t a chef or an artist or a musician, but nobody’s going to complement the elegance of your conlang’s noun inflection system.

It’s bitterly ironic that the whole point of a language is to communicate, but the vast majority of conlangs will never be uttered by anyone other than their creators, and rather badly even then.

I don’t want to get paid for my hobbies because they wouldn’t be hobbies anymore, but it would be nice to get more than just a smile and nod from people outside the hobby now and then.

Since it seems people are sharing the fruits of their labor as well, here’s my most complete conlang: https://www.frathwiki.com/Commonthroat

Parenting

I made a Halloween mask this year from start to finish. The entire process took 2 months of work but it paid off in a way that if i can get faster at it i might try to sell something one day at a convention 😁👍

Next step in the process is learning about Vacuum Forming! Then we’ll really be in business.

Mask in question:

I used to make a lot of Garry’s Mod animations. One such one…

https://youtu.be/72f-vNEfLpY

Never did sign my channel up for monetization - I didn’t like the patterns YouTube pushed you into and each animation usually took me many months. You can kind of see on my channel I tended to get distracted by whatever was a current trend. I’m trying one more that took me the better part of this year.

A lot of people remark that “I must really enjoy animating” - I do enjoy the result, but it’s a lot of work and takes willpower to push myself into another 3-hour session of laborious posing to get a scene in my mind on the screen just right. I also really hope for the animations to garner attention, even if just to make someone’s day better.

I’ve spent some 5 hours just today documenting and writing instructions on some IT tools for my collective. One person said its cool though, so not bad.

Open source software. Sigh.