#Boxing Day Sale 2023

[trestinafashionjewellery]

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[sabjolelectronics]

It's Boxing Week and you know what that means! Enjoy up to 70% OFF your Favorite Brands and shop for the Best Deals. Boxing Week Deals: https://sabjol.com/product-category/special-offer/ Boxing Week | Boxing Day | Boxing Day 2023 | Gifts for Him | Gifts for Her | Gifts for Kids | Laptop | Printer | Gaming Devices | Gaming Laptop | 3D Printer | XBOX | Monitor | Gaming Monitor | Desktop | Headphone | Headset | Smartphone

[ayeforscotland]

One last anti-capitalist rant of 2023. Asda employees near me have had to sweat their arses off between Boxing Day and New Year to put up Easter Decorations.

Collectively as a society we should have grace periods between festivals/events where we’re not getting shite shoved down our throats.

I honestly think it plays a part in keeping us fucking miserable all year round as we’ve not even had a week since the most expensive holiday of the year and we’re being primed to *get ready* for the next.

Fucking Easter eggs are now on sale. Honest to god, can we pause for five minutes please?

[blueiscoool]

$1 Million Worth of Gold Coins Stolen From 18th-Century Shipwrecks Found

After an extensive investigation, Florida officials recovered dozens of gold coins valued at more than $1 million that were stolen from a shipwreck recovery nine years ago.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission announced in a news release Tuesday it had recovered 37 gold coins that were stolen from the 1715 Fleet shipwrecks.

The fleet of Spanish ships sailed from Havana, Cuba and headed to Seville, Spain on July 24, 1715. The journey was short-lived, as a hurricane wrecked the fleet just seven days later off the coast of Eastern Florida.

The first ship was discovered in 1928 by William Beach north of Fort Pierce, Florida, about 120 miles south of Orlando. Since then, gold and silver artifacts have been recovered offshore for decades following the first discovery.

In 2015, a group of contracted salvage operators found a treasure trove of 101 gold coins from the wrecks near Florida’s Treasure Coast, about 112 miles west of Orlando. However, only half of the coins were reported correctly. The other 50 coins were not disclosed and later stolen.

The years-long investigation by the state’s fish and wildlife conservation commission and FBI “into the theft and illegal trafficking of these priceless historical artifacts” came to a head when new evidence emerged in June, the news release said.

The evidence linked Eric Schmitt to the illegal sale of multiple stolen gold coins in 2023 and 2024, officials said. Schmitt’s family had been contracted to work as salvage operators for the US District Courts’ custodian and salvaging company for the fleet, 1715 Fleet - Queens Jewels, LLC. The Schmitts had uncovered the 101 gold coins in 2015.

During their hunt for the coins, investigators executed multiple search warrants and recovered coins from private residences, safe deposit boxes and auctions, the news release said. Five stolen coins were retrieved from a Florida-based auctioneer, who unknowingly purchased them from Schmitt.

Investigators used advanced digital forensics to nail down Schmitt as a suspect in the case. In most cases, digital forensics can recover data stored electronically on devices such as a cell phone, computer system or memory module.

With the help of advanced digital forensics, investigators identified metadata and geolocation data that linked Schmitt to a photograph of the stolen coins taken at the Schmitt family condominium in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Authorities said Schmitt also took three of the stolen gold coins and put them on the ocean floor in 2016. The coins were later found by the new investors of the fleet’s court custodian and salvaging company.

Throughout the investigation, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission worked closely with historical preservation experts to authenticate and appraise the recovered coins sold by Schmitt.

Schmitt is facing charges for dealing in stolen property, the release says.

The company commissioned to salvage the shipwreck said in a statement it “was shocked and disappointed by this theft and has worked closely with law enforcement and the state of Florida regarding this matter.”

“We take our responsibilities as custodian very seriously and will always seek to enforce the laws governing these wrecks,” the statement read.

Recovered artifacts will be returned to their rightful custodians, the news release said. But the investigation is far from over: 13 coins remain missing.

[louisupdates]

Louis Tomlinson has said it's a 'dream come true' as he prepares to return to a Manchester event for the first time in nine years.

The former One Direction member has been in the city for a number of gigs in recent years as a solo act, including his gig at the AO Arena, on November 11, 2023.

With the first details of Soccer Aid being released on Tuesday March 11), it was announced that Louis is returning to the match eight years after his original appearance in 2016.

Louis' last Soccer Aid apperance, held in Manchester United's Old Trafford stadium, saw him part of an England team that beat the Rest of The World 3-2. One highlight of the event, saw Louis shush his former bandmate Niall Horan from the sidelines after England took the lead.

The 33-year-old will be taking part in the 2025 edition of Soccer Aid, set to be held at Old Trafford, Manchester, on Father's Day, Sunday, June 15.

Speaking about the game, Louis said: "Manchester! It's about ten years since I last turned out for Soccer Aid, so I thought it was about time I returned to the pitch. As everyone knows, I am a massive football fan so playing with some legends of the game is a dream come true.

"Wayne Rooney with Tyson Fury in the manager’s seat – it’s gonna be a good one! It’s all for an amazing cause: UNICEF. Please buy your tickets and support the incredible work they do.”

Louis will be co-managed by the unlikely duo of Tyson Fury and former Man United player Wayne Rooney, who is also coming out of retirement to play.

Wayne said: “I enjoyed the last time I was involved at Soccer Aid so much that when the call came for the 2025 match it was a really easy decision! I’m a big boxing fan, so to do it alongside Tyson Fury is fantastic. It really sums up how brilliant Soccer Aid is. We have this in common: we’ll both be taking it incredibly seriously!

"Obviously it’s great to lace-up the old boots again – and see some old friends – but the cause is the real reason we are doing this. UNICEF needs our help. So, I promise we’ll put on a show for you this June if you buy your tickets to help raise money for UNICEF and for children around the world.”

Tyson Fury added: “Tyson Fury: ENGLAND MANAGER! Who would ever have thought it!? I have had some big fights in my career and the prospect of leading my England team to victory this June fills me with just as much excitement as any heavyweight fight!

"Everyone knows that I am a huge Manchester United fan too, so it’s even more special for me that the game is at Old Trafford this year – and I get to manage one of my heroes, Wayne Rooney! How can we lose!? The work UNICEF does all around the world is so special and so important. I really hope that you can come along and support us this summer.”

Making their Soccer Aid debuts are Manchester streamer Angry Ginge, Joe Hart, Nadia Nadim, Steph Houghton, Toni Duggan and Leonardo Bonucci.

Among the returnees for Soccer Aid 2025, which will air for free on ITV and ITVX, is Harry Redknapp, Vicky McClure, David James, Paddy McGuinness, Gary Neville, Paul Scholes, Jermain Defoe, Jill Scott, Tom Grennan, Sam Thompson and Sir Mo Farah.

Tickets for the game are on sale now via socceraid.org.uk/tickets – adult tickets from £20 and juniors from £10. Tickets include access to a pre-game ‘Fan Zone’ and ‘Player Arrivals Area’

[dotthings]

The denialism and revisionist history going on pushing the fairy tale that Nexstar CW is the only CW era with problems that required calling out, and the invalidation towards any criticism of the pre-Nexstar eras, have gone completely off the rails.

Perpetuating these fairy tales and the erasure of CW Network's long-running history of issues helps enable the broken system people claim they care about denouncing.

The reality of CW Network history: Racism, homophobia, poor set practices, toxic abusive showrunners, systemic failure to support actors especially in marginalized groups, and fan base after fan base used for engagement and then treated badly.

These are systemic industry issues, not confined to any one network. CW became a lightning rod for it because it was unusually concentrated from one platform, so it stuck out and CW earned a terrible reputation, long before the sale.

To combat the revisionist history and denialism, behind the cut is a timeline with a few of the egregoius systemic problems that have plagued the CW historically and reflect severe enabling and lack of oversight on the part of the network.

Nexstar Media era acquired the CW on October 3, 2022.

The harm starts at the very beginning, though. On January 24, 2006, The CW was born. In its founding, The CW destroyed an entire slate of Black-led series on UPN and the resulting network was extremely white.

Candice Patton, in EW, reflecting on the early seasons of The Flash and how she had to speak up and advocate for herself and for Iris West (date of article May 23, 2023, but refers to pre-Nexstar CW) “The scariest thing is speaking up, and I had a hard time talking about it for such a long time because you're so afraid of being seen as problematic," she says. "That's a word that no actor wants to have follow them around. But I think we're learning that speaking up and speaking out is the only way for change. And it's not about blaming people or canceling people, it's about just really being able to have a conversation so that the industry changes for the better. And I hope that whatever struggles I may have had, doing that has made it even the smallest amount easier for the next crop of actors coming up who feel like they need to be heard and seen and accommodated for."

July 8, 2022, EW. Candice Patton reveals how she considered quitting The Flash in S2 due to racist fans and The CW and WB didn’t give her the support she needed, and reflects on how she was treated differently than her co-stars:

"Even with the companies I was working with, The CW and WB, that was their way of handling it. We know better now that it's not okay to treat your talent that way, and to let them go through this abuse and harassment. But for me in 2014, there were no support systems. No one was looking out for that. It was just free range to get abused every single day. There were no social media protocols in place to protect me, so they just let all that stuff sit there….It's just not enough to make me your lead female and say, 'Look at us, we're so progressive, we checked the box.' It's great, but you've put me in the ocean alone around sharks. It's great to be in the ocean, but I can get eaten alive out here…It was more about the protocols in place and the things I see happening for my white counterparts that's not happening to me. Seeing how I was treated differently than other people, seeing how I'm not protected by the network and the studio, those were the things that not necessarily hurt me but frustrated me."

January 28, 2022, Sunstroke Magazine - Looking Back On Kat Graham's Racist and Anti-Semitic Experience on 'The Vampire Diaries’ A summary: * Kat Graham endured racist and antisemitic comments from a co-worker. * The show forced her to wear a wig when she recommended using her natural hair for Bonnie * Ian Somerhalder had to step up to protect Kat, threatening to quit the show if Bonnie was killed off or written out * Showrunners shot down the idea of Bonnie being queer and was patronizing to Bonnie fans * Here’s a compilation of Kat Graham and her character Bonnie being mistreated during the run of TVD:

October 2021, EW and THR - Ruby Rose accuses CW and WBTV of bad set practices and that they were forced to keep filming 10 days after major surgery she had to undergo after being injured doing a stunt and called out bad practices that harmed crew and endangered everyone on set. CW and WBTV denied everything

June 7, 2021, Hypebae, Candice Patton speaking on issues concerning how PoC are treated at CW and systemically in the TV industry

November 22, 2020, Popsugar - The all-black cast of the superhero series Black Lightning have to find out from social media that the show is cancelled and are given no advance warning. China Anne McClain reveals she was going to quit the show even if it had continued: “For different reasons, that, to be honest, I don't want to go into. I just want y'all to trust me on it."

November 9, 2020, Slashfilm - 'Superman & Lois' Writer Nadria Tucker Says She Was Fired After Raising Issues With CW Show's Sexism And Racism

San Diego Comic Con 2017: the cast of Supergirl singing a song to mock a predominantly queer fanbase for the Supercorp ship

March 14, 2016, Variety - “What TV Can Learn From ‘The 100’ Mess” in the wake of The 100 killing off Lexa, an openly queer character.

April 6, 2016, EW - The 100: Ricky Whittle says showrunner 'abused' him off the show May 6, 2015 - Season 10, episode 21 of SPN "Dark Dynasty" airs, killing the show's only recurring openly queer character at that point, Charlie Bradbury.

It’s common knowledge Daman Salvatore is bi in The Vampire Diaries books. The character on the show, one of “classic CW”’s biggest hits, was straightwashed.

2013: Misha Collins at NJ Con comments on how women are treated on SPN:

2024: Misha Collins at Purcon 8 shades the CW for placing representation caps on queer rep at SPN

The fact CW had other queer rep does not preclude the existence of pinkwashing, queer erasure, or queer censorship)

November 2020: in the wake of Castiel's romantic love confession to Dean Winchester and in the immediate aftermath of the end of SPN, the nature of the confession was ommitted in all official promotional material and Misha Collins hinted he was told he couldn't talk about Cas's pov. Eventually, Misha Collins was able to speak openly that the writer intention and the story and everyone who worked on the scene intended it as a romantic love confession and that Cas is queer and in love with Dean.

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Love the shows. Support the shows. Support the creatives who were trying to make things better from within the system.

The megacorporation does not love you.

Stop bootlicking for the megacorporation.

[dat2ndaccount97]

Look back challenge Day 6 (which also doubles as my Day 5): Any you're thinking of getting rid of?

The SDCC 2019 She-Ra and Shadow Weaver Doll set is so far my only buying regret and the only dolls i've ever considered getting rid of.

For backstory, around june 2023 I hit up the Mattel store at their San Bernardino warehouse, with this store being more of a dead stock store. They had a whole pallet filled with these SDCC She-Ra Sets. That same day they were also having a half off sale, so that plus me signing my email up w/ them and getting a discount brought the price down to $20

I got them because I got 2 of the retail release She-Ra's back in 2019 and really liked them despite their Poly hair. I got this set not knowing these 2 also had Poly hair. I didn't find that out until way latter, still having yet opening them and that info causing them to stay in box. Had I known beforehand I wouldn't have gotten them, & they're just sitting in my closet taking space.

[arimiadev]

(you can read this article down below or on my blog!)

How to Sell Visual Novels at Conventions

Or, “how do you table at an anime convention and actually get people to stop by your booth and actually get interested in visual novels????”

Picture this – me, someone who’s never been to California nor flown alone arrived to the Hyatt at the San Francisco Bay, being greeted by several online friends I’d known for years but never met in person. After a great time walking around the surrounding Burlingame area and meeting back up with the rest of our group, we had to actually put in some work for the day.

That is, setting up our booth for the convention starting the next day.

We unpacked box after box, taking turns standing around with our hands on our hips and heads tilted wondering “how the hell are we going to set all of this up?”. I decided to make it my job to set up our keychain display. All I had to do was get a copy of each keychain we had and pin them up – we even had a box from prior conventions that had a single copy of (most) of our keychains, for displaying. But as I opened more boxes, I found more and more keychains…

After threatening to change the password on their Vograce account, I found we had 10+ boxes of merchandise for niche visual novels that we were trying to sell at a vtuber convention. Not an anime convention, not a gaming convention, a vtuber convention! Going to bed that night, already tired, I was sure there was no way we would make a profit…..

…And yet, we made more on Friday than they had for the entire convention in 2023. By Sunday, we had made more than double that, having sold items to over 100 customers with most purchases around $40 each. We weren’t selling fanart, we were selling a majority completely original art.

We lived the dream of a lot of indie developers – we sold physicals of our indie games and people bought them. But how did we do it??

a little context

Some background – OffKai Expo is an annual vtuber-oriented convention in Burlingame, California, a suburb of San Francisco and just 15 minutes away from their airport. If you don’t know what a vtuber is, just go watch my oshi Gavis Bettel. In 2023, Studio Élan had a booth at the convention as it’s somewhat local to some of our members. We decided to have another booth at the convention for 2024 and I offered to work at it (what’s a booth without a marketer?).

The only anime convention I’ve ever been to was the local one in Memphis, namely Anime Blues Con, but those are….lacking, to say the least. Not much to do, very limited artist alley, waning attendance (which was already small to begin with), barely any new artists nor sights year after year… I’ve always wanted to go to a convention outside my area, to say the least.

But how did we manage to make the weekend successful?

conceits

What we did won’t be entirely replicable for most devs reading this, but there will be some insights and takeaways that I’ll highlight that are applicable to anyone wanting to table at conventions and sell their games.

Our table was for Studio Élan x VirPro – it was a joint table between our yuri visual novel studio and our indie vtuber friend streaming group, Virtuality Project. We sold some merch for VirPro, but I’d estimate that was no more than 20% of our sales – we still would have made a profit even if we weren’t selling that merch.

this table held our limited VirPro merch. we were able to hang our Élan prints on the wall behind it thanks to our friends at Studio Nekomata allowing us to tape our prints to the backside of their display. we also had a Miho cutout, but she didn’t want to stand up this weekend…

However, it is important to note that Studio Élan is not a new studio. We’ve been around for years, have 15k followers on Twitter, and have several visual novels released. We’re not extremely well known, as we are within a niche within a niche, but we aren’t unknown either. Some people actually cosplayed our characters at the convention! It’s definitely possible some locals came to OffKai Expo just to see our booth & panel (we also held a panel on Saturday where we announced 2 new games).

Another thing to note is that we have a stock of merch from running an online store and having held Kickstarters before. Specifically, we have physical copies of almost all of our games as well as artbooks, soundtracks, clothing, and more. We had tons of keychains and 11×17 prints, sure, but we also sold a lot of merch that is much harder and more expensive to produce.

So, tl;dr, things we had going for us:

We are established developers with a following & released games

We have a sizeable amount of merch already made for our online store, including physical games & artbooks

We were boothing with our indie vtuber friend group and selling their merch on the side

But our main problem:

We were boothing at a vtuber convention, not an anime or gaming convention

Now, with all of that out of the way….

convention standards

First off, let’s look at some basic things you can expect while tabling at a convention. (for the purposes of being specific to visual novels, when I say “convention” I’m only referring to anime & gaming-adjacent conventions—OffKai falls under this as vtubers are both anime & gaming-adjacent)

At a convention, you will typically be selling in either the artist alley or the dealer’s room, which are both referred to as the vendor’s hall. For small conventions, these two may be the same area. The artist alley is typically for artists selling keychains, prints, and more. The dealers room is for vendors that sell larger merch or have more items to sell – this can include artists but also includes people selling imported items (such as anime figures) and companies.

Conventions have a set amount of hours that the events go on and the vendor’s hall is usually not open the entire time. These rooms will usually open in the morning, around 10AM or so, and allow vendors an extra hour for fixing things before opening every day. For OffKai, we had to stay at our booth for about 8~ hours every day, except for Sunday. Sundays are always the shortest days for 3-day conventions, as the convention will usually wrap up around dinner time (if not earlier).

Vendors get time the night before the convention starts (usually Thursday night, with most conventions I’m referencing being Friday-Sunday events) to set up their booths. It took us around 3 hours to fully set up our booth, with 4 of us working on it. Setting up your booth will go a lot smoother if you do a trial run before the convention.

Every convention I’ve tabled at or known a vendor at provides vendors with at least 1 table and a chair. More chairs are usually easy to get, you just need to ask staff before the vendors hall opens up.

tip 1 – bring a friend

Conventions provide tables and chairs, but they don’t provide helping hands! You’re probably going to need help unpacking and setting up the table, but you’ll definitely need to take breaks during the convention for the bathroom, food, and more. You can’t just ask staff to sit at your table and you can’t just hide everything while you’re gone. Bring a friend to help out!

If you have to go alone, make friends with the people boothing next to you and ask them to watch over your table if need be. Be sure to keep your money and payment processors with you if you ever have to step away. And bring snacks & water!

our merch

Like I said, at Élan we have typical merchandise for our visual novels like keychains and acrylic standees, but we also have physical copies of our games for PC & consoles, artbooks, soundtracks, and more.

We had these types of merch:

Acrylic & wooden items

Keychains

Standees

Pins

Print media

PC discs

Console discs & cartridges (Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 & 5)

Artbooks (game artbooks, limited edition anniversary artbooks)

Soundtrack discs

4×6 prints (CGs, key artworks)

11×17 prints (key artworks, exclusive convention artworks)

Clothing & fabric

T-shirts (4 designs, 1 color each)

Hoodie (new collaboration design, for all of our games)

Scarf (new collaboration design, for 1 of our games)

Fabric flags (key visuals)

Misc.

Grab bag (misc small items)

$5 bin (misc small items)

Pencil bag

Mousepad

Enamel pin

Plushie (limited Makeship leftovers)

Some of these were items we’d never sold before such as the hoodie, scarf, and 11×17 prints. Some of them were also much more of a hassle than others.

In terms of storage and cheapness to make, prints and stickers are by far the winners (we didn’t sell stickers at OffKai but plan to in the future). Prints are basically the best thing you can sell for production cost:profit, as a 4×6 print can cost you $0.20 but sell for $5+ and an 11×17 print can cost $0.60 and sell for $15-20.

On the other hand, t-shirts can be some of the most difficult merch to work with. They take up a lot of room (we had at least 2 boxes of just shirts/hoodies) and require you to have multiple different sizes. The plushies were great & easy to sell, but at the same time they cost a lot per unit and take up even more space than shirts.

The physical copies sold great, but the cost to produce & room to store them makes them unwieldy for most developers. I would recommend them over more bespoke merch like clothing, though—several people came to our booth, having never heard of our games, and left with a physical game. CD discs rather than DVD cases are much easier to store and can be handmade, although ours are manufactured.

tip 2 – be selective with what merch you make & bring

Unless you’re lucky enough to have a convention down the street from you, chances are you’re going to have to travel to the convention. That means packing everything up, possibly shipping it, etc…. You need to be picky with what you bring if you don’t have multiple cars to throw it all in.

My merch recommendations:

4×6 prints

Ours were $4-5

Dirt cheap to print, easy to store

Easy for people to buy because of the low price point and ease of carrying

Idea – these are so cheap to print, at the very least print some of your key visual & logo to hand out to people for free

Stickers (die-cut or sticker sheets)

Dirt cheap to print, easy to store

Easy for people to buy because of the low price point and ease of carrying

Idea – some conventions won’t allow you to hand out free stickers. For conventions that don’t, I would sell either singular die-cut stickers or sell them in packs

Keychains

Ours were $12-15

Cheap to print, not very hard to store

At this price point people want to have an attachment to the characters before buying

Idea – if your game is relatively unknown but you still want to print keychains, consider packaging them with something else like the game or a sampler CD of the demo / soundtrack

Physical CD disc games

Ours were $30

Not cheap to print, not very hard to store

People will buy copies of games they’ve never heard of because it’s an interesting item to own and seen as more value than a digital copy (even if physical is more expensive)

Idea – it doesn’t cost much to get a 50 pack of CDs, the cost comes from the packaging and time to make the entire thing. If you don’t have a finished game yet, consider printing your demo out on CDs in paper slips to hand out for free

our booth

Now that I’ve talked about basics for conventions and what merch we sold, what did our booth actually look like?

We didn’t have a pre-convention trial run, so we were essentially winging it. With all of the merch I outlined, could you believe we crammed all of the display copies on 1 table, 2 shelves, and 1 clothing rack?!

Our main focus was making sure each of our physical games were visible. After all, we were at a vtuber convention where most attendees didn’t know us, so we wanted to have a way to show off our games. We spent a lot of real estate on showing individual game copies and having brochures spread out.

tip 3 – have an idea of how you’re going to display things before the convention

We also brought several items to display merch. For keychains & pins, we had a simple corkboard leaning on a photo stand / easel. For acrylic standees, we had a clear nail polish stand. For physical copies, we had photo stands and bookends. For clothes, we had a small clothing rack. For physicals, we had 3 small bookcases. These were all extremely helpful, but they are added costs and more things to carry to the convention.

here’s a better look at our 2 bookshelves. the purple ladder one was at the back of the booth highlighting some items and storing various artbooks & bundles and the smaller one was at the front left of the booth by the VirPro merch, basically in the walking aisle

The corkboard and various photo stands were must-haves, regardless of what you’re selling. A corkboard makes it easy to display anything on it, whether it’s keychains, stickers, mini-prints, announcements, posters, and more. Photo stands were also super helpful for propping our corkboard on but also showing off individual physical copies.

this was me trying to arrange the corkboard and acrylic stands. photo stands and art easels can in handy!

Along with the display stands, we also brought some decorative items like pink table clothes and flowers. These aren’t required, but help make your booth more noticeable.

A few miscellaneous items I plan on bringing to our next convention are a hand sanitizer dispenser, a small air purifier, and fliers. I always keep hand sanitizer on me, but it’s easier to use it when it’s in a convenient bottle and place. Several of us got sick after the convention (despite me wearing a mask), so I’m also bringing a small air purifier to keep some germs away from the table. I also want to bring small fliers for our upcoming games—while brochures are wonderful, I want something that’s easy (and cheap) to hand out to anyone who looks at our booth, not just the people we talk to.

tip 4 – be aware of merch thieves

We arranged our table in a way that we didn’t have to worry much about people stealing merch, though that is a problem at some conventions. As you might’ve noticed from the pictures, our smaller items like the keychains are at the far back of the booth, right beside where we sit. That allowed us to keep a better eye on it.

Rather than sitting behind our tables, we arranged our booth to be where people would walk inside it. This allowed us a way to talk to people easier. We also made sure to hide our card readers, phones, and more when any of us left the table, though this was easy because we almost always had 2-3 people at the booth at any time.

my advice

If I were an indie dev looking to booth at a convention and had the time and spare change, I would if it were close enough to drive to and the booth cost under $500. Unless you’re an established developer or have a popular artist working on your project, it’s hard to justify that cost.

tip 5 – don’t forget to budget for…

booth costs

extra badges (most booths come with 2 free badges)

hotel

travel

food

merchandise manufacturing

any shipping fees (your luggage, merch, etc.)

display items, extra things for your booth

While you may find a booth for $250, you also have to remember the travel fees, cost of food, all of the extra items you’ll need aside from merchandise, and more. A $250 booth for a 3-day convention could easily end up costing you $2,000+, and that’s if you don’t pay yourself or coworkers for their time at the booth!

If you’ve never been to a convention before then definitely go to one as an attendee before becoming a vendor. Get a feel for the place and have some fun, even if it means you won’t be able to booth there for months or a year.

tip 6 – be sure to bring…

Some kind of handout for people with your game & logo on it (fliers, business cards, brochures, etc.)

Small stationary merch for your game (4×6 prints, stickers, etc.)

Corkboard to display things on and something to prop it up

A way to take card payments and cash for change

Hand sanitizer

Pen/pencil and sticky notes

Clamps

Tape

this is the inside of our old brochure! it details our different games and highlights some upcoming titles

I’d also try putting your demo on CDs to hand out to people who seem really interested if you can. CDs are pretty cheap to get now, and even if you just get a 50 pack that can run you around $12, which ends up being $0.25/CD. Not a bad cost for getting a potential fan, if you hand them out only to people who are really interested or package them with other merch and sell them.

Your main effort if you’re not an established developer, however, will be awareness. Talk to the people who stop by your booth. Tell them hi and explain to them what you make. I had several people clearly not understand what visual novels were, but I had many more who became interested once I mentioned we made these games. “Wait, you actually made them?!”

tip 7 – talk to people!!!

People at conventions think art is cool. They think indie games are cool. Be honest with them and show them your hard work. Yeah, this means you have to put on your extrovert cap for the weekend. Just don’t treat it like you’re a car salesman—you’re a game dev first and foremost and enjoy this line of work so much you want to share it with strangers at conventions. Let that shine through in your words.

All in all, conventions are stressful, tiring, and a lot of fun when they’re run well. If any of this sounds interesting to you and you find a convention close enough to you or one that will be relatively cheap to attend, I recommend trying it out.

------------

OffKai Expo was so, so much fun and I’m so happy I was able to attend. It was a well run convention, our booth did amazing, I got to meet actual fans IRL, and I was able to finally see a lot of my online friends in person. I was scared leading up to it but I’m so glad I pushed myself to go. Having an in-person panel there where the room was almost full absolutely blew me away—I kept asking “do they know what room they’re in? Did they get lost?” If you came to our panel or booth, thank you!!

— Arimia

read more of my articles on tumblr here!

[bananaofswifts]

01 - Taylor Swift

No one in the music industry wielded more power over the past year than Taylor Swift, who made history at stadiums, movie theaters and on the Billboard charts, leaving even the most seasoned executives speechless. While they’d long celebrated her staggering popularity as a singer, songwriter and performer, her force as a strategic business leader suddenly came into sharper focus — and industry veterans took notes as they watched some of her bravest and most innovative business risks reap remarkable rewards.

At 34, she is one of the music industry’s most charismatic and influential leaders — and she rewrites the rules.

“The piece of advice I would give to the other executives on this list is that the best ideas are usually ones without industry precedent,” Swift tells Billboard. “The biggest crossroads moments of my career came down to sticking to my instincts when my ideas were looked at with skepticism. When someone says to me, ‘But that has never been done successfully before,’ it fires me up. We have to take strategic risks every day in this industry, but every once in a while, you have to really trust your gut and take a flying leap. My rerecordings are my favorite example of this, and I’m extremely grateful to my team and fans for taking that leap with me because it absolutely changed my life.”

Sage advice for an industry in which instinct has largely been supplanted by metrics and data analysis.

In December, Time named Swift its 2023 Person of the Year. In September, after encouraging her 279 million Instagram followers to vote and linking to vote.org, the nonpartisan nonprofit said it received over 35,000 registrations. She appears on the cover of this issue of Billboard and in the No. 1 spot of our annual Power 100 issue because her force across the business of music is now unparalleled — and because she models commitment to innovation that the rest of the business will need in order to tackle the big challenges ahead.

Swift’s gambles have paid off handsomely over the past year.

Her massive The Eras stadium tour, which began in March after she controversially put all the tickets on sale at once, crashing Ticketmaster and sparking mass hysteria, grossed an estimated $906.1 million in 2023 and is poised to become the highest-grossing global tour of all time before it wraps in December, according to Billboard.

The Golden Globe-nominated Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour film, taped during her six-show run at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., in August, has grossed over $261.6 million worldwide since its October opening, according to AMC Theatres Entertainment. In January, the publicly traded movie-house chain announced that the film’s box-office take made it the highest-grossing concert/documentary picture ever released, surpassing Michael Jackson’s 2009 This Is It. Once again blazing a new path, Swift made a groundbreaking distribution deal directly with AMC Theaters instead of linking with a film studio.

Swift has shaken up the catalog market, too. When Scooter Braun infuriated her by acquiring the master recordings of her first six albums through his Ithaca Holdings and then sold them to investment firm Shamrock Capital at a profit, Swift rerecorded the albums with loving precision and added bonus tracks to the new releases. They performed phenomenally well, as she deftly used her tour to promote them. When her latest rerecording (and 14th studio album overall), 1989 (Taylor’s Version), spent its fifth week at atop the Billboard 200 at the end of 2023, Swift beat Elvis Presley’s record for the most weeks at No. 1 by a solo artist. Her industry market share last year was 1.72%. If she were her own genre, she’d rank ninth for 2023 — bigger than jazz.

“She’s the smartest artist I’ve ever worked with,” says Messina Touring Group’s Louis Messina, who promotes Swift’s tours and has worked with her since 2005. “She outworks everybody and she has always had this vision. If you’re around her, you can’t help but believe in her.” —Melinda Newman

[jimmythejiver]

@softness-and-shattering

Okay so... I used to be a crayon collector as one of the few expenses I had as a kid besides ponybeads for crafting that wasn't taking paper and tape to make paper dolls and boxes and scraps to make dioramas. That was when I lived with my parents and was struggling middle class. At some point my older brother went to college and I inherited his prismacolor collection from highschool. In highschool I'd supplement this collection with stolen stubs from art class that was thrown in a general tub for class projects. Most of the colors were reds, black, white, peach and brown tones, but I got a lilac and an imperial violet that you could never find in stores without buying a complete set again. I cherished those and still have them, here they are with a parma violet from bro's old set I widdled down over time in twenty years:

Every so often I'd be lucky to replace a pencil here and there, but the prices would jump up. Recessions and living check to rent moving out of parents meant no major set replacements for years. I made do, used my pencils in a way where I'd have to cycle through other colors to not rely on favorite tones too much. I'd wonder why none ever showed up at thrift stores like cheap color pencils and crayons tend to. I even stopped drawing for years because of the pressure of surviving tbh. I focused on learning to write and set down my visual ability because I just don't have a grasp at anatomy and the three dimension anyway and landscapes do use up a lot of color.

Eventually my brother was burned out, he was harrassed by our boss who tried to pit us against each other and legal stuff I don't want to get into here. We ended up back home at my parents to fight this asshole and retreat because our rent landlord also became unbearable, which is another story for another time. Back home my disability income didn't go up much and it went into paying expenses and no rainy day saving or escape money was possible and I ended up Pop's unpaid laborer when it came to home improvement crap. Brother tried to make other jobs work after losing his ten year stable job to work with asshole who preyed upon us, but couldn't keep them for various reasons on top of managing a toxic family life. He published a book (it started as a way to encourage me to go write when I was sitting at home wasting away between soul sucking house repairs) and did some editor freelancing afterwards. Needless to say one by one members of my family die, my mom in 2016, my oldest brother (who I haven't gotten into because he's why I left my family in the first place as soon as I could at 18) in 2020, my father (Pop) in 2023 and that is just immediate family, though my extended relatives aren't going to step in unless I denounce and detransition either. My future is uncertain.

My grandma can't take me in long without violating her rent conditions and she hides our cat among her own and hopes the other tenants make no fuss, my surviving brother is now in an estate dispute with my sister (another reason I needed to leave my family) who had brought a bunch of friends (more like people she thinks she can ingratiate to do things for her but are looking to rip her off), into father's house where they robbed whatever they could carry and stowaway and proceeded to trash the house... We never evict sister, but brother has to play bad guy to get her to get them out. There's a longer story in getting it put up for sale while we fix father's money pit he left us. The sale pays off what Pop owed on the remortgage and getting money pit some actual work put into it, but it's gutted with no floors, heating or and drywall everywhere and winter is fats approaching...

Meanwhile our surviving stuff was either incorporated into grandma's apartment or sitting unsecure on moneypit property. My prisma's and clay were at grandma's where I could occasionally have downtime to draw landscapes or character design for a book I'm too stressed to write on a laptop I can't access often. It is at this point my long distance boyfriend and cowriter on a long-winded fanfiction series and I couldn't maintain constant contact and we've not really been able to fix that since unfortunately. I have this phone prepaid a year in advanced to go crazy watching the news or some bullshit discourse on tumblr. I can see I'm going crazy, even my friend halfway around the world politely calls me out. My situation makes me wallow further in everyone else's I can't change, like a distraction because if I dare admit I'm living in chaos then I'd have to answer for myself and now I can't answer for myself why I can't help anyone else and the vicious circle.

One of the bleak things of existing without a consistent roof over your head is constantly 'shopping' to be somewhere because loitering is discouraged. Who can shop when you have no where to put your stuff? I'm often at the craft stores (Michael's and Joanne's but never Hobby Lobby fuck them), usually as an excuse to pick up yarn for my grandma, maybe I can replace a pencil here and there now that some money is coming in that isn't going towards the pit, my collection is over twenty years old and widdled down. I notice they never restock lilac and lavender, it is driving me crazy. All the sudden they stock amethyst and orchid, wtf? I go online to find out they discontinued them in 2022 because whatever they used to make the pigment they no longer have access too. I do however go down a rabbit hole of prismacolor's history, from being manufactured in the United States, to Berol in United Kingdom to Canada when I was growing up (where my old Sanford set comes from) to now being manufactured in Mexico under Newell. I find that there are plenty of discontinued colors through the years since it debuted in the 30s, but nobody has a definitive list or dates, just missing numbers, as each color has one. Also the quality has gotten more breakable over time which I can attest to. Also people at thrift stores purportedly throw them out unlike crayons which explains why I never see them in my hunts. Thanks... I'd have loved the stubs y'all. I use those!

Which brings me to last spring, we had gotten the final floors installed. Family friend who was helping with the moneypit comes back from vacation, undermines our plans to move grandma's furniture in. Grandma already put in her notice to move in with us. Friend's wife starts a huge fight. It comes out that this whole collaborative project was some game of chicken where they hoped we'd sink so much money in we'd panic and sell the house to them. They ghost. House isn't done, but is livable.

Meanwhile I've been on the search for lilac pencils (had to let lavender go because I at least have an intact one from before discontinuation) on ebay and etsy to no avail, overcharged or old pictures on new listing, color not guaranteed. I try alternative markets like mercari and other places, one of them is a website for dollmaking, where you can buy supplies and parts to make dolls. They have a lilac listing, we e-mail them, they can send it. We try another place, they get back to us in a rant about the discontinuation and being a small business being fucked over, etc. We get another e-mail back from a kid's art supply store, but we don't get back to them soon enough unfortunately because an overstock website claims to have 26 lilac pencils! We shoot our shot.

This all happens as we wait and wait to move ours and grandma's stuff into new place. I'm now the owner of 27 lilac prisma pencils:

Postscript:

In my research on Mexican manufacturing of prismacolor I find out that not only do they make the Premier that I buy and the Scholar (think similar to Crayola branded color pencils in terms of quality, I have some random ones), but they have a midgrade set they don't import us called Juniors for kids who want nicer but affordable pencils and they have a color called Lavanda and I found import listing on Amazon, but I don't buy them. Months later I am at an Ollie's over a county away and find these:

[izasbjdphoto]

My last dollieh arrival of 2024 was a Dream Valley Vanora in light tan skin. I still can't make up my mind which wig should be her "standard" one. The grey was what I put on her initially because she rejected everything else, and I didn't want her bald. But I did order her the multi-pastel and the dark purple wig shortly after. But now I can't decide, what is best?

I didn't have a wig chosen for her as she was an in-stock impulse purchase on my part. I had gotten a big back-payment of money owed, so I took a portion of it to purchase her from DDE. Cost a pretty penny, plus customs since I'm in the EU, but she was totally worth it!

I've named her Iona, and I am so glad I do finally own one! I couldn't join the preorder back in 2023 for her, because I couldn't afford it, nor did I have a character for her.

It was good I didn't join the preorder then, because the first half of 2024 was financially very difficult... I had also ordered Territh (DV Alter) for christmas, who I had pushed off for years, but I really wanted him for one of my wife's characters that I wanted to shell to complete an RP pairing of ours.

She still doesn't have a preexisting character, or a back story, for her, but that's fine. I originally wanted to get Adria's fullset because her outfit would have been perfect for Jazz, but I didn't like her face or ears as much. I barely looked at Vanora at the time, because I was so enamored with Adria's outfit. I forced myself to content with living vicariously through other owners, but sadly barely anyone had them or shared them? I was honestly surprised as they are both lovely!

Let me show some arrival pictures of her under the cut, plus more rambling. Beware of resin nudes!

Her shipping saga was... intense. DDE shipped her huge box (she herself is 66cm) through UPS. Sadly UPS kept having hiccups. First they kept pushing out the delivery date, because they fucked up and didn't forward the box to the delivery depot in time despite me having paid the customs already online.

Then they just didn't show up for the next two delivery days, literally trapping me at home for 3 days, because the delivery window was from 8am to 6pm... Of course this was all during the high traffic holiday time, where my sister needed me to help her bake Christmas cookies, but I couldn't get anyone else to wait for the box for me (I tried to find someone, but no one could and she was too big for a flex box). The second delivery day, they marked the box as "recipient not at home" at 8pm. I was home of course, and awake, but I couldn't call UPS because they closed at 7pm. A thing to note about UPS is, that they try delivering 3 times before they even think about bringing it to a shop, or just plain old return to sender. So I think you can understand why I was antsy.

Finally on the third day, she arrived about 5 minutes before the delivery window was over with. I was happy to finally open the box:

She was packaged safely at least, but due to traveling in winter with freezing temps, over half her magnets had gotten loose and needed to be reglued. I had to take her apart completely because her torso stabilizer had knocked loose, so I wired her.

I think I spent 3 hours getting her wired, restrung, and dressed, because she was being a brat. She came with a small bust as a gift, but I kept the large bust on her, it fits better into the custom made Iplehouse SID corset from CeressBJDclothes.

I bought her during the black friday sale on DDE, so I ended up qualifying for a past Dream Valley event doll, so I chose Tea, as a little gift for me wife since she mentioned liking him. We jokingly call him "Audrey Two" after the carnivorous plant villain of Little Shop of Horrors. His mouth can open, and he is cute over all, and fits in with some other silly little plant like creatures we got.

But anyway, I am glad I got her after all, I think we now have at least 1 doll in each of DV's standard colors! I have an Ann, Bor, and Eve in white, an Ann in the old orange tan, an Apocalypse Horseman body in normal pink, an Alter in normal (yellow toned), Vanora in light tan, and my wife has Tea in white and an Olivia in grey. I just love the fantasy dolls DV makes, they are so good...

So yeah, please let me know which wig looks best!

[blacksheepdolls]

(Late) Look-back Challenge - Week 1

I realize we're on day 11 of the month already, but whatever. I'll catch up in the next post. Anyway, days 1-7 under the cut!

Day 1: Introduce your newest toy to the one you've had longest.

Going with my BJD collection, Crow (Angel Region Ren) is definitely the oldest, as well as the first doll I acquired. He was made in 2007, and I bought him in 2012. My still-unnamed WIP Dream Valley Chaos was made in 2023, and shipped to me in early 2024. I've had them for 13 and 1 years respectively!

Day 2: What is your oldest toy? (Chronologically)

So if we're just going with BJDs, I'd just be posting a second picture of Crow. I was going to pair him with my first Monster High doll (Spectra Vondergeist), since that was kind of my gateway drug to BJDs, but then I made a cool discovery just a couple days ago.

That's my Anya doll from the animated movie Anastasia. I wasn't much into dolls as a kid, not human ones anyway, but this one was an exception. I loved this movie, and I had as much of the merch as I could get my little hands on. I don't recall how she got into her current condition, with her dress wonky, her hair a mess, and her shoes/hat missing, but I'm glad to have her back. :) She's certainly my oldest doll.

Day 3: A toy you love, but rarely, if ever, photograph.

Poor Nico, I never take him out for cool photoshoots in the woods or anything. The problem is... he just isn't stable enough. He's a Doll Chateau Noah, with the spindly deer body. His joints don't stay in place, and he's very top-heavy. I don't have a stand that works for him yet, and I just can't trust him to stay up on his own. Ah well, at least he's pretty. (He is standing in these photos, though it's hard to tell, but this is a very flat surface, and I watched him like a hawk.)

Day 4: Do you still have any toys from your childhood?

We're going to deviate from the BJDs for just a minute, because I do have toys from my childhood, but that's from a bit before BJDs as we know them were a thing.

This is my Tigger stuffie from when I was a baby. That makes him the same age as me! He's been roughed up over time, but he's still in one piece. He's not a doll, exactly, but I didn't want to just post Anya again.

Day 5: Any buying regrets?

I no longer own any of the dolls I had regrets about, but there were a couple. The first was my Sugarble Rudy.

On the left here, this is the best pic I still have of him (that's Grendel on the right). I guess he just wasn't what I was expecting when I opened the box. I wasn't fond of his jointing system, and I don't like faceplates. He was also a weird size, more like 1/8 than 1/6. In any case, I wound up selling him to a friend who liked him more.

Day 6: Any you’re thinking of getting rid of?

Nah. Unless you count the ones I already have for sale. I did a lot of deep thinking about everyone recently, and the ones I still have are staying as long as I can help it.

Day 7: A toy you like, but don’t want any more of that type/line/style.

And here we get to Grendel again...

Don't get me wrong, I love my dour wolf doctor to bits. And I have nothing against his head- he's a Doll in Mind Galahad. The issue is with his body, a Soom Super Gem body, the old style (specifically Chrom's). I'm not sure if the new ones are any better, but I don't think I'd buy another one. They're quite expensive for being so clunky, heavy, and unsteady. They can't stand well. And restringing them is a pain. They do look nice, though. That's why I bought it in the first place.

[wormthing]

Taking commissions for some Animal Jam items:

I've been playing Animal Jam Classic lately, and drawing in their Art Studio, and I cobbled together a wish list of random items I want. I'll draw a piece of art for you for some of those items; it doesn't specifically have to be for an in-game Masterpiece item. Check below the Read More for the list of items I'm looking for.

(And of course my commissions for $ USD are always open still!)

Please trade me at least one item off the list below in exchange for a piece of art.

Please message me about your proposed commission and what items you'd like to trade! Let me know if you want this drawn as a Masterpiece item, or if you just want a regular image file in exchange, probably done in MS Paint in a similar style above.

Give me a few days to get the drawing done!

If you want me to draw your avatar, I am not going to draw culturally insensitive items. I'll let you know if I have an issue with your proposition.

I can take payment when the art done/approved and we can trade, but I can also do half-payment up front.

If you want a Masterpiece item:

A Masterpiece Token included in the trade is appreciated, but not required. (Especially if I don't currently have membership.)

Give the art time to be approved. If it isn't, I'll see if we can work something out.

Please keep complexity down, especially in regards to colour schemes.

Click below for my wish list! Items I already have have been moved to a list at the end. I'll update it as I see things that catch my eye.

Check out the Animal Jam Wiki (link) to look up these items (or other related pages). (I also said what event they were from if applicable.)

Den items:

Mira Tapestry (2017 Mira v Zios event)

Glowing Spiked Phantom (2019 box prize)

Clothing:

Phantom Beanie (2017 Fall box prize)

Slime Green skullies (2022 trick-or-treat event)

Cursed Hypno glasses (2021 spooky sale)

Huntress hat (this is the only members item here)

Low priority:

Any other* promotional plushies (for non-members)! I love them ::-) [*Note: I now have: Rare giant panda, Rare giant raccoon, Rare monkey, Rare penguin, Rare koala]

Any Slime Green clothes (for non-members)

Non-member Halloween masks from 2022 (Classic Vampire Mask, Wicked Witch Mask)

My Den has other art I've done, some of which is from 2024 but some is from 2017! My username is 113457.

Items that were previously here, but are no longer needed:

Painter's Palette ("Let creativity fly" collection)

Fancy Pottery Wheel (same)

Cosmo plushie (2023 scavenger hunt)

Peck plushie (same)

Rare Wavy Bookshelf (2013 rare item monday)

Rare Giant Panda Plushie (promotional)

Rare Giant Tiger plushie (Lunar new year prize)

Art Camp Bead Station (2021 Art Camp collection)

Mira Banner (2017 MvZ event, not to be confused with the Beta mira banner)

Rare Hypno Glasses

Classic Werewolf mask (2022 spooky sale)

Classic Creature mask (same)

A green spiked collar for non-members

Spooky Mech Angel Wings

[youareiron-andyouarestrong]

so we could call it even, you could call me “babe” for the weekend (the road not taken looks real good now)

Today it’s five pm on Christmas Eve, and they close at six. No one is in the shop at the moment, the streets outside are empty, save for falling snow. Jyn’s plans are to go home, warm up the roast she prepared that morning. It’s only forty-five more minutes until the shop closes. In the next fifteen minutes, she could sweep the floor, make sure the displays are tidy for Boxing Day sales, and leave the incandescent Christmas lights softly glowing until closing. Then she’ll need to close up the cash register, take the day’s earnings to the safe, write down the earnings— The delicate little gold bell over the door chimes merrily as it opens. Biting back a growl, Jyn turns to face this interloper, this complete and utter layabout of a customer, coming at the eleventh hour on Christmas Eve— “Oh,” she says flatly. “It’s you.” * Cassian forgets to get his sister a gift. Jyn helps him out.

'tis I, @woahpip, your Secret Santa of 2023! I hope you enjoy this little story, as I scootch it on under the wire on this, the day of deadline.

read the rest on ao3

[lol-jackles]

https://twitter.com/CreationEnt/status/1763754174766792962

Jensen already signing on for 2025 cons?? CE is clearly fishing for money (the cruise and now selling packages for this new 2025 con) which tells me 2024 is in the red or close to it. It reeks of desperation to be pushing 2025 cons when they haven't even had a 2024 con yet (when I sent this message at least).

And Jensen signing on so early.... do you think he's feeling pressure about the future? Maybe he's not landing the jobs he thought he would and is lining up cons just in case?

Link. to be fair it's early 2025 so far, but...yeah.

As you know, peak-TV is over even though TV business still accounts for 80% of the total advertising revenue. And we are supposedly in the "third act of the streaming wars" as streaming services are struggling to reach profitability. The movie box office sales are expected to be $8 billion in 2024, which is down 10% from 2023, and down 30% from 2019.

All this means is number of scripted shows will be halved, from peak 633 in 2022, then 481 in 2023, to 300 in coming years (source: market research firm Ampere Analysis). Development executives are taking longer to greenlight shows, even for projects from established showrunners.

So yeah, acting gigs are going to be tougher to come by and Jensen is taking the best current option.

I've always thought that everybody decided to lose their minds and dump millions into streaming services and shows that didn't have a chance in hell of being profitable.

Phase One: Streaming by borrowing money from Silicon Valley banks, get into massive debts by making whole bunch of shows that nobody watch in order to crowd out competitors.

Phase Two: Profitability. This means less shows, and an introduction of advertising.   So you aren’t getting unlimited content for 10 bucks a month forever. The math never made sense

Phase Three: Production spending will fall and budget for "prestige drama" will be cut from $10 million to $4.5 billion per episode. You know, like the good old days before everybody decided to lose their mind over streaming.

On the plus side, there could be another Indie boom akin to the '70s and see really weird niche genres like disco themed movies and artsy odd experimental ones, etc.

[jambusaur]

the new guide to getting free sapphires/memberships on animal jam in 2023!

i love playing animal jam. some say i love playing animal jam too much! but what i don't love is spending money to do something in a game when i can do the exact same thing for free.

in fact, i've made it my personal goal to enjoy both versions of animal jam (classic and play wild) as much as i possibly can without spending a single penny.

some people are unaware of the fact that animal jam play wild memberships apply to both ajpw and aj classic, so i'm gonna walk you through how to get and maintain a free ajpw membership using some easy peasy methods!

click the "read more" thingie if you're interested :)

background information

in ajpw, you can buy a month-long membership for 600 sapphires in the sapphire shop located in jamaa township.

you can also buy a den item called a "my shop" there for 100 sapphires.

a shop lets you sell items for sapphires or gems. keep in mind, however, that if you're a nonmember, there's a fee taken out of any sales you make.

a shop is ideally going to be the first thing you purchase once you get 100 sapphires!

getting the initial 100 sapphires

getting your first 100 sapphires can take some time, but there are a lot of ways to speed that process up!

logging into ajpw every day

on most days, you have 3 possibilities when spinning the wheel: gems, 5 sapphires, or an item.

on wednesdays, the possibilities change to 5 sapphires, 10 sapphires, or 20 sapphires. getting a 20 sapphire spin on a wednesday can really help you out!

the possibilities also change on mondays: gems, 5 sapphires, or a clothing/den item with a rare tag.

in the beginning, it's really important to log in as many days as you can, especially because you can get 10 sapphires every month just by logging in for 15 total days (depending on the number of days in the month).

one more thing to mention about daily logins: a "new day" in ajpw might turn over at a weird time for you, depending on your timezone. i'm honestly not really sure what timezone ajpw is in, but i know that a new day in ajpw turns over at 8:00 PM EST for me.

it can be really helpful to know what time a new ajpw day turns over for you, especially if you're busy throughout the day and need to plan out when you can log in to get your daily reward.

if you don't want to manually figure it out by guessing what time a new ajpw day turns over for you, there's another easy way! you can join the unofficial animal jam community discord server (this isn't an ad i swear LMAO), and once you're verified in that server, you can check the #game-updates channel. that discord server is really good at posting about ingame updates right when they go out, so you can scroll through the #game-updates channel and look at the time stamps of messages to determine when a new day turns over for you. here's a link to the discord server if that's how you want to do it:

(let me know if there's any problems with that invite link, i'm pretty sure i got it to work tho!)

playing minigames

if you open the minigames screen, you'll notice that there's a sapphire icon on the right side of the popup.

clicking that will show you your progress in every minigame.

there are 3 gift boxes of rewards for playing each minigame. the first gift box gives you 5 sapphires, the second gives you 10, and the third gives you 15.

touch tank is definitely the easiest minigame to beat first. after that, it kind of depends upon your own preferences? i personally love overflow, fast foodies, and jamaa derby!

leveling up, gem tree, & dig sites

these three ways of getting sapphires only give you small amounts, so i'm grouping them together!

once you join a pack in ajpw, you have access to the alpha hideout and pack hideout.

every day, going to your pack hideout gives you exp towards leveling up (i don't think going to your alpha hideout gives you exp though, so make sure it's the pack hideout). leveling up can give you rewards, including small amounts of sapphires! it's a good passive way to earn a couple sapphires here and there and, in case you were curious, here's a link to all the level-up rewards!

at your pack hideout, you can also find a gem tree, which looks like this:

gem trees are in different locations based on which hideout your pack has. the image above was taken in the greely pack hideout, but every hideout has a gem tree!

if you click on the gem tree, you can either earn gems or, more uncommonly, small amounts of sapphires. the gem tree replenishes every hour, so try to click it as often as you can!

another way to earn a few sapphires is to click on golden shovel dig sites:

fun fact, there's always at least one golden shovel dig site on the ajpw map at all times. and you can tell if the land you entered has a dig site in it by listening for a sound effect that'll play right when you enter it. i can't really describe the sound effect, but it's like, magical? idk. you'll know it when you hear it! you might want to turn down the music volume in your ingame settings though if you want to hear it better.

the sound effect makes it really easy to find dig sites- you can just go to random areas of the map and listen for it! this is what it'll look like once you find a dig site and click on it:

sapphires are going to show up as a 2 by 2 square on the grid.

sapphire drops

the final way to earn sapphires in ajpw that i'm going to talk about is sapphire drops. sometimes when you're roaming around, you might get a popup like this at the top of your screen:

that means that someone used a super sapphire potion (which can be bought in the phantom dimension for 3500 phantom tokens), and if you walk around a bit, you'll find a big sapphire on the ground like this:

click on it!! you'll get 3 free sapphires!!

(super sapphire potion images are from the ajpw fandom wiki!)

getting the next 600 sapphires

now that you have a shop, you're going to want to sell as much as you can to get the next 600 sapphires. you can sell pretty much anything, but here's some of my favorite things to sell!

before i go into this though, i want to talk about a REALLY important part of selling your items: the shop explorer!

when selling items, even as a nonmember, you have the ability to list your item in the shop explorer.

clicking that toggle will put your item in the shop explorer located in coral canyons.

this means that anybody who wants your item can search for it and see a list of everybody selling that item.

once you list something in the shop explorer, it's there for 3 days. once the 3 days runs out, your item is no longer in the shop explorer, but it's still in your shop in your den. you can relist an item in the shop explorer by relisting it in your shop and clicking the toggle again.

now here's my favorite things to sell!

rare plushies

i sell my rare plushies really cheap so they sell faster, but honestly, they're super easy to get, so selling them for 5 sapphires each really isn't a waste at all!

to get rare plushies, you're going to need "the superclaw" which can be bought in the sapphire shop for 100 sapphires...BUT DON'T BUY IT.

the great thing about the superclaw is that, if you know someone who has one in their den, you can go to their den and use theirs! my den is always open with a superclaw for anyone to use :) my username is jambusaur and the superclaw is directly left of where you spawn in.

the superclaw is very simple to play, but it can get boring pretty quickly. that's why i made an autoclicker script that i can run overnight using autohotkey! if you're interested in using something like that for yourself, dm me and i'll walk you through making one :) fair warning though, you're going to need to download two things (autohotkey and a specific mouse coordinates finder), but i've been using those two things for years and they haven't given me any trouble or viruses or whatever!

after you've played the superclaw for a while, you might've gotten lucky and found a rare phantom plushie!

these guys sell for a bit more than a normal rare plushie! i usually sell them for 22 sapphires, but you're probably going to want to check the shop explorer in coral canyons before you list them, just to make sure that you're selling them for a reasonable price.

treasure chest items

after doing some golden shovel dig sites, you've probably gotten a couple treasure chests. placing them in your den and clicking on them will give you an item.

these items are usually not really worth much, but some of them can be sold for decent amounts of sapphires. the best way to check if you should sell a treasure chest item is by checking the shop explorer in coral canyons!

after doing these things for a while, you should eventually get 600 sapphires to buy a membership! WOOOO! with that membership, you'll now get daily rewards of 5 sapphires, you'll be able to open pack chest rewards, you'll be able to send pets on expeditions, and much more.

pet expeditions are a big topic on their own, so i'm not going to explain them here, but i'll update this post if i ever end up making a pet expedition guide!

now that you have a membership, you might be wondering, how can you earn enough sapphires monthly to keep that membership?

it's pretty much the same process as getting the first 600 sapphires! selling items in your shop will be easier though because you won't get the "nonmember tax" taken out.

that's all that i have for now! if you have any other questions or if you think i missed something important, feel free to dm me or send an ask in. thank you so much for reading through this post, and thank you even more for waiting for this post to come out!