#reviewer program

[duckprintspress]

Become an Advance Reader for Duck Prints Press!

Reviews are essential for showing prospective readers that we’re publishing awesome books that they want to buy and read. We’re looking to recruit an active group of people who post reviews of our work, and to do that we need your help! For the first time, we’re offering Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) of one of our projects: Aether Beyond the Binary, our most recent anthology, featuring 17 stories of characters outside the gender binary exploring modern-esque aetherpunk worlds.

How it works: You see this post. You think, oh, I love reading! I love leaving reviews! I want to join the Duck Prints Press Reviewer Program! Then, you go and read the rules for our Reviewer Program. And, if everything there sounds like something you can do, you fill out the form, and – we’ll be in touch! Even better: this program isn’t only for Aether Beyond the Binary, and isn’t only for “advance” titles. Our reviewers are encouraged to claim titles that are currently released, too, to help build up a robust collection of reviews of Duck Prints Press titles!

Requirements:

You must be over 18 years old.

You must be prepared to post reviews on Goodreads and/or Storygraph.

You must also post the review on the appropriate listing on the Duck Prints Press webstore (for advance titles, you’ll have to wait ’til we list them there).

Upon acceptance to the program, you must join the Duck Prints Press Book Lover’s Server.

Reviews must be at least 100 words long must and engage with the actual content of the work being reviewed.

Reviews must be left within 6 months of claiming a title, or you will be removed from the program.

What isn’t Required:

That the reviews be positive. Reviews are for readers. We require that reviews be honest to your own experience of the work, not that they be glowing.

That you post the reviews to social media. Doing so is definitely a bonus, but you don’t have to.

That you associate yourself publicly with the review-leaving (beyond using a valid Goodreads and/or Storygraph account). As in, you don’t have to say, “I, (your name here), reviewed this book” or link your book website accounts with your existing social media presence or anything like that, nor do we request any demographic information beyond confirmation of your age.

That you purchase anything. Absolutely no purchase necessary!

What You Get:

A e-book copy (ePub and/or PDF) of the work you’re reviewing. We do not provide physical ARCs.

After you post your first review, you’ll get a coupon for 10% off a purchase from the Duck Prints Press webstore!

For every ten reviews you post, you can claim a freebie sticker from among our sticker offerings, if you want. (You’ll have to provide a snail mail address to get this, of course.)

A community of fun book-lovers to hang out with! (You can get that even without joining the ARC program, though – our Book Lover’s Discord is open to everyone.)

We’re accepting applicants for claiming Aether Beyond the Binary ARCs through April 10th, 2024. On the 11th, we’ll randomly select 25 of applicants to receive ARC copies of Aether Beyond the Binary. Everyone else will still be entirely welcome in the program and invited to start with a different, back-catalog book or story to review. We’ll make another pool of Aether Beyond the Binary ARCs available in May.

So… those are the basics. Interested? Go read the full rules, then apply to be a Duck Prints Press ARC reader TODAY!

[colorful-horses]

charlie

[bucketsofmonsters]

Today's the last day you can get the ebook version of my novel for free!! Grab a copy here

[dandelion-wings]

just read a delightful OT3 story in another fandom involving hot baths and massages, and now I am directly yoinking a bunch of its beats so I can tell myself a bedtime story about Lisa and Kaeya bullying Jean into a hot bath and massages. 10/10, do recommend

[periodically80s]

[thresholdbb]

My Star Trek silverware post is going around again, and I'd like to clarify some things:

"Those are normal spoons" the hell they are

"There's nothing wrong with these" I'm happy you live in a world where all the flatware is acceptable, but I super don't, which is why I made a post about it

"What flavor of autism did you get?" Ridiculously strong opinions about Star Trek silverware, thanks

[bakuhatsufallinlove]

Time for a lighthearted review!

By now a number of people have heard of ボクの神隠し(boku no kamikakushi), aka “My Spiriting Away” or “My Mysterious Disappearance,” aka the BL manga that Okamoto Nobuhito, voice actor of Bakugou Katsuki, was involved in. It is available to read for free in Japanese here with a total of three chapters. This post contains spoilers for the ending.

Here’s a Q&A peppered with my thoughts on it.

The Premise

Crybaby Uzuki idolizes his childhood friend Haruto who always protected him, but since they started high school, their relationship has soured, leaving Uzuki utterly alone. One day, the pair are kidnapped by a strange man and forced to participate in a mysterious game of life-or-death.

How is Okamoto involved?

Okamoto is credited for the 原案 (gen’an). A corollary industry term in English would be “original idea” or possibly “scenario.” In my experience with comics, this suggests he created the characters and premise, then wrote the concept out and submitted it to a second party to be fleshed out for full production.

The script is credited to Production Beijyu (プロダクションベイジュ), a company who offers a variety of production and promotion services with a focus on editing and proofreading books, magazines, manga, and anime.

The manga—so the artwork and all of its production—is credited to 戸真伊まい, a name I can only guess is read as Tomai Mai, which sure sounds like a pen name and doesn’t appear to be linked to any other published work. This could be for a lot of reasons; the artist might be totally new or they might have worked in other genres and chose a unique pen-name for BL, but the only thing I found attached to this name online was their Twitter account.

How’d it get made, anyway?

As far as I can tell, Okamoto must have personally reached out to Beijyu and applied for their services to help make his idea a real thing. Beijyu gear themselves towards small, independent artists and authors, especially those who haven’t debuted with a magazine or printed publication yet.

For those unaware, manga is a massive industry in Japan, and it can be extremely difficult to get your foot in the door. Many creators talk about having their concepts rejected repeatedly by magazine after magazine, or getting a single one-shot published and then struggling to keep the momentum. There’s a reason all of the huge Shounen Jump creators talk about the intense pressure to keep their work popular and to avoid getting dropped from publication by any means necessary.

Boku no Kamikakushi is available for free and I haven’t heard of any plans for a physical release. To be honest, this suggests to me that Okamoto genuinely wanted to get his story made regardless of profitability—he isn’t just a celebrity attaching his name to a series for attention. There wasn’t some industry demand or opportunity that he took advantage of for professional gain, he must have been the one to initiate this endeavor, and honestly, good for him.

Is it really bkdk?

Nah. I will grant you that the tropes at play certainly reveal Okamoto’s tastes, and we sure could extrapolate about his feelings on bkdk from those tastes. But beyond the similarities in backstory, base themes, and design aesthetic that people have pointed out, the couple have very little in common with bkdk, and in fact, the way they diverge is kind of hilariously shocking??

Okay, fine. What’s their deal, then?

Uzuki is a yandere rich boy who likes to get choked. Haruto is honestly a hapless, horny victim in all this.

What!?

Yeah. The “mastermind” behind the kidnapping is Uzuki himself, who staged the whole thing with his butler. Basically, their high school classmates tease Haruto for being associated with Uzuki, the son of the richest noble in town; Haruto resents it so he distances himself from Uzuki and rejects him. Uzuki ends up lonely with no friends and missing Haruto, so he stages his own kidnapping and puts them both in the “death game” as a way to force Haruto to remember his childhood promise to protect Uzuki as his hero.

That’s insane???

YES. IT IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE.

It’s especially funny because the parameters of the death game don’t technically require them to have sex or get intimate, Uzuki is just a fucking freak and Haruto is confused by his own horniness and goes along with it. The first trial involves a selection of drinks, one of which contains poison, and they have to keep choosing one to drink from until someone dies. Haruto ends up poisoned, and Uzuki uses his prize (“one wish”) as the winner to get the antidote and save him, of course passing it to Haruto via full-on mouth kiss.

Haruto has a gay crisis about it.

The second game: whoever raises the other person’s heart rate to 130 beats per minute first wins, and the person with the elevated heart rate dies. Haruto’s heart rate spikes from aftereffects of the poison, and Uzuki’s solution is… for Haruto to choke him… on the bed they woke up on… so his heart rate increases as well. And then he asks Haruto to kiss him, too, and they just start making out until Uzuki’s heart rate hits 130. Haruto gets upset because he lost his head and ended up dooming Uzuki, but then somehow they arrange for this death to also be nullified, and they end up continuing to play the game for three days.

Three whole days!?!

THREE DAYS! This kid traps Haruto in a dungeon so he can make him participate in weird, sadistic, horny shenanigans for three days!

And then when they finally escape and everything is revealed, Haruto is just blankly confused and has this absent look on his face, repeating that he’ll protect Uzuki. The butler says that Uzuki performed excellent mind control, but then Uzuki imprisons the butler so it can be “just the two of them.”

What the fuck, Okamoto???

Right? And you know what, it isn’t my jam at all, but can we just take a moment to recognize that a professional voice actor who is popular and prominent in the public eye wanted his weird horny BL idea to come to fruition, so he went forth into the world and made it so? And he didn’t even hide behind a pen name or anything, he wants people to associate him with it, he’s promoting it! He loves the hell out of it!

Like, I’m pretty astounded by that, and honestly I respect it. More people should just make things that cater to their own tastes without any self-consciousness about it. Wave your freak flag high, Okamoto.

[asleepinawell]

pick the programming language of your choice (tell me which it is in the tags so I can judge you)!

[duckprintspress]

I saw a poll about doing formal reviews of AO3 works that horrified me so thoroughly that I don't want to reblog it here, but it DID get me wondering about how many folks on Tumblr post reviews of original works they read. :D

(note that I don't care how often you post reviews, once or a hundred times still counts as a yes. :D )

reblog for reach? I can't think of anything clever to ask y'all to put in the tags, lmao, but I'd still love if this one circulated at least a little, I get the sense very few people post reviews but I'm curious.

[mahikamihan]

dream and george pair programming together real and true 💚💙

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

What kind of tablet and app do you use or recommend for digital art?

personally i use Procreate on an ipad, like the vanilla bitch i am! it Is a good program, but i've previously used & been happy with Medibang, i've heard good things about Krita and Clip Studio.

as for tablets, i started out with a Huion pen tablet! that one worked pretty damn well once i got used to watching a screen instead of my hand as i drew! it's a pretty decent brand, but there are tons of others that are Not Half Bad too

but really, you can make anything work! there are a lot of different options out there - a good way to find Your Best Fit is looking up programs/tablets, reading reviews, comparing and contrasting to see what appeals to You!

[fantasyfantasygames]

Worst Contact

Worst Contact, Space Swabbie Games, 2014

Here's the setup: You are the crew of an interplanetary trading ship in the implausibly near future. Humanity has expanded across our solar system. You pushed the ship too hard on its trip through the asteroid belt, and a small impact left you off-course, floating slowly to your death in deep space, too low on fuel to ever make it back. You have enough food and air for months, maybe years, you just have to hope someone rescues you. And then this D'deridex-sized ship warps in near you and hails you, asking if you want a ride home with the first aliens anyone from Earth has ever encountered. You get to make first contact.

The catch: this game was heavily inspired by Redshirts (which was released a year or two before). Your ship is full of misfits and losers who would fit in well with The Lower Decks and the funnier parts of Firefly. Hilarity ensues.

Characters are primarily defined by their Profession and Motivations. Professions are what you'd expect: engineer, trader, commander, helm, explorer, scientist, security, plus a make-your-own system available that works nicely. Motivations are actually more locked down. You choose several from a set of 12, including things like "money", "fame", "entertainment", and "escape from the law". Those get ranked. You roll d10s based on Motivations and add bonuses from Professions. It's vaguely Silhouette-like, nothing new. Success chances are fairly high. You get more luck points by playing into your Motivations, so you'll have a lot of them, and they max out fairly quickly to encourage you to spend them.

The game's best mechanical innovation is the Mistake Spiral, where every failed roll looks like a success but puts a mistake (a written-down fact) on the table. Every mistake makes it more likely that another failed roll - especially one where you spend a Luck point - will cascade into a disaster, with badness proportional to the number of mistakes there were. Every failure after that point is a critical failure until the problem gets fixed, at which point you reset the spiral. I like that you all get to look competent until it all goes to hell. There are separate spirals for physical/mental rolls and social rolls.

Art is minimal, mostly starship renders on a level somewhat better than Babylon 5 but not fantastic. Setting details are mostly generated by random roll. There are 20 alien species described in brief detail. Your ship has one of 10 standard technical problems. The aliens have five words from this d100 table that they definitely do not understand the correct definition of. There's a d100 random-roll table to determine your weird cargo that will never be delivered. It's all small details. The game is mostly social, unless you get stuck in the chompers.

Worst Contact could be a one-shot, and is probably intended to be 2-4 sessions. There's no XP system. I feel like it still has a lot of potential for a 10-12 session campaign. Even after you deal with the actual contact with aliens, there's the matter of what happens when you get them back to civilization. I would totally play it, but I also have a soft spot for sci-fi games that commit to their premise.

Space Swabbie Games put out Worst Contact on USB stick, which has never worked out well. At least they open-licensed it, so if you get the PDF you're more than welcome to pass it around to others. Just watch out for the malware on the thumb drives.

[catscomputerscreativewriting]

theory of computation/computability and complexity/whatever your institution calls it is the universal computer science hazing ritual.

[svtskneecaps]

feel like the global tasks sweep strat should probably be nerfed somehow. my thought would be, give each team an individual ten minute overall cooldown on global task claims. that is to say, a certain team can only claim one global task per ten minutes. say, deliver gas masks, and then in ten minutes you're allowed to deliver tea, and then after another ten minutes you can claim hot chocolate.

another teams would be able to claim a global task for bananas during this time, and their own ten minute cooldown would start.

(the global tasks can either keep their individual ten minute cooldown [i.e. after tea is claimed no one else can claim tea for ten minutes] or a slightly shorter cooldown, say 5-7 minutes)

when a global task is claimed, everyone is notified, right? if not, in my hypothetical, they will be.

then, a team trying to sweep six tasks at once would actually take sixty minutes to do, allowing another team to swoop in and have a chance to stop it in cinematic, entertaining fashion rather than tubbo having to grind resources and then log out in front of the merchant to counter this, which is boring for everyone (including the person delivering). plus, if a team cuts it down to the last second and ends up getting delayed, they physically wouldn't have time to make a delivery, meaning even being a BIT of a nuisance could be a viable strategy, even if you can't manage to kill; if you can STALL you could still wreck their plans.

that's my dream anyway idk i'm not a game designer. just think it would be interesting for most players

(i elaborate under)

red team would have to shake up their strategies, which is fun since they're a team that kinda has to rely more on strategy than outright brawn (overall the team's pvp can't be relied on unless they have carre or phil, as seen today when pierre, bad, and etoiles attacked phil cellbit foolish and baghera, and cellbit and foolish both died to etoiles in the attack, despite it being a 4 on 1 at the time. baghera was killed by bad soon after. phil was the one to get the kills. the first day, when blue attacked [niki, tubbo, and bad as i recall] carre got both kills)

the other teams would then still have a way to stop a global sweep since a sweep would have to start earlier, allowing not only more time to arrive at global to pvp about it, but ALSO allowing another team to swoop in and steal the goal out from under the team again

i'm gonna use it in a scenario bc i'm badboyhalo and i can't stop myself from making examples:

so, tonight, if the proposed cooldown was in place, bad and tubbo would both still had roughly 17 minutes when red team would have HAD to start the sweep process if they wanted all six global tasks: 1 hour until the server closed at absolute MINIMUM. more for safety's sake.

therefore, in this scenario, there's a lot to happen

blue team could wait at globals, knowing red will probably try this strategy, and attempt or perhaps SUCCEED in killing red. if they kill red entirely, the operation is a wash; red doesn't have to gear to come back from scratch and take out blue team, and even if they could, the travel time to return to globals alone would mean they wouldn't get all the global tasks, potentially meaning they don't take the lead. if blue team is unable to kill red and dies themselves or has to retreat, but succeeds in delaying red, red would face the same problem.

if red sends in all of the task items on one person, and that person dies, even if the rest survived, blue could loot the items from that person and would be able to either use the items themselves, if green is currently the owner, or could run away with the items, effectively wasting red's time and again, meaning they wouldn't get all tasks claimed even if they were able to overtake the runner and reclaim their items.

i'm unclear what would happen if red divided the task items between them since it seems like the person claiming the task doesn't have to have all (or any? again, unclear) the items in THEIR inventory in order to claim so long as a teammate is nearby with the items in their inv (evidence: pac's vod "voltei... o que tá acontecendo no QSMP?!" at roughly 3:00:00; tubbo claims tea and tea is taken out of pac's inventory. i don't know the limits of this strategy)

blue team also has time to swoop in and steal a global task out from under red during this time. say, if red team had claimed the task for 10 tea leaves, upping the price to 15 tea leaves, and then blue team snuck in and claimed the task and set the price up to 20 tea leaves, (since the proposed 10 minute cooldown on claims would be TEAM LIMITED; red's cooldown applying to red only and so on). if red waited until the last second, they wouldn't have the time to reclaim this task even if they did have the resources, possibly forcing them to start their sweep earlier to counter this possibility, at which point team members who had logged on earlier and are out of time by the end of the night, OR members who live in time zones that don't allow them to stay up until server close, may have an easier shot at participating in defending against a global sweep.

all of this DIRECT CONFLICT would make for good audience entertainment and heighten the stakes of an attempted global sweep, since it would practically have to be one team defending globals for an hour while they pipe all their resources into it, knowing that if they die another team could easily swipe their task resources and use it themselves (along with the rest of their gear). it makes it more interesting, while still mostly viable.

plus it would force more strategizing for red team which is maybe just a personal plus, i just really like seeing people planning both in advance and in spur of the moment. it's really satisfying to see how a plan comes together and succeeds or fails; plus, since red team is the main team using this strategy at the moment and their main draw and strength as a team is cohesion and communication this would be completely fucking riveting for me as a viewer so maybe this is just a personal thing. but i really really think it would be fun

but again, i'm not a game designer, or a qsmp player, or a qsmp admin, or honestly even really a gamer? so maybe i'm off my rocker and out of my gourd and this isn't viable or balanced in any way shape or form but YKNOW what is this blog except putting stupid thoughts into the void and seeing if this time the void spits back hate mail so. i'm folding this into a paper airplane and throwing it into the abyss. hopefully it made sense.

k love you appreciate you getting this far, have a good week!!

(i hope your team gets a win in dramatic fashion and celebrates together!!! i hope they come together and unleash a plan so spectacular it takes the server by storm!!! i hope it's so good it becomes a vod you go back to even years in the future!!!! i hope you have a good week!!!!!)

[skrunksthatwunk]

chipmunk adrian belew be like she saved my life in a matter of squeaking,