#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]

[anonymolly]

.

[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.

[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,

[pandemichub]

More information about Stanford research goals and the RECOVER Program/Initiative:

[rockinlibrarian]

Hi there!

Do you enjoy reviews and recommendations of everything from picture books to fanfics to mildly psychedelic music?

Are you interested in half-coherent descriptions of possibly interesting library programs?

Do you like to listen to (read) me ramble?

Don't you want to know about the extreme middle-agedness of the person behind this blog?

WELL THEN, have I got the post for you!

It's exactly what it says! It's organized into nice lists with boldfaced items and headings in larger fonts! It has a lot of @sunnymarbles in it! It has quite a few of YOU (or at least people on Tumblr who may in fact not see this at all unless I tag them) on it, too, but likely just once each, for something you wrote! Except @destinyandcoins who is on there twice for different reasons! @dannypageoflight is oddly enough NOT in it! Sorry Dan! You have apparently done nothing interesting this year!

[ifindtheartifacts]

On the plane send prayers and good vibes