Silophae

X/Twitter might have actually hit the final nail in the coffin this time. It's no longer a safe space for artists to post art.

There are a lot of people out there who voice act as a hobby who’d do it for very cheap. My housemate is one such hobby voice actor and I asked her if she or her friends would take the job if someone contacted them saying “I’m making a short indie game and need a voice actor for this one character but I can only pay you 5$” and she immediately said yes. They already do it for free as a hobby so being paid anything is just a bonus, and it would be a fun little job. All she’d ask for besides the 5 bucks is being put in the credits to get her name out there.

taking advantage of hobbyists' willingness to be underpaid for their labor or to work for exposure is absolutely not the way to handle trying to make a project you do not have the budget for. exploiting people who have a passion for what they do is a problem that plagues the games industry at every level and we should be doing everything in our power to discourage those sort of working relationships within our peers, not acting like it's somehow a win win.

it's genuinely great that your housemate has the financial security and free time available that she can do fun little jobs for $5 like the one you described, and i don't think her willingness to do this is somehow wrong in any way, but i think extrapolating that situation into a rule of thumb for how people trying to do indie dev projects should behave is completely irresponsible.

in general i dont think being a hobbyist means it's right for you to be underpaid. but something i think very much worth noting is that a not insignificant amount of those people you can find easily on youtube may not necessarily be "hobbyists" as much as they are people who have accepted they will not be able to break into the voice acting scene. many of these people are also very likely to be quite young and have less experience setting boundaries for themselves in professional or semi-professional contexts. Understanding that AI voice generation reduces the opportunities for paid VO work means understanding that a desperation for any amount of income for doing what they do or any kind of credit they could put on a resume is going to make people more willing to agree to exploitative working relationships than they should be.

if you're okay with amateur voice acting in your project, try starting with people you already know instead of soliciting internet strangers. people you already have rapport with, who might already be familiar with you and believe in the project you're working on, who you can be reasonably certain are in a place where providing you their labor without compensation isn't putting them out.

a big part of working on large scale projects is also learning to compromise between your vision and what is actually feasible. shifting your scope to something that is within your budget is always going to be the better choice than finding sneaky ways to get more labor out of your fellow creatives for less money. additionally, if you're releasing your game for sale, you can put whatever profits you might make towards patching in voice over after the fact. There is plenty of precedent for this in the industry - Disco Elysium released in 2019 and wasn't fully voiced until 2021, for example.

also something to keep in mind if you're making a for-profit game is the possibility of getting people on board with a profit sharing set up instead of just offering trivial or otherwise subpar compensation on the front end. Sure, the odds of any one indie game making bank are pretty low, but they're never zero, and I'm sure a lot of people would be more comfortable participating in an indie project as a partner in that game's future success than as a hired grunt.

‘The Magic of Jingle Sleigh Heights’

This right here is why Ichigo should never have been allowed back in the human world.

Regular captains and lieutenants need a reiatsu limiting gentei kaijou seal on them to be allowed to go there at all.

Ichigo, base-line before he reaches this version of Aizen, had the reiatsu strength of three captains.

Ichigo overwhelmed this version of Aizen, then went on and overwhelmed and defeated a several times stronger version of Aizen.

And then he finds out more than half of his reiatsu was sealed all along and his reiatsu is so strong when he's going into battle it nearly causes a physical manifestation.

Even with a gentei kaijou Ichigo shouldn't be able to be in the living world because that seal works on a percentage and limits reiatsu to 1/3 - which would put Ichigo at the level of a captain before the seal.

Ichigo, by the laws of how everything works and his own skill level, should not be able to walk down the street in Karakura without leaving a line of broken bodies like Aizen did.

Aizen was not TRYING to kill those people. He even warned that guy to not come close. Aizen is extremely skillful in precise things and can absolutely restrain and control his reiatsu to a degree Ichigo is not able, and may never be able, to achieve, and he's STILL accidentally killing humans that get within a certain radius of him.

He's still blasting semi-to actually powerful shinigami's limbs to reishi dust when they get close to him even with Kurotsuchi's specially made seals and bindings and chair designed to keep Aizen's reiatsu close to his body.

Aizen never touches ANYONE but Ichigo and Yhwach after he fully transcends himself with the hogyoku.

It's entirely possible he CAN'T. That this is not an aspect of himself he can turn off and he's just permanently separated himself from everyone else in a every sense of the world.

That no one can even come close to touching him. That they won't even get to the point of being in physical contact with him before their hands cease to exist.

But Ichigo can lay his hands on his bare skin.

Ichigo can touch him.

Ichigo may be "weak" enough his reiatsu isn't insta-killing shinigami and souls able to withstand reiatsu, but he is definitely not weak or skilled in reiatsu control enough he should be able to be in the world of the living around souls with zero immunity to reiatsu.

Also: what a heady thing that must be for Aizen after all that isolation, to know there's one single person out there that can touch him.

Ichigo being able to get into that body is like Aizen or Yhwach entering a gigai; it shouldn’t be possible. So, unless Ichigo is sporting some Muken gear post-684 (which wouldn’t even solve the problem) there’s no valid reason as to how he hasn’t accidentally killed everyone around him. Especially considering he’s always at maximum output with his spirit energy.

At least in the Soul Society the reishi-rich air could act as a buffer for his reiatsu but the WOL doesn’t have that.

Just to list the reasons as to why Ichigo shouldn’t physically be able to exist in the WOL:

As you mentioned, his reiatsu would turn everyone to dust.

His body can’t hold his soul form, it’s too powerful. It’d either disintegrate or explode.

His reiatsu is too influential on Hollows. Karakura must be swarmed with them.

He’s a beacon of spirit energy basically inviting danger (be it from Squad 0, remaining Quincies, Arrancars, whatever is in Hell, etc.)

He’s already dead.

They, that is Soul Society and the Zero Division, still made the frankly fucking baffling decision to allow Ichigo to return to WOL. Which we latter learn in those whimsy light novels is the lid of hell.

[Video description–

Construction works, including stamping of designs on concrete flooring, and also the cutting of tiles to fit around tricky obstructions such as light switches and an octagonal column.

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I’ve read classics since I was young and I agree with you totally 👍

Also, reading them critically can help to understand how people in the past thought and to recognize the different ways discrimination can happen at a narrative level and how prejudice can blind even smart observant people (for example, both Giovanni Verga and Luigi Pirandello were definitely great intellectuals and understood human condition well but they were misogynists like many men of their era too).

And one can discover how minorities managed to write their own texts, just look at Sappho, Hroswitha, Kassia, Murasaki Shikibu and Hildegard Von Bingen, and the first examples of feminist literature, like “The blazing world” by Margaret Cavendish and “The faerie queene” by Edmund Spenser or fairytales like “The Snow Queen” by Andersen and “Alibaba and the forty thieves” and “Tatterhood”.