my qsmp life

(Please note, I'm not a professional or a journalist. This post is half regular person wording things for other regular people who were also regularly confused by corpo-speak and half me writing things down as it helps me remember it lmao)

Weren't staff just volunteers?

Yes! But also no. Basically they had this trial system before you got paid (yeah, red flags immediately, you get it now?) where for one week they did the work unpaid until they were either accepted and paid or weren't excepted and were fired. Volunteers, officially and on the "we're hiring!!!" things posted on twitter, only existed for that trial and were a temporary stage before employment. OR!!! That's what was *supposed* to happen, basically QSMP Studios staff kept making up excuses to extend that one week deadline, claiming stuff like "your behavior is strange, we're just gonna keep an extra eye on you for a while before we make a decision" and then it dragged on and on with people being stuck in the volunteer phase for months in some cases. which is unpaid labor. which is scummy af. think unpaid internships, but with even less safety nets in place.

Weren't the Staff paid and Volunteers unpaid, because well, they're just volunteers?

Ok so basically people had official jobs and what they were being paid for (at abysmally low rates, mind you) and then were also asked to do other not-their-job things, so "artist" staff and "person who did art for qsmp" are not the same thing, translators drew art unpaid, roleplayers did translating unpaid, etc etc. List of QSMP Staff/Volunteer wages: Paid Staff: 150€ (171 USD) per month - Keep in mind that the server was open and had people working on it pretty much 24/7 over a year, someone who was a paid staff member throughout almost the entirety of the servers runtime, a year, would have been paid 1800 euro ($2056 USD) for months of being on call pretty much 24/7 which surmounts to an hourly (on-call or working) rate of about 24 cents. These were the paid ones. Roleplayers/Actors: Unpaid Builders: $5 USD per hour Commission pay for art done by non-artist staff: Unpaid Developers (Unknown what is meant by "developers", could be backend, webdev, modding etc): Some were reported to have been paid as little as 1 Euro ($1 USD) per hour Twitter Account Admins: Unpaid Web Developer: Between $5-22 USD per hour Video Translation: $1 per minute of edited video, (The minumum wage per minute in my country is 5 times that btw, I was gonna give the USA one as an example but its abysmal, but they were paid less than that anyways so ugh) Video Translation done by non-translator staff: Unpaid 3D Modeling (Commission pricing examples from one Model Artist): Small model - ~5-10$ Player-size - ~15-20$ Large - ~30-60$ Unusual sizing - 60$+ Rush Fee - 15$+ This is lower than commercial pricing. Writing: $200-400 USD per month - writers were just as on-call 24/7 as other staff types, last minute changes happened frequently, needing changes a days or even hours before going live. Hourly rate calculates to about 40 cents per hour.

Staff were paid from Quackity's personal Paypal account, rather than an official business transaction. Paypal transaction fees were not covered by QSMP Studios / Quackity. (Side note, one (maybe more) of the QSMP actors were underage, and unpaid due to being an actor so yeah unpaid child labor.)

(Side side note, the "NDA" they had to sign was the first result of typing "NDA" into google lmao)

It's just minecraft, they're getting paid to pay minecraft, they're lucky!

Staff were uber overworked, on call 24/7, and made to do sooo many things outside of their official designated/paid jobs. The idea of an admin with a specific job is nebulous at best. That was what you were on paper, in reality admins did a bit of everything. Actors did art, writers did translation, builders did writing, it was all over the place. Remember the jokes about admins being online for 13+ hours a day? It was funny at the time, "they're being paid to play minecraft, wouldn't be online all the time?" In reality they had no choice.

The staff have been paid now!

I have seen zero evidence of this being the case, the closest Ive seen is a he-said-she-said of posts saying that Quackity told Philza and Tubbo who mentioned it on stream. I have seen zero clips of them saying this, but even if they have, it needs to come from Quackity.

“I just don’t think enough people understand their character,” the mayor has been quoted as saying. “Too many people saw them through another streamer’s POV, and I just think that it’s a great injustice to Aimsey’s character that all these people see them as only a part of who they really were.”

Mamdani expressed appreciation for Aimsey’s character arc, especially the quiet moments of solitude and the emotional monologues given when the creator’s microphone was muted for other players.

“The yuri is cool and all, but I also think it’s disingenuous to associate tr!Aimsey with only their romantic relationships with other characters. Hopefully, more people will see them as their own character and not an extension of their favorite POV.”

remember, voting is based on swag, trauma, and favoritism!!

trauma and propaganda under the cut!

First of all, canonically, white hair (in regards to things like QSMP and Arkanis) is the result of memory loss. So the reason the streak of white started for Cellbit was because he was kidnapped (along with Felps) by the Federation, and he woke up one day in this prison type place they had him and Felps in with that streak, meaning they altered his memories and with his being somehow.

And to add to that, he only has a streak because while the Federation most certainly affected him and his damage (both physical and mental), it wasn't enough for more than a bit of white to show up in his hair. The more white there is, the more memory loss there is or has been. He still remembers his name and family and why he doesn't like the Federation etc etc. Where as Bagi (his sister) looks opposite to him in that regard, the majority of her hair is white and she has a streak of brown at the front (and later her hair becomes entirely white because she has lost all of her memories, but this post isn't about her lol).

Also, adding to the addition "he was forced to solve enigmas", while that isn't incorrect, that's not fully how it went either. It wasn't just because of the Federation he was solving them, and he wasn't forced to solve them always either. Yes, they gave him many puzzles, during his kidnapping and throughout QSMP, but the reason he got the white streak wasn't solely because of the kidnapping. He was solving enigmas before he got the streak and he was certainly solving them after the fact too.