Written by Otaku Apologist
Those of you who are cucking to the system, running the gauntlet of schools, part-time jobs, maybe climbing up the corporate ladder and worrying about job security, you’re surely reading grim news on the economy. Shit ain’t stable.
COVID policies are wrecking innumerable family businesses, plunging countless families into poverty, on top we got the elite-imposed energy crisis (the green transition is the crisis), causing the price of electricity and goods to fluctuate like a sexy pole dancer’s supple body, leading to hundreds of thousands dying in their homes at winter. On top of that, we got an onslaught of robots and artificial intelligence taking jobs in various sectors of the economy, leading to mass layoffs. We also got the new global bottom-to-top wealth transfer program called the Russia-Ukraine war, because the Afghanistan money laundering operation ended. Add to that all kinds of extra shenanigans that our corrupt mainstream media barely reports on.
The economy is unstable, because of corruption. Because we have narcissistic sociopaths for leaders fleecing the population to finance wars, selling national resources to multinationals, bastards financing their luxurious lifestyles with treason. Meanwhile, technological advancements are so rapid, it’s a chaotic period where job descriptions are changing.
Now, stay with me as I rant, because I’m going to equip you with the mindset necessary to survive and thrive in these turbulent times. I realized this morning, when watching the below video that a friend shared on the Hentaireviews social Discord, that my perspective as a lifelong freelancer is the voice that must be heard throughout the world.
Summary of the video: It’s all doom and gloom, the middle-class is dead, bla bla bla.
Yeah, my family was middle-class too, until both parents lost their jobs, now I’m shooting for upper middle-class status with a fresh strategy that I recommend to you too. To explain it simply, you need a gang.
First, some basics. In a stable economy, you got a lot of permanent factory-line types of tasks, where your career is to keep the cogs rolling in the corporate machinery efficient as possible until a cozy retirement. When the economy is having an expansion cycle, companies want to just keep the wheels rolling and risk little. But in an unstable economy like this, demand spikes randomly. Gigs are more project-based. Suddenly there’s a shortage of something, you gotta go there. Suddenly something breaks, you gotta fix that. Some new waifu gets popular, you wanna do that.
When Bowsette suddenly broke the internet in 2019, we suspended a project to make a comic of her.
Without clear market signals to chase, companies will come up with higher-risk projects with smaller budgets, until they got a whiff again which direction to pump funds. I know this, because I talk to companies, plus run my own.
In my perspective and experience, what matters most in a chaotic economy is positioning. You want to have what people need readily available. The ability to respond quickly to a demand-spike is the key. Hoarding assets, like useful contacts or some goods, is advisable. Personally, I’m growing my contact list to take on sporadic freelance work from private clients and companies, while saving money to chase new hentai trends that might emerge quite suddenly.
You want to get skilled at approaching companies and famous people. Stalk their twitters, show up on their streams, join their Discord community groups. Get to know them, their style, their customers, read interviews, follow them to get information, then suggest collab. Do the legwork! Your first negotiations with companies will likely be embarrassing failures, but you’ll learn the art of negotiating deals over time, because you have to. Necessity begets creativity and vigor.
But in addition to chasing opportunities, set up a system that generates leads automatically, so you don’t have to exhaust yourself in chasing gigs. Then you can actually focus on task completion and build up your portfolio. With a competent website that hosts your work samples, you can have employers chase you. Don’t rely on social media, your account can be banned.
Snapshot of my life: Some weeks ago I had a gig to head-hunt developers for a game project. I delegated that to a freelancer and grabbed a margin off top. Just today I got a gig to write 7 sex scenes for a new visual novel that received a budget last week. Also doing consulting work to a company on how to improve their sexual content (no hours for that this month). I’m financing two in-house game projects going for sale this year, while scripting tens of sex scenes to another company’s Unity-based game with an assistant. On the hentaicommissions side, we’re doing a set of animations featuring Dawn from Pokémon, while another client is asking us for an internal creampie animation. Also got a client paying us to make a 23-page interracial comic, plus a racist Hermione Granger comic (which was paused due to artist’s personal life, but now resuming) and a Gwen Stacy comic (the artist of which had to be switched). Even that’s not everything we’re doing, as I’m in constant talks with clients and companies about collaboration, most talks ending in failures, but many also succeeding.
After some time, you get accustomed to depending on sporadic gigs that determine each week whether people in your social circle are out on the street or not. Knowing the stakes, you negotiate projects in a friendly and civilized fashion.
In an unstable economy, you’re thinking with your feet all the time. You’re saving funds to pay sudden bills and chase short-term opportunities. But to actually win, you need a gang of useful people who are constantly improving their skillsets and teaching you new things too. You want to be learning new softwares and machinery, reading deeply, supplementing your competence and income with matching gigs. And gigs you can’t do yourself, refer the tasks to your gang.
You have to help people, so they’ll help you. The system is collapsing. Our governments are bankrupt, we have no pensions coming. It is looking increasingly unlikely that we’ll have a welfare state standing, nor is a singular employer going to provide lifelong job security. We have to rely on each other, be each other’s social safety net.
I have multiple income streams, because usually when one is performing well, another is performing badly. You want multiple employer contacts, multiple business ventures, multiple clients, multiple freelance contacts, a public portfolio, you want to be hunting opportunities even when you have good ones, because you’ve no idea what will stick and what collapses.
Next, let’s talk about AI, since that’s scaring so many people.
I’ve personally done AI media projects already, we did some things in-house to understand the limits of the technology. I can happily confirm, not one writer or artist lost their jobs because of AI… Because while AI is effective where it shines, there’s many things it just can’t do. You still have an easier time interfacing with a human than with a program, especially if your project is a comic the details of which you want to micro manage. Currently, based on our experiments, AI can halve the costs of producing commercial media, but that’s about it. It’s definitely not taking over the world just yet. It makes horrendous mistakes, so you still need human operators who understand how to give it good prompts and to fix its mistakes in Photoshop.
In summary, forget about building your life around permanent tasks. Embrace chaos. Like the woman I was supposed to marry and impregnate once said, “hentai is anarchic fun”… What a prophetic bitch she was.
