Interesting little game

I wasn't too enthralled with this the first time I checked it out, but with a long list of classmates participating, whom I could fight against, it became more interesting.

Create your Brute and fight creekpilgrim, if you dare. Fear my cute pink hair! Fear it!

It's an odd little game in that you don't really do anything except choose whom to fight - the things that happen during a fight are all automatic and don't require any actions or choices on your part. And you get experience from other people fighting your brute when you're not around, and possibly some kind of experience from the experience of your pupils - that part I'm not too clear on as yet.

There are one or two other games I know of that basically play themselves - you just let them run and they level up over time. Sadly, I cannot remember their names....

Damn you, Turbine

It figures that they come out with Leaves of Lorien just as I lose access to my shiny ETC machine.

For those of you unfamiliar with Lord of the Rings Online, or those of you who would like to see pretty screenshots from my favorite part of The Lord of the Rings, check it out here.

Grad school hates me, again

On the other hand, this is my favorite grad school advisor EVAR. When life hands you a Leave of Absence, if you're patient enough, you might receive a Spanish computer graphics guy to make up for the sour taste in your mouth.

Of course, when grad school subsequently hands you a Letter of Dismissal... I'm not sure what happens after that, although I'm doing okay with the patience bit (at the moment). Thank the good Lord for library Internet access. And friends. And mothers.

Link to read after sleeping

This is the end of my Internet wanderings for tonight. I swear it!

A friend of a friend recommends this fabulous post by Rob Donoghue. I was intrigued enough to read the one about mooks; looking forward to finishing this up tomorrow. After the voxelizing has been conquered. Or at least the collision detection that is holding up the voxelizing.

3 am

YouTube served me up a lovely new voice tonight, and then it suggested this, a mashup of said voice, Katie Melua, and... well... watch it. I believe it's a film called Threads, but I can't be bothered to check because Matchbox 20 is singing me a lullaby and I don't feel like interrupting. Say what you will about the pop band, and then take a look at his eyes in the last few seconds of the song. That's quality humanness.

If I'm going to be awake at 3am, I might as well be in this sort of mood. Connections, insights, a sudden view into the territory around this momentary rut my life is in. And I don't mean rut in a bad way. At least not entirely. Not that my performance this semester has been perfect, but the semester itself has been... reasonable. I'm currently walking a waiting-for-student-loans tightwire, with bad consequences for having absolutely no cash waiting just a few steps ahead. And I need to somehow kick my independent study into gear. But these are not things that are going to kill me, and I have faith that people are going to be kind to me this time around.

The work is good. The teammates are cool - tonight's afterhours movie selections were Shinobi and Shaun of the Dead, so you know the bonding's topnotch. Which, unfortunately, meant that I missed the last bus home and here I am. Fortunately for you, if you're a long-lost friend wondering what's up with Julie these days. And most of my friends are at least a bit off the radar, so.

I'm not sure whether I wish I didn't need the kindness. It would be great to do everything right and never need help, at least in theory. But maybe it would be even lonelier.

Working for The Man

Here's another one Juleigh sent out, this time featuring advice about how to restructure instead of downsize, should you be a video game company executive feeling the pinch of the current financial climate.

While I'm not a video game executive, nor do I plan to be one anytime soon, I really enjoyed the article. Thinking back to my time in financial software (hello Ontario Systems), the advice here really makes sense. I don't think I was ever there during painful layoff sessions, but I do pay attention, read pretty widely, and hear stories from people who've worked at various companies; also, Ontario was unusually open about the financial status of the company, at least internally, so I got me some finance and accounting education whether I needed it or not.

I can picture how the suggestions that Mr. Mencher gives might work better than the standard "We're trimming 7% of our workforce in order to meet (or approach) our yearly earnings projection." And given the state of the world economy, who couldn't use advice about better ways to keep a business viable? Really, I think it boils down to: if you let your numbers men or women run the show, you're going to piss off your employees, or at least frighten them into polishing their resume when they should be working harder to fill in for all those people you just fired. Wouldn't it be better to take a look around and find some ways to tighten the collective belt before you resort to decreasing your labor force? Perhaps you don't need that corporate jet after all, or your financial planners and industry forecasters should give up their yearly bonuses for dropping the ball on this one.

Good links for job hunters

The ever-fantastic Ms. Juleigh DeCarlo just sent these out to us, and I want to dig into them (and possibly post about the first one) when I get a bit of breathing room. The sprint to Quarter Presentations is on and things are a bit hectic around the offices. Cool that we have "offices;" a suite of rooms is just what one needs when one is doing serious development.

Six Words that Make Your Resume Suck

The AWN Career Connections

The Five Worst Mistakes You Can Make on a Resume

Evidently, AWN.com is a good resource for entertainment technologists. Who knew?

Beginning again

New year, new semester, new chance to have a fulfilling and useful semester at the ETC. And so far, everything is fab-o, a-ok, could not be better if I had custom ordered it. I mean, having my old housemates back would be perfection, but since they've all abandoned me for the West Coast (except for Zikun! who is in Pittsburgh somewhere), I'll take what I can get.

My main semester project: Crayon 3D which you can investigate here and here. Someday we will have a shinier website. With possible mailing list! Our dreams and future feature lists are bigger than one semester can contain.

Kongregate

No, you didn't just catch me out in a typo. Having discovered the Referrals page on one of my favorite casual game sites, I am here to try it out.

It's fun to combine things. So: my previous post about freelance online writing meets my love of all things piratical meets my addiction to casual games: click here and earn me some points, friends. It's fun, I promise. And if you don't find it fun, please tell me why. I'd genuinely like to know.

Taking the plunge

It might end up being only a small plunge - I have so far invested less than $20 in this venture, plus a few hours doing research on how to make money online without going into anything resembling marketing or "business." I hate business. My friend Carrie and I had a running joke in undergrad that business majors don't have souls. Since the only business major I can think of that I'm particularly close to is thinking about ditching her religion as a bunch of man-made power-grabbing foolishness, I have yet to find a reason to change our theory.

But I digress. Free Lance Home Writers is my new business partner, and hopefully between me putting in some serious time on this and it actually being a decent system, I will make enough to pay off these last couple months of student loan payments that are breathing down my neck. Last only because I will shortly be fighting my way through whatever paperwork is necessary to make the banks leave me alone until I actually graduate at the end of next semester. Also, boots. I need boots. No, really. This is not girl-talk, or retail therapy. My old ones fell apart in Japan, and I don't intend to trudge to the bus stop through snow drifts wearing sneakers.

You see how I have difficulty focusing on finding gainful employment? I think it boils down to real fear that I won't find anything and I'll end up spending the rest of my natural life hiding from big mean banks. I didn't realize going into this whole deal that grad school would be such a gamble. For the past six months, I've felt as though I were teetering on the brink of either pushing through and getting that huge piece of paper from CMU or waving goodbye to $60,000 plus interest and making the best of my life as it stands.

If you're looking for some sort of pretty shiny summary of what this post is about, sorry. Fresh out today.