Thump Thump Thump

Sorry for the radio silence for the past week. Life is, as ever, a quixotic complication of schedules, stresses, and situations, all requiring time and attention. Needless to say, while I could have found the time, I opted instead to not worry about it, and focus on other things. Will I be continuing the music posts? Yeah, probably, but I think I’m done doing them daily for now. There is no shortage of music to talk about, but when you’re coming home wiped and it’s 103 degrees in your apartment, you simply don’t want to sit at the computer and write a review. While writing every day is important, it should be because you’re passionate about it, not because you feel a sense of obligation — that’s a surefire way to douse the spark before it even has time to light. (As Heinlein said: “If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you’ll abort it if you do. Be patient and you’ll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.“)

I’ve been continuing to work doing game testing, which has been good. I get along well enough with my coworkers, and while I do get up early, and have to deal with 520 traffic heading home (which often leaves me knackered by the time I get home, regardless of how I felt when I left work), it’s still an enjoyable gig, and I feel like I’m DOING something (most of the time… every once in a while we get a day where we’ve done the testing we needed to do, and are simply waiting for a newly corrected build from the developer, so we’re basically just playing through the game trying to think of a new way to break things then, and that ends up feeling like makework for this late in the cycle). I’ve been chatting with a few of my co-workers about doing a mod, as we all have different “other” abilities to bring to the table… one is a modeler and texture artist, one is a programmer, I do production/writing/design, so the idea currently is to brainstorm a project that allows us each to showcase what we excel at. I’ll definitely keep folks in the loop as things solidify with that.

Things I’d like to get back to doing:
1) Photographing regularly (daily would be ideal, but weekly would do).
2) Writing (in particular working on some fiction).
3) Programming (Objective-C)
4) 70 a character in WoW, 75 a character in FFXI
5) Studying and writing about game design.