Welcome to the first of what I would like to make a weekly series of blog posts. These updates will consist of three factors: the Personal, the Professional, and the Published. The personal will cover my daily activities, professional will entail my attempts to network and expand my (growing) empire, and published will contain the last week’s updates to the blog and my future plans. I’m still pretty iffy on the separation between categories. Especially the title of that last one. Feels like a reach.

Personal

This week has been tumultuous in its untumultuousness (definitely a word.) Seeking work has dominated most of my daily hours, but I’ve been particularly motivated towards self-improvement in all its forms. Simply put, I had a reckoning that I had been stuck in a rut for a while now, and I want to get back to the point where I can look at myself from five years ago and think, “whoo, at least I’m not THAT guy.” I think it might be easiest to break down my focuses into a list:

• Daily 30-60 minute walks in direct sunlight. Haven’t been getting enough physical activity since my treadmill bit the dust, so this is my next best option. I would prefer running, but I threw my previous running shoes out with the treadmill. I’d like to get a new pair of shoes before wearing out my current ones any further. To take advantage of this lenient pace, I’ve also taken to doing light arm exercises with some dumbbells I had lying around. Felt like a waste having open hands. I probably look like a psychopath pacing around in my backyard doing curls and listening to music, but fuck ’em. Walking, jogging, or running has always been my self-reflection time. It’s like meditation, but for someone with ADHD. Oh, and the Vitamin D ain’t bad.
• Reorganizing my room. What a goddamn mess. Boxes still lazily left unsorted from moving, that sort of thing. Trying to figure out which clothes I want to keep, etc. Kind of hitting my limit on dresser space, which is frustrating. And I lack shelves for my physical game collection, so they might have to finally go down to the basement. I feel like I’m shunning my children, tossing them into the cellar like illegitimate heirs. I guess some parents do in fact do that though, so that means it’s fine, right? Anyway, one box/crate/containment unit a day.
• Growing my beard out. Does this count as self-improvement? I prefer how I look with facial hair, so I guess so. The challenge is knowing when to stop. I told myself I’d groom it down for my next interview or other IRL appointment. Hopefully my job search isn’t so unlucky that I look like a hermit by the end of this.
• Starting this blog. I’ve had nowhere to consolidate my decade+ of work, and I’m kicking myself over not doing this sooner. I must empower my brand!
• Opening an Instagram. I had no traditional social media presence, and this seemed like a good one. I’ve gone on trips to Santa Fe and Chicago over the past few years, and it feels like a bit of a shame to keep those adventures to myself. Once I have some spending money again, I plan to go on regular expeditions to conventions or whatever places interesting people congregate, and I’ll be documenting those here and on Insta. Did you know there’s apparently a convention just for mall Santas? Sounds like a jolly old time. I currently don’t plan to dress up. That shit looks hot.

Professional

Oh me, oh my. Those faint of heart may want to skip these sections. Or not, because things tend to turn around eventually. Back in January, I landed a great contract at my highest rate yet. My job title was “logistics coordinator,” but it was kind of a fancy way of calling me a secretary. Not to downplay my quality of work, mind. I did the typical office smorgasbord of data entry, formatting and standardizing documents, finding new clients for my employer, and assisting in constructing and organizing meetings. The intention was for my role to become more defined over time, with me potentially flying out to assist at a conference in Georgia! Alas, an internal restructuring left me without duties to mop up, and as the newest employee, I was let go.

The experience is highly appreciated, and I wear it proudly on my resume. Though it has yet to prove its worth in acquiring me a new contract. I’ve set my sights high on becoming salaried rather than this perpetual gig crap, but I’m beginning to think Icarus would never have made it as a writer. Truth be told, I’ve only been deep in the hunt for about two weeks now, which is probably nothing in the grand scheme of things. I have a couple of prospects on the horizon, but it’s too early to feel confident about them.

I don’t want this to sound too pessimistic – we all know how dreadful the job market is right now, anyway. I was at my lowest point before I landed my previous job, so I try to remember from experience that people do exist with an actual eye for talent (and another fixed on cost-cutting, but c’est la vie.) As always, it’s difficult to know what to blame the most. Yourself? Well, we can always make ourselves more valuable. Nepotism? Hardly a secret that the best way to get hired is know someone who will feel personally bad about saying “no” to you. The rise of AI? Certainly a detriment, but the trend has been on a decline as people realize the technology fucking sucks and will just tell you to jump off a rooftop if you ask how to make a potato salad. Predictive text models are not new technology, people. We haven’t been using it wide-scale for damn good reasons. Critical thinking and contextualization are core to communication, and AI is not yet capable of learning in the abstract, empathetic capacity that humans can.

Have to cut that rant off there. Anyway, should things not turn around in another two or three weeks, I’ll probably switch full-time to learning new skills with regards to graphic design, video editing, and audio mixing. For a long time, I’ve wanted to use videos as a way to expand my audience, and I’ve also always wanted to try breaking into voice acting. So, we’ll see.

Published

The site looks like shit. I’m aware. I’ve always been a function-over-form guy, but this is too much even for me. I’m still attempting to learn WordPress proper, and my priorities remain with importing content, regardless. WordPress’s design feels made to accommodate landing pages for businesses. Large, unwieldy images organized for tablets with the smallest text boxes for listing your contact info, social media, and a hollow mission statement. The internet changed history by allowing us access to an unprecedented amount of information, yet modern web design seems almost embarrassed of that strength. Corporate sites are so slight now that they feel like they could slip through your fingers. And at the same time, they preach about wanting to appear more “human” during meetings about PR. You can’t appear to have a soul while also wanting to remove all traces of one. I’m sorry.

Hey, at least all of you fuckers will always have me. So yeah, expect slow changes to site aesthetics for now, but daily additions to content. In particular, the video games page has had a boatload of ancient content imported. And boy, is some of it bad. Much of it is nearly a decade old now, and originally was intended to only be read by a small group of friends. This was an excuse to keep my writing standards low. My current intention is to edit one work a day. This entails improving syntax, grammar, formatting – everything. The only thing that may be neglected are gameplay and mechanical descriptions. Some bear revisiting to properly describe, and I don’t have that time right now. Last week, I completed my first rewrite with Hajime no Ippo – The Fighting!. I thought it would be a minor job, and it still probably took over an hour. But I felt great after seeing the transformation. And today, I rewrote Kirby’s Dream Land 3. Please check both of them out!

And before I forget, a shoutout to a very special friend. They said I didn’t need to do this, which only guaranteed that I would. To maintain plausible deniability and to protect the innocent, I’ll be referring to them with an alias. Thank you to Schmillian, a lovely, kind, and intelligent English teacher with a superhuman level of patience when it comes to hearing me rant about everything from video games to cannibals. You’re a class act. Literally, because you have classes. May your sanity hold for as long as we know each other. Ganbatte!

This blog entry ended up going on for longer than I expected. I just love hearing myself type, I guess. If you read all of that, reward yourself with something delicious and pretend it was from me. Until next time. Namaste. Memento mori. Omle du fromage.