2008.06.17
I'm such crap at life decisions! I'm feeling my usual urge to conduct Q+A with tons of people I respect: the best (and techie) friend who stayed at our University for his Masters, a beloved professor from that same school, my first manager out of college, my Aunt who put this round of the idea in my head, a friend of a friend who is going for her PhD in that same New Media course I noted yesterday, presumably to teach...
Would I enjoy teaching if it were at a low level? (And would I have the credentials to teach anything but that unless I focus on hard core stuff?) Could a New Media program open a door to a more interesting, well-rounded job, or should I stick with the tried and true server stuff and just try to be interesting on the weekends, as it were?
And most importantly, how the hell do I figure this stuff out? I'm sure some of those friends and supporters I mentioned up above might get sick of acting as de facto career counselors, but I don't know what other resources I have. Is there a career counselor type who really knows this kind of field and could study my background and make recommendations accordingly?
Art and Toys of the Moment
Dave Bollinger Works page has some fun stuff that I need to explore at a more leisurely pace. The generative art of pixelrobots and pixelspaceships is not to be missed, and stuff like scrawl is super pretty. (via crummy)
Bollinger references Paul Schmidinger's page which also has some nifty stuff.
Between programmer/artists like these, and some of the folks at Indy Games, it can be frustrating, like when you see an idea of yours already implemented, or just in general more grace and cleverness than you can easily provide.
In some ways, I'd love to figure out how to merge my thoughts about more schooling and my desire to make more stuff like this. But I'm not sure if the latter has much to do with making money. (Though sometimes I think what is really lacking is the artistic pretension... I'm not sure if blogging and geeking is totally compatible with "le artiste" type respect.)
Speechifying of the Moment
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.BoingBoing's summary missed the big section on Amnesty International that the full transcript reveals.
Tight pinstripe slacks on women form a bit much of a topological map.