freetime

As in "I look forward to having some." This month will continue to devour my little soul bite by bite until mid- to late May. And while it's a shame that I won't see the light of day for many, many weeks, I have to take a few minutes to tell you that I still love the game industry. I have a ton of reasons, but here are a few of the small, petty ones. The deeper, more resonate reasons come later, when I'm not just rattling off a few disconnected thoughts before bed.

1) it's not corporate America, even when it is. I've never seen a game company that even comes close, in its most corporate and evil days, to any bank, any business, any of the traditional jobs my high-school counselors wanted my to consider.
2) every day, I get to go to work knowing that I'll be able to voice an opinion on something that matters dearly to me. Whether that opinion is listened to, well, that's icing on the cake. As long as I get to speak honestly and without compromise on the things that matter to me, I'm at least somewhat content.
3) the stuff I'm writing gets read by more people than I've ever really stopped to appreciate. I read a lot of online reviews, and that skews my impression of how well my work is being received. I've been thinking a lot about my work lately, and I've got opinions, which are forming slowly, in what little spare time I have. I'll be posting them when I finish, I suppose.
4) today, at work, I wore a Haujobb t-shirt underneath a pullover that has a pattern looking remarkably similar to human bones dyed into the sleeves. Nobody blinked.

There are things I don't like. I'm not writing this down because I want to lord it over anybody. However, when I'm working long hours, trying to remember why I'm doing it in the first place, I need to stop and appreciate the fact that I am writing professionally, writing in a field I love, and even if I'm not always writing in a style or on a subject I enjoy, at the very least, I'm writing.

I lost my train of thought along the way. Never pause a rant to brush your teeth, no matter how much you think the aftertaste of guinness is bothering you.

Eating: I hate some Trader Joe's Indian food... boil-in-a-bag Johdpur vegetables. Our kitchen was just finished, so we can cook again. Tomorrow.
Drinking: Are you kidding? I just brushed my teeth! Earlier: Guinness, some green tea afterwards.
Listening: Nothing right now, but I've been listening to the new Haujobb for a while, the Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack, and some old led zeppelin to distract me while I work. Other work hits include Apoptygma Berzerk, Kronos Quartet, Underworld, Mozart, Chopin (noctures and impromptus), and Senor Coconut.
Thinking: Nothing coherent, as you've already guessed. Stopping for a minute to appreciate what I do, because I've been in a bit of a funk lately. I've been thinking about the video-game industry a lot, about the industries that thrive around it, about the localization process (I'll explain all this to those of you who don't know what I'm talking about), and about the way that process is seen by the outside world. Let's just say that one of the downsides comes from the knowledge that, when I do my job best, my job is absolutely invisible. This has been on my mind, and I'll be writing about this when I've got it sorted in my head. This is all free-form jumble, as near to automatic writing as I get--when I've put some thought into it, maybe it'll make some sense.