Inconvenience Yourself!

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Are you ready to face the challenges for your career?  For your life's dream?  Are you ready to walk through the metaphorical obstacle course of your perfect job (unless it's not metaphorical)?

Are you sure you're ready?

If you want to face down the challenges of following your profan/progeek/protaku dream job, I recommend practicing dealing with inconvenience by inconveniencing yourself.

The more you work to deal with challenges on your own terms, the more you test and push your limits, the more you'll be able to deal with them when your career throws them right in your face.

Next time you're working to organize your den, go all the way and take that extra hour to really deal with that pile of papers.  Face the boredom and you'll develop discipline.

Next time you've got to go talk to an annoying salesperson to get that new piece of furniture, face it down.  It'll help you deal with challenging co-workers and clients.

Next time you've got to finish that piece of fanart, try out that new coloring technique even if it takes longer or risks failure.  It'll get you used to building new skills even in adverse situations.

Go on.  Inconvenience yourself.  It'll prepare you for the challenges you'll face in the future.

– Steven Savage

You May Have a Job – But Do You Have a Life?

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You have a great job.  A fantastic job.  You love what you do.  You love what you make.  You hate to leave work – and probably don't really leave as much as people may think.

If you're a progeek (such as myself) of course that's kind of a holy career grail – the job you love that embodies all your interests.

However you may have the ideal job – but do you have a life?

This of course is often a massively loaded question for us progeeks and profans – our goal is to turn our hobbies into our careers.  We may not have a life to some people as we're geeks and otaku, but we often have quite a diverse and interesting life – and turning what we love into jobs would seem to make our lives even more, well, lifelike.

That can be wrong.  We get it wrong on scale.

A job is what we do to earn a living and do something we (hopefully) consider important in our society and community.

A career is the path of our jobs, of our professional development.  It's a the arc, the progress, we make in manifesting what we like to do and care about.

A life is the entire big picture, how everything comes together.  It is our past and our future, it is what we care about and do.  It is, in short, who we are.  "Having a life" means having something that matters to us, that has context and meaning, a past and a future.

You can have a "life" and be an introvert off writing code or books or what have you – if that truly is part of an overall, fulfilling life.  You can be a genius on a job you love – but with no arc to your career and no sense of the bigger picture, it's really shallow and meaningless.  The stereotypical nerd off writing amazing code with few friends may indeed be more happy than someone beloved, famous, and facing a meaningless life.

Having a life is one where what we do, who we know, our careers, and our job come together to make something meaningful to us, something that's part of the even bigger picture – of what and who we care about, and of what matters to us.  It's the history of our development and growth as people, where we know why we do what we do and how we'll get where we want to go.

So you may have a job.  But don't mistake it for a life.

– Steven Savage

News Of the Day 7/2/2010

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Crunchyroll dominates the world again, Hulu hands on, plenty of video game news, and the Last Airbender rides a screaming, flaming Sky Bison into the pits of failure! It's must-know geek career news!

Career:
io9 has a humorous, but thought-provoking look at careers to let you make the future less of a dystopia.

Economics/Geekonomics:
Personal Bankrupcy filings up 14% in the first half of 2010.

A look at employment/unemployment statistics. Still not a pretty picture.

Geek Law:
Apple and AT&T sued in a class action suit over various issues. Everyone surprised, raise your hand – then slap yourself for not seeing this one coming.

Anime and Manga:
Wow. CrunchyRoll and Bitway have a Digital Manga Initiative. More details are needed, but it sounds interesting – American company, Japanese digital manga company, some mutual support, and Crunchyroll world domination continues. Considering what Crunchyroll has done in anime, they could bring that sensibity to manga – and with Bitway's connections, they could well undermine competitors.

Comics:
It's official, DC is folding web imprint Zuda into their other online comic initiative. No surprises, though I'm curious about what policies about new talent and such may survive or be used. Digital comics changes a lot of the rules – including risk, payments, etc., which means talent recruitment and chosing what title to release changes.

Movies:
The Last Airbender film opens to dismal reviews. I'm serious,really dismal. The repercussions of this are going to take some time to figure out – and some analysis – but I'd say M. Night Shyamalan has put the nail in the coffin of his geek credibility, and those running the Avatar franchise have some tough decisions. I don't think this'll cut down on remake-mania, but it may serve as a painful object lesson. Damn it, why did this have to happen to Aasif Mandvi?

Science:
Clean Tech investment is up worldwide. Might be time to look for that career in solar, biofuel, etc.

Video:
Hands-on with Hulu Plus. Sounds decent, if a bit underwhelming for now.

Video Games:
Video Game sales down 5% in may apparently due to mobile devices. This also suggests that how gaming sales are calculated may need to be re-evaluated.

Helios Interactive releases it's own cross-platform dev tools. An interesting and fun story – for an 8 person company owned by a transport business this is pretty good. Hmmm, wonder if Helios is going to expand any time soon, or if you may want to use their tools.

iPhone game company Tapulous acquired by Disney. They have a good reputation, and it appears that it's a good, solid integration. Wonder if they'll be hiring anytime soon – you may want to check it out. Also shows Disney's continuing expansions – and I didn't know they had a stake in Playdom.

Sony's PS3 is now profitable. No price cuts likely, however. It appears Sony's endure-through-it-all strategies have worked.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: So, Last Airbender, Um . . . . so what's next for the movie franchise? The franchise itself?

– Steven Savage