It's been a while!

Sorry about that!

I can't remember the last time I just spoke openly about what I've been doing. When I have, It's mostly been over on Patreon to the three to four close friends who love and trust me enough to support me implicitly over there. But never in a public, archivable format. (Wink wink nudge nudge.)

What's been happening.

At this point I'm swiftly approaching a full year since graduating college, still without a job. I'm really lucky and privileged to have landed where I have, in a way where I can stay afloat relatively easy. But having a stead income would still be a load off my shoulders.

The Bad

I briefly held a job at a conglomerated grocery store, but left after two months because the store directly verbally harassed me in order to suppress a request to change my availability. Yeah. I'm still flabbergasted two months later. I turned in a written letter of resignation, shaky and anxious, and have never stepped foot in the building since.

Jokes on them, I held a job at a competitor elsewhere in the country for a solid 4 years, the last of which through a fucking pandemic in a state that legally declared it didn't exist and with legislation that encouraged super-spreaders. Putting this new job on my resume only reflects poorly on the company, and rightfully so. Feels so vindicating thinking about that.

The Good

Shit's happening? What?

I haven't had many continuous projects, mostly just working on myself, learning to take better care of myself.

At the start of this year I watched a video of a particular "Coding Influencer" challenging themselves to recreate those basic interactive mobile game ads in under an hour. The catch being the absolute clown was 🔥leveraging the power of ChatGPT 🔥 and consistently spent half the fucking hour going back and forth with ChatGPT generating hundred line-long all encompassing monolith scripts that didn't fucking work half the time, when in reality the entire fucking code side of the game could have been less than a few dozen simple lines of code. It was clear they had no idea what they were doing.

(Okay, so obviously, I'm not going to be naming the influencer. I'm not here to directly insult anyone, only to vent my frustration. The original content, including most of the influencer's content is generally sarcastic and stupid, and this is no exception. Personally, I think the subject incompetence exhibited was intentional for the purposes of satire.)

How the fuck did we get to this point? That a display so spectacularly incompetent (emphasis on the spectacle) is considered entertainment, or that using fundamentally inconsiderate and nondeterministic generative AI in a time sensitive challenge is seen as anything but spectacularly incompetent. I knew that I could do that challenge objectively better.

I know I could do better ... wait, I could do better. Not just at the challenges, but at mobile gaming in general. I realized, at that moment, that I theoretically possessed all the skills I need to deliver a functional mobile game. I've experimented with it in highschool, I just never had a project worth investing the time to deploy.

So that's what I've been doing.

I pivoted the old racing game project into a mobile game (targeting Android exclusively for now). It will be free to play with optional video ads to supplement hosting costs and make some extra income.

I've spent enough time working on the project to talk about it in a separate post later. And I can't wait to share.

The Secret

Being a long-time (albeit barely known) VRChat world creator, I've been spending some time being a code advisor for other world developers. And I've even been invited to a project I can't talk about yet, so look out for that. (I didn't sign an NDA, I just don't want to put words in someone else's mouth.)

That's about it!

Yep, that's about it!

Apologies to my supporters for the radio silence. The perfect storm of major life changes have really been keeping me from doing things noteworthy enough to warrant writing a post about it.