Tuesday, April 1, 2008

The League of Unemployed D-Bags

Heh...after all this time, I still don't have a steady job. It's not like I haven't been trying, but maybe I haven't been trying hard enough. And, of course, I kinda don't want to work. I guess that partially explains why Office Space is a great movie despite the fact that I haven't really worked in a corporate setting such as the one depicted in the movie. I don't really have any dreams, so that could be considered equivalent to the main character's dream of doing nothing, heh. And although I don't 'need a million dollars to do nothing, man', I still need some source of income.

Every time I keep thinking about it, getting a career in the games industry just becomes less and less appealing. Even a recent thread on the shmups forum just strengthens the fact that it's still work and work sucks. Hell, someone posted that nearly verbatim. And being someone who lacks passion, I don't think getting a job in the industry would make me happier than that office job I just recently left. But, as long as I can put my 'skills' to use, I'll try to go for anything where I have more than a snowball's chance in hell to become employed.

It's funny, though. After attempting to have a Phase 3 meeting (which didn't go through twice), the people who showed up on the second date (aka not the head of the company) decided to go to a fellow IADT graduate's home. So we did, and just hung out for a while. After having a somewhat lighthearted discussion about our lack of jobs with the Phase 3 dudes, I asked the other two guys if they had jobs. One said they didn't, and the other said sort of, which is probably an on-call thing. It's at that point where I learned that we're just a bunch of unemployed schmoes just trying to get through our lives.

Should society look down on us? Probably. Should we feel horrible about ourselves because we're not doing much with our lives? Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But do I feel horrible that society is probably looking down at me for doing nothing with my life? Nah. I'm more worried that I'm letting my parents down, especially when they paid for my entire college tuition. But other than that, I don't care if my jobless waste of flesh is being looked down upon. I just wish I could accomplish something with all this free time.

I worked on video game stuff at first. I tried recording a full run of IWBTG on impossible mode, but the recording threw off the game speed a little too much for me. Well, that and I sucked. I also went back to playing Guwange to see if I ever had a chance at counter stopping it. No luck there; I can't even break my old score of 10 million. I considered doing a full 100 point run of Megaman Zero but for some reason it doesn't seem appealing anymore. At the very least, I managed to complete my Megaman X5 run that obtains the MMH/MEH rank for both X and Zero.

Since then, I've turned to musical stuff. I've tried playing a few things by ear, but I haven't been too successful with that. I don't even know if I could reproduce the bass line, let alone create a suitable harmony. If I'm successful though, I might just create a piano-arranged version of Ashes to Ashes from the Super Robot Wars Original Generation games. Though, I don't think that has a remote chance of happening.

Speaking of which, I've been highly addicted to those games. I've played through the first SRW:OG game twice, and I'm currently on my second play through of SRW:OG2. It's amazing how much time flew by. Such is the life of an unemployed douche bag, heh. Maybe I should do a little programming in the meantime as well. After all, I'm the coder for Phase 3. But I have very little motivation that is stemming from a lack of communication and, recently, the cancellation of those two meetings on the same week.

And as long's I'm talking about games, I might as well mention the North American instagib League, NAiL. ES was quite inactive and more or less dead at the time, so I left and joined up with EoM. With them, we managed to win one match against KEA. Being an instagib league, I didn't take it too seriously. But it was there, so I signed up and played. Veni, vidi, I got my ass handed to me as expected. Well, I don't know if I'll ever be as active in Quake 2 as before, which isn't saying I was playing a lot anyway, more like spectating on the servers 'cause I'm too much of a pansy to actually play.