Coming back up for air
I'm very slowly crawling out of the deep, dark hole I buried myself in for the last year and a half. Escapism is a wonderful thing. But damn, eventually one begins to wonder what the hell is going on back in the real world, and comes out to look.
So where've I been? The short answer: playing Battle Pirates on Facebook. It's not actually the kind of game you normally find on Facebook. It gets very immersive, because you're building up a base and making ships, and then just when you think you're bored with that someone attacks you or your friends, and well now you have to go avenge them, and it kind of rolls on from there. The sector I was born into is filled with awesome people. Some of us have been playing together for a year and a half. The game has steadily been going down the tubes for the last seven months, but it's really hard to walk away from the people.
Especially when, for a while there, I was deeply involved in sector leadership. I've been trying to edge my way out of that for a while now with limited success. Just when I think I can sneak off, someone does something that shows how much they still like me, and then I can't. I actually vowed to myself when I first started playing that I was just not going to get dragged into any social scenes at all, because I knew where that was probably going to go... didn't work out so well, but I also have no regrets. It's been a hell of a ride.
What else have I been doing? I'm still working in Alabama, though I switched positions. I do data management type stuff now. Not sure if it suits me better than the code techie things I was doing before, but it's worthwhile to learn about at least.
I moved to a new apartment. Seems to be my pattern. Wherever I land, I pick an apartment randomly that I stay in for a year, then I find a better one to live in for a longer time. I like my current place a lot. Hopefully I'll get to stay in it for a while.
I found some offline roleplaying friends. We get together on Wednesdays usually, though there've been Saturday games in the past. We've played a lot of different things (the main GM has a short attention span), and mostly at the moment it's Pathfinder. I'm not a big fan, but I'll live until someone else suggests running something else.
I haven't written a damn thing (fiction wise) for well over a year. At some point I should probably get back to that. Part of the problem is that, for my main series I'm working on, I've effectively written all the "first draft" material, which means the next step is to sit down and go over it and make a second draft. It looks like a lot of work. o.o
All the freelance writing kind of disappeared. Google changed their search result algorithms, and it hit all the content sites pretty hard. eHow's response was to offer to buy up all my articles for an insulting price so they could own it and stop paying me the royalties. This turned out to be a whole ton better than what Bright Hub did - which was to abruptly shut down all their forums and other means for us writers to talk to each other, and send us an email saying they were simply going to stop paying us, the end. The gaming article writers eventually found ourselves back together via an email list that the channel editor started, and we are all pretty frustrated at how it turned out. Not much we can do though. The contract we all signed actually said in the detailed small print that they could do that whenever they wanted, and so they did. They were the best of the content sites to write for, and the ending was to screw us in the worst way possible, so I don't think I'm going to look for any more work amongst content sites. But really I knew that going in, so I guess I should be happy I made a few bucks when I was unemployed anyway. I guess I do still have an account at Demand Studios, but I haven't looked at it in a long time. Last I saw, they were subcategorizing everyone by expertise, and they hadn't put me in any subcategories, so my pool of articles to pick from was zero.
That about sums everything up I think.
So where've I been? The short answer: playing Battle Pirates on Facebook. It's not actually the kind of game you normally find on Facebook. It gets very immersive, because you're building up a base and making ships, and then just when you think you're bored with that someone attacks you or your friends, and well now you have to go avenge them, and it kind of rolls on from there. The sector I was born into is filled with awesome people. Some of us have been playing together for a year and a half. The game has steadily been going down the tubes for the last seven months, but it's really hard to walk away from the people.
Especially when, for a while there, I was deeply involved in sector leadership. I've been trying to edge my way out of that for a while now with limited success. Just when I think I can sneak off, someone does something that shows how much they still like me, and then I can't. I actually vowed to myself when I first started playing that I was just not going to get dragged into any social scenes at all, because I knew where that was probably going to go... didn't work out so well, but I also have no regrets. It's been a hell of a ride.
What else have I been doing? I'm still working in Alabama, though I switched positions. I do data management type stuff now. Not sure if it suits me better than the code techie things I was doing before, but it's worthwhile to learn about at least.
I moved to a new apartment. Seems to be my pattern. Wherever I land, I pick an apartment randomly that I stay in for a year, then I find a better one to live in for a longer time. I like my current place a lot. Hopefully I'll get to stay in it for a while.
I found some offline roleplaying friends. We get together on Wednesdays usually, though there've been Saturday games in the past. We've played a lot of different things (the main GM has a short attention span), and mostly at the moment it's Pathfinder. I'm not a big fan, but I'll live until someone else suggests running something else.
I haven't written a damn thing (fiction wise) for well over a year. At some point I should probably get back to that. Part of the problem is that, for my main series I'm working on, I've effectively written all the "first draft" material, which means the next step is to sit down and go over it and make a second draft. It looks like a lot of work. o.o
All the freelance writing kind of disappeared. Google changed their search result algorithms, and it hit all the content sites pretty hard. eHow's response was to offer to buy up all my articles for an insulting price so they could own it and stop paying me the royalties. This turned out to be a whole ton better than what Bright Hub did - which was to abruptly shut down all their forums and other means for us writers to talk to each other, and send us an email saying they were simply going to stop paying us, the end. The gaming article writers eventually found ourselves back together via an email list that the channel editor started, and we are all pretty frustrated at how it turned out. Not much we can do though. The contract we all signed actually said in the detailed small print that they could do that whenever they wanted, and so they did. They were the best of the content sites to write for, and the ending was to screw us in the worst way possible, so I don't think I'm going to look for any more work amongst content sites. But really I knew that going in, so I guess I should be happy I made a few bucks when I was unemployed anyway. I guess I do still have an account at Demand Studios, but I haven't looked at it in a long time. Last I saw, they were subcategorizing everyone by expertise, and they hadn't put me in any subcategories, so my pool of articles to pick from was zero.
That about sums everything up I think.