Downtime @ Work
School
Having applied to Berkeley's MBA program, I was forced to wait until April 1st to get a response back (quite the unfortunate date to receive notification). While I did hear back, the email started ominously enough with the phrase "After careful consideration..." Usually not a good sign.
I got wait-listed, which is good, I guess, except that I now am taking a statistics class to fulfill a prerequisite I may not even wind up needing. I get to wait another month and a half (May 27th, I think) before I hear back to see if I've been... I dunno, bumped up? Reconsidered? What is it called when you move from 'second choice' to 'acceptable'?
Work
Work is pretty much the same as it's been for the past two years. Morale (throughout the entire company) is in the gutter. We have very few projects in the pipeline, so some people are spinning their wheels while others (like me) are working on the same project they've been working on for over a year. It's difficult to find any sort of motivation when you're re-building the same project for a second year in a row. To top that off, the project itself is somewhat low-priority (though in comparison to what, I wonder...), we don't have any deliverables for the foreseeable future, and still no clearly defined scope.
That last bit is one of the main gripes I have with this place - nobody seems to know what they're doing. We've got a new CTO, but no engineering director. We have engineers waiting to work, but nothing for them to work on. We've got ideas being pitched, but no process in place for green-lighting them. We've also lost maybe a dozen people from the production team over the past four months, and hired nothing but sales and marketing people. One can imagine where this might be going. Time to start polishing up the ol' resume again. I had hoped to be able to put "Haas School of Business - Expected Graduation Date: 06/2014" on there before I started sending it out, but I can hopefully make it work without that bit.
Some of you may already know this much, but I've pretty much engulfed myself in a game. celtcub talked about Mass Effect with HIGH praise back when he was playing it last year. Then, for my birthday, he got me my own copy and demanded that I play it. So there it sat, unopened on my desk for a few months until last... November, I want to say. I had grown tired of StarCraft II, so I decided to load it up. Now, the game he got me was actually Mass Effect 2, with the recommendation that I pick up the original. I got about 20 minutes into the game, and - without giving anything away - realized that I was missing out on a LOT. So I finagled a copy of the original from Jesse and played the ever-loving shit out of it AND the sequel.
I think my initial trepidation surrounding the game was that it seemed like another generic space-based first-person shooter. Given the developer's (BioWare) credentials, I should have known better. It turned out to be a fairly RPG-heavy sci-fi game, which despite my lukewarm feelings regarding KotOR, was a truly engaging experience. You could customize your own protagonist, complete with a face-creator, you could choose their class, select from some interesting personal history tidbits, etc. etc. Really, though, the thing that sold the game on me was the ability to play through the game with a female protagonist. Now, I'm not one of those guys who says...
"hurr, if I'm gonna be staring at an ass for 40+ hours it may as well be a hot ass!"
I mean, I DID make her attractive, but that wasn't the driving force behind the game for me. It wasn't what kept me thinking about the game long after I had finished playing for the day. No, what really gripped me was the fact that a female protagonist gets treated the exact same way as a male protagonist. The character is referred to by their last name ("Shepard"), gender-specific pronouns are avoided unless absolutely necessary, and aside from one or two flippant comments from obvious chauvinist characters, she is Commander Shepard. Not "a female version of Commander Shepard". When she's there, nobody else is. She gets treated with the same respect, the same awe that a male Shepard would. I can't begin to tell you how refreshing that felt. Beyond that, though, Jennifer Hale does her voice, and adds a layer of complexity and emotion that was stripped from the male voicework (intentionally so, as I understand it).
Now, the game itself is pretty damn captivating, but I'll be honest and say that the thing which stuck with me the most (aside from the amazingness of FemShep, as female Shepards are affectionately called) was the (romantic) relationship that was built between my Shepard and one of her crewmates. Now, when I say that the character that I had my Shepard fall in love with (and I'll admit, I kinda fell in love with too) is a blue alien woman, it calls to mind certain... images about the kind of character I was portraying, . I've tried to explain why the relationship between my Shepard and Liara was/is so compelling, but I've so far been unable to completely encompass it in words. That hasn't stopped me from writing about it. That's right, I've been writing fan-fiction. And believe me, had I said those words a year ago I'd have given myself a wedgie and called myself a nerd. I'd like to point out that nothing that I've written is what I would call "slash" fiction, that's not the point of why I write, and that's not the way that I think about this relationship. That stuff is hardly important, and certainly not something that would get me writing.
But that's my whole point. Something about this game, about this relationship has sparked creativity in me that I haven't felt in... ever, I guess. I mean, I signed up for a fiction writing class so that I could get a better idea about how to compose a story. I've got a thumb drive filled with first drafts. I carry around a little booklet with me so I can jot down story ideas. My longest story will be pushing the 30,000-word mark when I next update it. I love the fire that this game has instilled in me, and I'm glad that I'm able to focus it on something productive (frivolous, sure, but productive nonetheless). I'm hoping that the creative spirit I've been feeling these past few months will spill over into the rest of my life, but even if it doesn't, I'm perfectly happy with what I've been doing with it so far.
Having applied to Berkeley's MBA program, I was forced to wait until April 1st to get a response back (quite the unfortunate date to receive notification). While I did hear back, the email started ominously enough with the phrase "After careful consideration..." Usually not a good sign.
I got wait-listed, which is good, I guess, except that I now am taking a statistics class to fulfill a prerequisite I may not even wind up needing. I get to wait another month and a half (May 27th, I think) before I hear back to see if I've been... I dunno, bumped up? Reconsidered? What is it called when you move from 'second choice' to 'acceptable'?
Work
Work is pretty much the same as it's been for the past two years. Morale (throughout the entire company) is in the gutter. We have very few projects in the pipeline, so some people are spinning their wheels while others (like me) are working on the same project they've been working on for over a year. It's difficult to find any sort of motivation when you're re-building the same project for a second year in a row. To top that off, the project itself is somewhat low-priority (though in comparison to what, I wonder...), we don't have any deliverables for the foreseeable future, and still no clearly defined scope.
That last bit is one of the main gripes I have with this place - nobody seems to know what they're doing. We've got a new CTO, but no engineering director. We have engineers waiting to work, but nothing for them to work on. We've got ideas being pitched, but no process in place for green-lighting them. We've also lost maybe a dozen people from the production team over the past four months, and hired nothing but sales and marketing people. One can imagine where this might be going. Time to start polishing up the ol' resume again. I had hoped to be able to put "Haas School of Business - Expected Graduation Date: 06/2014" on there before I started sending it out, but I can hopefully make it work without that bit.
Some of you may already know this much, but I've pretty much engulfed myself in a game. celtcub talked about Mass Effect with HIGH praise back when he was playing it last year. Then, for my birthday, he got me my own copy and demanded that I play it. So there it sat, unopened on my desk for a few months until last... November, I want to say. I had grown tired of StarCraft II, so I decided to load it up. Now, the game he got me was actually Mass Effect 2, with the recommendation that I pick up the original. I got about 20 minutes into the game, and - without giving anything away - realized that I was missing out on a LOT. So I finagled a copy of the original from Jesse and played the ever-loving shit out of it AND the sequel.
I think my initial trepidation surrounding the game was that it seemed like another generic space-based first-person shooter. Given the developer's (BioWare) credentials, I should have known better. It turned out to be a fairly RPG-heavy sci-fi game, which despite my lukewarm feelings regarding KotOR, was a truly engaging experience. You could customize your own protagonist, complete with a face-creator, you could choose their class, select from some interesting personal history tidbits, etc. etc. Really, though, the thing that sold the game on me was the ability to play through the game with a female protagonist. Now, I'm not one of those guys who says...
"hurr, if I'm gonna be staring at an ass for 40+ hours it may as well be a hot ass!"
I mean, I DID make her attractive, but that wasn't the driving force behind the game for me. It wasn't what kept me thinking about the game long after I had finished playing for the day. No, what really gripped me was the fact that a female protagonist gets treated the exact same way as a male protagonist. The character is referred to by their last name ("Shepard"), gender-specific pronouns are avoided unless absolutely necessary, and aside from one or two flippant comments from obvious chauvinist characters, she is Commander Shepard. Not "a female version of Commander Shepard". When she's there, nobody else is. She gets treated with the same respect, the same awe that a male Shepard would. I can't begin to tell you how refreshing that felt. Beyond that, though, Jennifer Hale does her voice, and adds a layer of complexity and emotion that was stripped from the male voicework (intentionally so, as I understand it).
Now, the game itself is pretty damn captivating, but I'll be honest and say that the thing which stuck with me the most (aside from the amazingness of FemShep, as female Shepards are affectionately called) was the (romantic) relationship that was built between my Shepard and one of her crewmates. Now, when I say that the character that I had my Shepard fall in love with (and I'll admit, I kinda fell in love with too) is a blue alien woman, it calls to mind certain... images about the kind of character I was portraying, . I've tried to explain why the relationship between my Shepard and Liara was/is so compelling, but I've so far been unable to completely encompass it in words. That hasn't stopped me from writing about it. That's right, I've been writing fan-fiction. And believe me, had I said those words a year ago I'd have given myself a wedgie and called myself a nerd. I'd like to point out that nothing that I've written is what I would call "slash" fiction, that's not the point of why I write, and that's not the way that I think about this relationship. That stuff is hardly important, and certainly not something that would get me writing.
But that's my whole point. Something about this game, about this relationship has sparked creativity in me that I haven't felt in... ever, I guess. I mean, I signed up for a fiction writing class so that I could get a better idea about how to compose a story. I've got a thumb drive filled with first drafts. I carry around a little booklet with me so I can jot down story ideas. My longest story will be pushing the 30,000-word mark when I next update it. I love the fire that this game has instilled in me, and I'm glad that I'm able to focus it on something productive (frivolous, sure, but productive nonetheless). I'm hoping that the creative spirit I've been feeling these past few months will spill over into the rest of my life, but even if it doesn't, I'm perfectly happy with what I've been doing with it so far.