Unemployment is both crushing and freeing. Crushing, because of the financial health bar ticking down in the background. Freeing, because I can almost do whatever the hell I want with my days. In many ways, both good and bad, it rather suits me.
I have a job sort-of lined up, now. At least, I’ve been given an offer, and accepted it – but I’ve yet to be given a contract to sign and a concrete start date, which is frustrating and anxiety-inducing. It feels like it could all turn out to be a mirage, and I’ll have held off on looking for other opportunities (even short-term ones) for nothing. And I will chastise myself for ever having got my hopes up.
If I do get it after all I’ll be over the moon, and not just because my bank balance will stop free-falling. It’s a great opportunity to work in my specialisation on something cool, with (it seems so far) nice people. That’s all I ever hope for from a job, really.
In amongst this interminable, horrible waiting I’m fortunate to be doing plenty of nice things:
I’ve been getting in some quality time with my partner, who continues to amaze me in so many ways, and also taking steps into another relationship that feels exciting and promising. Consequently I have a lot to look forward to in the realm of affection, and feel very loved and cared for.
I’ve been reading more. I’m now devouring Andrzej Sapkowski’s Blood of Elves, a charity shop catch, and Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit, having recently enjoyed her The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.
I’ve been playing Space Hulk for the first time with my friend Tanya. It is quite good. I can see why it’s so adored.
I’ve been painting lots of Weaver Courts models for Goonhammer reviews. I’ll be mostly out of the review-woods soon, but then I’ll keep on painting til I’ve painted all my remaining Weavers. Somewhere else in town my old Kings of War opponent might be answering my summons and building the Nords starter set she found in her cupboard, so I may yet actually play some Conquest.
I’ve been working on Quarrel again, this time building from the ground up in Odin, and keeping the project scope nice and tight. If I’m disciplined I should soon have a prototype I can shove in front of people and start iterating on.
I’ve also been working on Magewinds again, having been energised by a recent session helping my partner prototype her own (very cool) game idea. I have a clear vision of where I’m going with the project and how to get there, which feels great.
Therefore in spite of the lingering bitterness, things are, for now, not terrible.
In 1999’s Skavenslayer, Gotrek Gurnisson and his human companion Felix worked as “sewer-jacks” in the Imperial city of Nuln, renowned for its artillery school and gunpowder might. There, beneath the city, they uncovered a Skaven plot and, over the course of a series of adventures, foiled it.
In Verminslayer, Gotrek Gurnisson finds himself among the “under-jacks” of the Sigmarite city of Greywater Fastness, known for its steampunky technology and industrial power. Beneath the city he finds a new human companion, uncovers a Skaven plot and, over the course of a series of adventures, foils it.
The similarities are deliberate, of course. While I can’t deny I’m disappointed in Black Library’s reluctance to do anything surprising at all with Gotrek, the nostalgia this novel is steeped in is effective on me, and sometimes it’s alright to re-tell good old tales. They wouldn’t be good old tales, after all, if they weren’t worth borrowing from.
Overall, Verminslayer is a perfectly perfunctory fantasy romp through one of the setting’s silliest cities. The new companion character is likeable (if a bit mundane compared to Maleneth), the twin Skaven antagonists are great fun, and Jonathan Keeble’s audiobook narration is, as ever, brilliant. All his finest rat-man voices come out to speak-play. At the end all I can say is yes-yes and, very much so, more-more.
I discovered (or rediscovered?) today that I’ve lost a lot of my university projects because they were either on Bitbucket1 or on a PC hard drive that died in 2020ish, only some of which was backed up. Lost forever now are:
The GameBoy Advance demos and games I made as part of a first-year module. This included a version of Asteroids and a software 3D renderer.
Fixed-function OpenGL programming projects. I barely remember these, so I’m curious to see what I came up with.
Some PlayStation Vita coursework. There were some cool ideas in there, like a 2D platformer where you made bubbles to walk across gaps.
My fourth-year Honours project, which took an idea I’d experimented with in an earlier module, voxel space rendering using a compute shader, and dived into it in depth.
Also gone are various small extracurricular and game jam projects.
Alas.
There’s an odd kind of grief here, of nostalgia denied, of the past decomposing from recorded history into fuzzy memory. I’m not sure how to articulate it. I wanted to reflect on who I was before I started working at Rockstar, revisit some old projects, and perhaps mine them for experience, ideas, and resumé material – but I can’t.
Try to back up your stuff, folks. Obviously don’t go overboard with it, but you never know what you’ll miss when it’s gone.
I’m not sure when these were purged. If I recall correctly I used SVN (Subversion) or Hg (Mercurial) for version control on most of my projects, and Bitbucket ended support for these at some point in the past 8 or so years, before permanently deleting any remaining repositories that used them. Annoyingly, I can’t find any emails in my archive about this happening. Did they just do this without warning users directly? I’ve just learned about the Software Heritage project, which aims to automatically archive any source code repositories that are shared with it. That way, when Bitbucket or GitHub or any other hosting provider executes a purge or eventually dies out, the code will still exist somewhere. I’m glad it exists, even if it can’t help me here. I’ll try to use it in the future. ↩
Unsure how willing or able I am to comment on the ongoing matters1, I will assume you know what happened at the beginning of this week and therefore understand that it means I am now 100% on the lookout for a new way to make an income.
Hopefully one that will treat me better.
I’ve updated my About page on this site and made posts about job-hunting on social media, including my unhappily-resurrected LinkedIn. A list of potential opportunities is being compiled, leads are being pursued, and one (1) application has been sent.
In the in-between time I have things to keep me busy:
Model reviews for Goonhammer, like this one about the Crann Guardians for Conquest’s Weaver Courts faction. My plan for today is to finish my review of the Coill Draic.
Educational projects and possible portfolio pieces. Recently I’ve been dipping my toe into Odin, a C-like language which has great out-the-box functionality for game dev. It would be great to use this chance to get a game out.
I also need to budget quite aggressively to make sure my savings stretch however long it may take for my incomings to match my outgoings again. I’ll be alright though.
And I probably need to get a lodger, a step which is overdue anyway – it’s felt wasteful to live alone in my big flat ever since Nat moved out – and while Kara and I are hoping to get a place together, that no longer feels likely to happen this year.
Onwards and upwards, I guess.
I will at least say that yesterday I attended one of my final Organizing Committee meetings for the union at Rockstar Games. I felt sad, but I also felt hopeful in a way I never have before. The task is in new hands, and they are strong. ↩
