How much are you spending in tuition?

I worked in videogames and vfx for roughly 10 years. A lot of really small stuff. Here was my last demo reel before I got out of the game: EDIT: LInk removed, wasn’t really worried about getting doxxed but…

One of the major reasons I finally quit was actually listening to an Adam Savage interview where he just sort of randomly dropped the line of “And of course you know when you’re a special effects guy you’re always thinking about ‘what’s the next hustle’.” It made me finally realize that the intense anxiety and unsustainable lifestyle of stretching out a check for 3 months worth of work into 6 months of living and constantly wondering “what can I do when I get laid off from this job” NEVER GOES AWAY. Its not just a thing you deal with as an entry level guy…its a thing you deal with as a reality of your career choice.

I got a job doing some 3d visualization and graphics programming for a controls company and while I wont say its my dream job its made my life and by extension my sons life objectively better in every way. I have steady income, benefits, set hours, and at leas as much job security as anyone can actually have in the hell world of today.

If you truly want to pursue a career in videogame art then I would STRONGLY advise the self taught route and/or at least not going insane on tuition. I know a lot of people just like me who became disillusioned but who have absurd amounts of student loan debt from ridiculously overpriced art schools.

I have seen good artists and bad artists in my career. In my experience: the good ones are not the ones who went to a super expensive fancy art school. The good ones are the ones who will do the art assignment for class and then go home and do even more art…or the ones who just do art all day and don’t need any structure to motivate them. If you don’t have that kind of passion…it might not be the route for you.

I come from a fairly affluent family of Reagan conservatives in Texas. Outside of a very brief window I never identified as a republican, but like a lot of upper middle class white teenagers who grew up in the early 00s post 9/11 being heavily online I came into my political identity during the rise of youtube and the new atheist movement. Libertarianism’s blend of social liberalism with economic conservatism seemed to make a lot of sense at the time.

Then the 2008 crash happened. I didn’t even really understand what had happened at the time or how and was fortunate and insulated enough to not feel the impact: but what I perceived it as was all the free market anti government types come running to suck at the government tit because they’d made a boo boo and destroyed the world economy. At that point I decided I’d been grifted and that maybe I didn’t really have a clue how the world worked.

Following that, in my twenties, I began to listen to more progressive media outlets and began to appreciate the negative impacts of deregulation, and the significant benefits of things like universal healthcare. I identified as a liberal and a progressive during the entirety of the Obama administration but I also listened to a lot of political commentators who were actually very critical of him from the left. During this time I also did a lot of reading on non fiction for the first time. Not much theory. More stuff like “Making Globalization Work” to try and actually understand the systems that govern our lives and how things like the 2008 crash happened.

Then the 2016 election happened. I had already kind of been on the trajectory beforehand with reading things like “The Shock Doctrine” (read it, please) and even Chomsky finally but this kind of escalated my political trajectory because there just was no other way to reconcile it and the fallout from the Obama administration.

At this point in my mid thirties I’m a bit wishy washy about whether I most identify with Communism, Socialism, or Anarchism. I only know with certainty that I am anti capitalist.

I live in Austin and I have a five year old about to start school in a split custody situation. Been an absolute fucking nightmare figuring out what to do. We finally got an out of district transfer approved for a school that is offering 100% online classes (cause fuck charters) but if they decide children are a necessary sacrifice to the glory of GDP my ex and I have agreed to pull him out and coordinate homeschooling immediately. We don’t see eye to eye often these days but i’m thankful we are on this one.

Me too. Still getting used to the damned block button frankly. If you’re on PS4 add me. PSN ID is same as my username here.

The possibility isn’t 0% imo…but even putting aside precedent like the Obama administration I honestly think the Trump administration precedent is more telling on this.

Trump has violated so many norms and done so many things that used to be inconceivable…and yet I don’t recall him ever making a serious hardcore attempt to “lock her up.” Even someone like Roger stone was essentially given as red meat is walking free now.

Once you reach a certain level of power you become immune from consequence because nobody in that in group wants to set the precedent that they may be criminally accountable.

In the end I think the most likely change or new result of this all is it may no longer be gauche to speak Ill of your predecessor.

Potential hot take, in that scenario she might have actually had a decent chance to be either one’s running mate.

In the timeline Sander’s won she may have actually been seen as a compromise to the DNC since Bernie wouldn’t owe them anything and they’d be desperate to prevent someone like Nina Turner from being VP.

Ghost of Tsushima.

Whatever its shortcomings anyone wants to argue over: its one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m playing it on a QLED monitor and just walking through the open world is enough to justify the purchase.

Years ago my highschool English teacher had us read “Night” by Elie Weisel and “Farewell to Manzanaar” by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and asked us to do a dual book report comparing and contrasting the two. You can guess which one of those was the one she added to the curriculum. Here’s some takeaways I still have to this day about it.

1. God bless my English teacher. Years later my sister went on a rant about how she’d gone through her entire education and never heard about the internment camps until George Fucking Takei of all goddamn people talked about it. I tried to think why that was dropped between when she and I went to school and realized I only know about them from my english teacher. If history covered them, we brushed over it pretty quick.

2. I think it is fair to argue that as fucked up as the Japanese internment camps were, they were not on the same tier as the holocaust. They were fucking concentration camps done out of a combination of either outright xenophobia or greed since huge amounts of land from Japanese Americans was seized in the process…but at the very least they represented something lesser then a campaign of outright mass industrial ethnic cleansing. They were still an evil…but that argument cuts both ways when it comes to comparing our situation to china. I don’t know how bad the situation really is in China…but it seems to me like there should be a high bar to tossing around holocaust rhetoric and I find it a bit too easy and uncomfortable the way (as chomsky put it) Americans seem able to judge China by its actions and ourselves by our intentions.

I would generally agree…but this is the first of those remakes since the Jungle Book i’m kind of interested just because it seems vastly different from the original More of a Wushu/war epic then the typical disney paradigm. They even (wisely) cut out the comic relief eddie murphy sidekick who was nothing but a cynical attempt to recreate the magic of the Genie and Robin williams anyway.

Also…while I have mixed feelings on China, them casting a pro communist party actress triggered a ton of people and that owns…so yeah…I’m kinda interested in watching it.

Lawl…yeah that’s going straight to my plex server. Maybe I’ll host a stream of it on discord or something.