So yeah, I haven’t had a job since October of last year. It’s an interesting experience, actually. A wild confluence of events turned a 3-month “break” into what may amount into nearly a full year off. I guess at that point you can call it a sabbatical or something? At any rate, I’m cranking out emails and such in full force now looking for yet another IT job I’ll hate in six months. My optimism is infectious, no?

I still hold out hope that some MMO studio will return my emails so I can con them into a producer or an associate designer gig. That’s no small task for people who have actual industry experience, let alone someone who’s spent the last decade in IT/IT management.

One morning it hit me – I’ve been spitballing a game concept on and off for the last year, why not actually WRITE IT DOWN. Artists have a portfolio and “shipped titles” are generally considered to be the analog for a producer or designers so why can’t I create one?

Given how my thought process works a simple document would be nigh useless. After a week it’d be so convoluted that you’d need a cryptex to decipher every 3rd paragraph. My solution was to use a wiki and it seems to be working pretty damned well so far. Navigation and categorization let me easily move around to edit/add details to stub entries and the built-in metrics show me where I last left off or places that are unfinished.

I’ve been at it for about two weeks now and I have around 50 entries written for the skills system. Writing it all down has also helped me see some weaknesses that the random afternoon navel gazing never revealed.

In years past, before the onset of “adulthood”, I could sleep forever. I could sleep for 12 hours, hit the can, take a nap for an hour, then go back to sleep. Fast forward to today – I can’t seem to sleep past 9am. I blame him. I cope with this rather tragic turn of events by napping. My couch is rather comfy anyway…

Tuesday was as uneventful as Monday. I dropped my work laptop off at my former place of employment so I have to scrounge a workable box out of the mound of spare parts that have been collecting here for the last decade+. The first rig I tried had a non-functional version of gentoo on it and refused to bend for XP allow.

She’s All That was on StarzHD today… don’t ask. Rachel Leigh Cook in HD is incredibly cute, FYI. So is the SD version, but that’s neither here nor there. While it’s not readily apparent in type, I just spent 10 minutes finding an appropriate image URL for Rachel. Let’s just say images.google dropped the ball. Badly.

I tried to play Knights of the Old Republic tonight and ultimately quit in disgust. I got the same ich feeling I do when trying to replay Diablo and such on modern machinery. I get that they can’t make use of widescreen, but it feels like I have a frakkin mouse plugged into a cave wall.

For some reason lately I’ve found myself spending an inordinate amount of time playing stupid web games. Since I’ve challenged myself to actually BLOG shit instead of thinking of things that would make excellent blog posts and then going to sleep… It’s meaningless, it’s talking to hear myself talk, yadda yadda yadda. It’s my house, suck it up.

Sudoku Combat – Nearly every morning I start with one of those wacky Sudoku things. I’m sure there’s 101 places to play them online, but this is the first elegant one I’ve found. I am really not good at them, honestly. I keep at it because it’s the good kind of frustrating and I hold out hope that I may actually improve my brain somehow. My best efforts are 5 minutes, fyi…

Motherload – This game is incredibly addictive. I’m still trying to figure out a proper strategy but I can tell you that you shouldn’t go below 1000′ with the first 2 tiers of fuel tanks.

Clash N Slash – From the same MiniClip site as Motherload. I just played this for the first time yesterday and it seemed fun. YMMV.

N – I am ninja? I’ve unlocked the first 20 levels or so…of like 1059102. If you watch the teaser screens it gets about 50 times more complex than the toughest level I’ve cleared. Incredibly well done game.

Stick Arena – Like all online FPS games it’s more fun with friends. 4 or 5 people in a private arena > pug.

Andre’s NES emulator – Java base NESticle. With exception of the crazy imports just about everything you could want to play is available. My only complaint is that the game window is a 2″ x 2″ square on a 1680×1050 widescreen

DHTML Lemmings – uh… do I need to ’splain this one?

Raiden-X – Courtesy of digg. I’ve actually just deleted this one and had to page through digg to find the URL again. Once you’ve finished it without dying (on hard, no less) it’s not that entertaining. Be that as it may, I still played a lot of this one. The save feature is a welcome addition to any gamelet.

That should keep any bored nerd busy until the next staff meeting. Enjoy.