Here’s a bit of my life story. For starters, I’ve always had trouble finding a proper job, probably because I’m on the autism spectrum (of course, not something I’d like to explicitely tell everyone, for reasons), and/or I’ve had a very pelicular story on my resumé (in short, you know, the whole you need to have experience to have experience thing, the classic catch-22), I don’t know for sure. I’ve always worked freelance on some small projects with friends, friends of friends or for myself, comfortably at home, and I wanted to work in a big company that could provide me with a stable job and work in an office, for a change. We’re around mid-March. I finally got a proper company that bothered hiring me. That took a while, but I was happy. I was in the last step of their hiring process. But unfortunately… The pandemic happened.
You know, my field is definitely one that isn’t particularly essential and you can easily arrange for working from home, but this company being an IT consulting firm they have a lot of clients, mostly the government and major banks and insurance companies who nevertheless decided or had to take a break during the pandemic, and as such they also had to take a break on hiring new employees. So yeah, that means I’ll have to wait out this COVID-19 crisis that is going on since the last month or so no one knows when this will end and start accepting these little freelance contracts, or look somewhere else which might take just as long given my situation.
Little note on working freelance: it’s pretty great if you want to be more independent, and to do what you want, but unless you get very popular it comes at the cost of job security. I’m still at this point where friends come to me to fix their problems, or to help work on their project, and I’m still afraid to ask for too much cause I know they probably wouldn’t afford it otherwise, and once they really get started (if they ever do) they might afford to hire me at a more reasonable rate. You might accuse me of thinking too much of others rather than myself, but eh. I’m a philantropist. But of course, I need money to pay my bills, my hosting and domain names needed to host my little projects, but also food and stuff. And my daily driver computer I had since 2011 also broke down recently, a little iMac 27" I bought with my student loans thinking I could program software for both Windows and Mac but over time I got to hate how Apple is locking down their OS while Microsoft seems to embrace the open-source software they despiced with all their might 20 years ago. It toughed for a solid 8 years, despite all of the problems with the hard drive, the power supply and the graphics card. (For the record, I recently installed Arch Linux on it. Which greatly increases the life of a system and is very, very customizable.) I might have to buy a better one. Which is not a very good timing right now. Anyway. I’m 28 and I still live with my mom and my brother, you might hear on the news that more and more young adults are doing the same because the economy is collapsing, I feel like I’m a prime example of this. I have never really worked enough to have any sort of benefit from the government, or if I did, I don’t know, I’m not really getting it. Sure, I’m getting a bit more freelance contracts these days, or promises of contracts, but eh. I’m getting tired of that waiting game.
For a few years I had this story I want to adapt as a video game or something. Something epic I’ve always wanted to see being done. I’ve written the first few chapters as a novel, but I’ve always wanted it to be fully illustrated, maybe as some sort of Japanese-style visual novel. Programming it would be easy, but the graphics part is where the problem is. I’ve never been super good at this (and I tried!) and I’d rather pay artists for this. Ideally I’d set up a little visual novel development studio, working as a director with artists, musicians, and people helping me wherever I need. But I’d need funding to pay those people, and I hoped to get a job to get that funding, so meanwhile I work on some smaller projects with a smaller goal, or write a bit of that story once in a while. But these projects never really worked out; most end in failure, if they don’t they don’t get as popular as I’d have hoped, and none so far is making me a profit.
But I still have hope. Let’s do this. kofiwidget2.init(‘Support Me on Ko-fi’, ‘#29abe0’, ‘H2H69D43’);kofiwidget2.draw();Become a Patron! I guess you can use Ko-Fi or Patreon (unless you have a better solution, GoFundMe?) to send some money, funds will be used to buy a new computer and to kickstart the studio. I don’t really know what to offer in return just yet, but I could probably draw you something. And definitely offer you some goodies and/or the game in the future once it’s done. Your name in the credits. Stuff like that. I kinda hate asking for money, usually, but eh, I tried. And follow this blog, I’m going to keep you updated.
In any case, thanks for reading and for supporting me :)