Grues, Games, and Gainful Employment

So I now have requests in to several individuals to allow me to use them as professional references when I attempt to get a job this summer, and I'm just waiting to hear back before I start filling out online applications.

Seems like the old "sidle up to the place of employment with the classified ad clutched in hand" method of job-hunting seems to have fallen by the wayside. On the one hand I'm a bit disappointed by that, but on the other I'm glad to be saved the trouble.

In any case, I've got two projects that will also be keeping my attention for the rest of the summer, along with (hopefully) my job. The first of them is a bit of interactive fiction that I started last summer, but put on hiatus when school started kicking my ass. I picked it back up again yesterday and added a few more rooms on to it, along with at least one instant game over for the player.

In my experience, IF enthusiasts seem to like those. At least, the third or fourth time I was strangled by the janitor in The Lurking Horror, that was the conclusion that I drew. Strangely enough, it had to be the time I went to try to catch the snippet of the game where you realize he didn't blink the entire bloody game that I figured out how to beat him. Go figure.

The other project is (at the suggestion of a friend) to write my own role-playing game. I've been working on the opening fluff since yesterday, and I've got a good solid four pages or so of it (single-spaced, at that). I'm liking it. It's going to have some nice layers to it, I think. Or at least as many layers as Western steampunk fantasy can have. After I'm done writing this I'm going to post a chunk of the fluff on Literary Bushido, just for the hell of it.

So between those two and the job I'll (optimistically) get, it seems I'll have a fairly productive summer. And hey, one of my reference hopefuls just emailed me and said that he would. Just one more to go before I start putting in applications.

Then I will be gainfully employed. How about that?

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It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Zen and the Art of Magic

I decided today (or yesterday, I suppose, depending on how you look at it) to go apply for a job at a nearby newspaper that I'd seen advertised. It seemed to be the ideal sort of thing for me: sitting at a desk taking calls from people wanting to buy classified ads. Nice, clean work environment, a steady paycheck, and I'd be working for a publication--being a writer, that's always a bonus.

Unfortunately, when I checked their classifieds today/yesterday (it's almost three in the morning, I'm not being too strange) I found that they were no longer advertising for that position. It makes me worry that it was already taken. I'm going to go there and make sure, of course, but I'm not holding out much hope. Hope has a nasty way of coming back and biting you in situations like this.

I've looked at a few other jobs. None of them appeal to me as much as the newspaper gig, but some of them might be serviceable. I'll just have to see how things turn out.

To deal with the disappointment, and also that I might have an activity while I waited to grow tired enough to go to bed, I took all the new Magic cards I've gotten over the past week or so and constructed a deck. It's blue/white, and its base is the deck that I threw together for last Friday's sealed deck tournament. I took out some of the things that just didn't function well within it and tried to limit it to being decent at only a few tasks. What I wound up with was a goodly number of denial tactics, spells that do unpleasant things to my opponent's creatures, and a small horde of my own creatures (almost all of whom have some manner of evasion ability, like flying).

The weird thing about the whole process is that I got very calm, very focused, and very content while I was sorting through what cards were going to go in and what ones were coming out. There was some serious Zen shit going on, and I have no idea why. I just sort of blocked out everything else, and an hour and a half or so later I had a deck that I think is actually pretty good, considering. It needs deck protectors, of course, because I think there's summat like three or four rare cards and two foil cards in there. While I may not be hardcore like some folk (I don't, for instance, drop $360 to buy four copies of a complete set) but I still like to protect the cards from accidental drink spillage and suchforth.

I don't know when I'm actually going to get to use my new deck. I suppose, like with the job opening, I'll just have to see.

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I don't know if anyone's ever slit their wrists by determined papercutting, but if I have to spend several hours a day stuffing inserts into newspapers I might just be the first.