Friday Wanderings

Goal: buy an external hard drive, some badly needed beer, and if I'm lucky, score a copy of Sword of the Stars since CompUSA couldn't hook me up. So I ended up at Gamespot. It was on the way, honest.

This particular Gamespot is near a highly recommended liquor store (notably named "Steve's Liquor" which really couldn't be better but indeed I did not buy my beer there). What I didn't know was that it was almost solely dedicated to console games and Sword of the Stars is most notably NOT a console game. Live and learn.

They did, however, have ONE SHELF of PC games. Now I'm a sucker for PC games--it's how I grew up. In fact, I'd say that video games have shaped my life more than anything else so to see this entire store devoted to games and only maybe 2% of its entire shelf space holding the PC games which I knew and loved, I was, well, feeling a lot like a gaming coelacanth. Old doesn't come naturally to geeks, IT SNEAKS THE FUCK UP ON YOU WHEN YOU'RE TRYING TO BUY GAMES. Ahem.

The game I was looking for did not, sadly, exist on that one mere shelf. What I did find, though, was that no less than three of the games I worked on did exist there which was pretty cool. Background bit of this post: enter stage left.

I am a professional video game developer. I'm a software engineer by trade but most places I've worked have dumbed this down to "programmer" which is only part of what I do. "I went to school to be a software engineer" is partially true. I went to school to get out of Kalamazoo, the software thing happened 5 major changes later. Seven years and a pair of engineering degrees later I landed my first game dev gig and boy howdy, the things they never teach you in college. It's been six years and three companies now and I've somehow outgrown "kid" but am not yet respectable enough to be "senior" which I expect to continue indefinitely. Regardless of age or quality labels, I assure you I'm 100% USDA prime geek.

Programming is not all I do. Other things that I'm fond of that will show up from time to time: composing, sketching, 3D modelling, cooking, home brewing, gaming, Buddhism and eastern thought and a bunch of other stuff that aren't coming immediately to me. I don't claim to be any good at anything really, but I do claim as many do that I have a somewhat unique perspective and a few pretty words to express it with.

I dislike talking about myself so that'll do it for now.

(For those wondering, I did find Sword of the Stars but did NOT buy an external hard drive because I didn't find one I liked. The beers in question would be New Glarus Copper Kettle and Capital Brewery Brown Ale.)