Ideas for when it all goes pear shaped?

News & General Discussion
1

So I’m just thinking about my life plan at the moment. :stuck_out_tongue: (Midlife crisis alert!)

At the moment I’m being an indie dev making games. More or less breaking even. But making less than I would do if I was working in MacDonalds. But hopefully that may improve once I bring out my new secret games(!)

But I also need a backup plan in case it all goes wrong,… or I run out of money. I’m kind of burnt out in terms of working for software companies. I don’t think I could face sitting at a computer in the same office with the same people for months on end… again. I can’t really see any progression from that position that I would be particularly interested in such as being a team leader tracking everyone else’s bugs etc.

I feel like I need some excitement. Obviously if I succeed at being an indie dev that would be exciting because of the money coming in.

When I look in the paper at jobs such as “Admin Assistant” or “Labourer” it makes me feel lucky to be doing what I’m doing and its the best job in the world. But on the other hand if I watch a film like James Bond or Jackie Chan then I kind of feel in comparison am I wasting my life in front of a computer screen making pixels change colour! And maybe I should be working at an dolphin sanctuary or something.

Do you have a non-media related back up plan? Give me some ideas! :face_with_spiral_eyes:

2

As someone that has ADHD or whatever it’s called and it came out of the blue after enjoying working from age 14 - 45 I sometimes wish I could be a forest ranger leading tourists on tours. Or those nice people when I visited the Disney World, Towers of London, and many other places, or any job where people are out and about enjoying themselves and not moaning about their lives or causing other to moan about theirs. I’ve even ‘fantasized’ I could be a busboy or bagboy again with the same lighthearted enjoyment of other people’s enjoyment that I had then. Not the youth, although that’s generally nothing to complain about, but the ADHD-less enjoyment of life.

So I’d recommend a tourist guide or forest ranger type job but as those often require both degrees and knowing one of the hiring managers in many places you can be a busboy, waiter, bagboy, or if you like certain hobbies like gardening work in the section of a retailer that allows you to help people with that interest.

The forest ranger jobs can pay good salary as they are government jobs but the rest of those jobs are minimum wage.

3

I’ve decided, like a lot of creatives with some experience, to teach. It won’t pay well, but if you can teach a game-related or software skill at a college, you’ll find it reliable—and that it does not divide you from what you love.

I got into game dev in order to explore storytelling in a new medium. My background and degrees are in writing. I’ve often fantasized about moving to LA to join the figurative parade. I’m good at it, but I’m pretty sure the industry would eat me alive. But then, the game dev parade is pretty hungry, too. Damn.

4

Hmm, once I almost applied for a job as a lumberjack. I liked the idea of getting back to nature! I wonder if all those tour guides, air hostesses, etc. are really happy bubbly people or are they really crying in the inside! But yeah, definitely people who work in the travel industry do seem to be a lot happier! (Also, in terms of happiness I read somewhere that hairdressers are the most happy).

5

I took loads of drugs and went mad. Sorted for life. Has its downsides, mind

6

Crying on the inside, no, but then I’ve never been an actor so I can’t speak for others.

7

Ah, yes. I couldn’t speak to the actual effects of recreational drugs as even prescription drugs I was given to try against ADHD were totally ineffective so I flushed them. As far as other drugs, haven’t tried then but the authorities can’t condemn the meth making houses here in the US fast enough. Jails are full of those folk in US. They’ve just finished buying a flop house that used to be an old motel and tearing it down. Took a guy I worked with in Switzerland almost 10 years to recover from his meth / coke addiction but he’s working now at the company I worked with him at when he was fired. They had banned him from working there until last year.

8

America’s (And actually most of the world, including here in England) attitude to drug legislation is killing and destroying more lives than it’s saving by not even allowing communication, nevermind education, i love my life i couldnt really ask for more even despite brains being a bit fucked up (Getting better though) but I do wonder what it’d have been like if the whole thing was more openly addressed and my little problems were noticed and managed a great deal sooner. Look at Portugal or Holland for evidence of decriminalisation resulting in a dramatic reduction in a variety of crime and see America’s prisons jammed full of pretty regular folk and still people dying in a variety of ways without consuming anything but because of the criminal element around it. Oh well

Amusingly the stuff you’d take to treat ADHD, i’d take for fun, has the opposite effect for non-attention problem people. In fact it makes me more non-attentiony, although for the last few months i’ve contradictorily just enjoyed lets call it ‘ADHD treatment chemicals’ as performance enhancing so i can work on my projects for longer periods of time and sleep much less. It’s not doing me any harm and i’m actually getting things done finally so it’ll do just fine for now. Sorry to hear your medication didn’t work out for you, i have/had friends with it hardcore and it was a sad thing, you’d know from the outset the friendship had a time limit at which the sufferer would lose interest and wouldnt get it back, not their fault, not your fault, mental illness is a bitch. Still, pretty glad my proper meds worked out for me, or i’d be dead, statistically

9

Well as I remember back before my ADHD I can honestly be thankful recreational drugs were never a serious temptation. I puffed marijuana a few times, less than 6 reefers in my life and I did inhale, Bill Clinton and Barracks Obama, and knew I didn’t need the drugs as I was having enough enjoyment without the marijuana. Marijuana ruined the enjoyment of the company I was with in fact.

They only last year made the county I was in wet since the 1920s and those ninnies have already caused a stabbing. Here it’s like when there’s a crime you know it’s drugs. They’ve got this John Wayne syndrome without cause of heroism.

Now if you need a drug and it’s prescribed and effective - that’s an entirely different story. Fact is the drugs I was prescribed were not effective. I may as well have taken a teaspoon full of water. However, running, swimming, and lifting weights is effective. I’ve been itching to make just one blasted game and the AHDH won’t let me, I’m hin and her nervously doing something else or nothing else all day long…

As far as legalizing drugs in the US, the ‘wild natural strength’ marijuana most people are familiar with in Europe is not what you get here where they tend to lace things with dangerous fillers and chemicals. Even the Netherlands doesn’t allow meth. And all those people that offered me coke, meth, ludes, whatever - I just look at them like they were crazy. LOL, if you’ve watched Ab Fab enough; I’m Saffy to Eddy Patsy. Or that Chinese girl that thinks she was wild because she drank a can of apple cider once.

If Hollywood and other elements ever stop fabricating the false claim that you need recreation drugs to be happy or creative then you may see recreational drug culture begin to wane in the US. Neither does one need to suffer for art. It should be taught to visit a good doctor if you have a need behavior alteration and attitude adjustment, it’s not shameful. God knows we didn’t evolve in urban rooms with all types of competing ambient visual and aural noise pollution or to sit for hours on end, day in and day out, year after year. It’s not natural, urban areas need a major redesign.

Jeez, going on Facebook and finding a meme with some witticism some celebrity never uttered to repost is so much easier than really trying to think about a problem. I have a headache now and I didn’t solve one problem and I don’t like to complain so my complaints embarrass me. It’s not my normal nature to complain.

I’ll quit my moaning now.

:wink:

10

I became a ski instructor this winter. It was definitely a good decision. You sleep like a baby when you’re outside all day, and you never feel that kind of tired you get from sitting, where you’re mentally fatigued but physically alert, you can just go home at the end of the day and you feel so damn good, and it’s totally okay to just put your feet up and have a nice meal, because you’re going to burn it off. I’m going to take on a few contracts this summer, but I think I’m moving away from game development as a career. I’m planning to move out west next winter and never do another job that forces me to sit infront of a computer.

I can do game development when I want to, but I don’t want to be forced to, because I’ve found that nothing is worse than when you’re just not feeling it but you have to try and make something… I mean, I’ve been fortunate enough to have never been in a situation where if I didn’t pick up another contract immediately I would end up out on the street, but there’s still always that thought in the back of your mind that if you’re not working you’re harming yourself somehow, so you start to feel guilty about taking a few hours to enjoy a game, or ride a bike, or just sit and do nothing. I’m sure a lot of freelancers can relate to this. So I want a job where I show up at a specific time, do something enjoyable, but can go home at night and forget about it.

So yeah, sorry for the rambling, but my advice would definitely be to explore some other options, even if you’re happy doing game development. If you have other skills, see what certifications you can get so that if you find that you need to change careers you’re employable. And I think it’s important to have at least a little bit of time every single day where you do something completely away from the computer. Grow plants, design a board game, or learn a trade, it will help to give your life more balance.

11

Oh you’re not rambling but your career change choice is what folks being prescribed drugs to alter personality disorders often actually need.

One forgets working a desk job how it feels to be pleasantly physically exhausted. I can remember after skating, skiing or another physical activity all day going to bed and you’re legs are still skiing or skating and sometimes, I don’t know about other folk, actually lay down and feel like I am flying. No drug ever gave me that feeling.

12

Thing is goat, these problems are caused by the criminality of the drugs, it’s not intrinsic to the chemical. Alcohol is absolutely no different past the ritual of it. If it was legal, no greater amount of people would do it (Been observed), and the government can get tax back off it, a lot of money that could then be fed back into education, rehabilitation, regulation, no more related crime - And you’re right, if someone got killed you can generally guarantee drugs had some part in it, but it wasnt the taking of them but the distribution and selling. I hate weed anyways, and i hate people who bang on about how great it is, its not all that, but it should be legalised, like everything else pretty much, cause nothing would change in terms of who takes what, might be a year long spike then suddenly theres shittonnes of empty space in prisons and less people dying, and apparently less people even getting involved in the first place, it being no more tempting than getting drunk, which i really can’t be arsed with most the time

On topic - If you can do the great outdoors, go do it! Can’t say you’ll earn a bunch of money but I think being able to explore the world is a great freedom and maybe one of the true positives you can get out of living. I wouldn’t get into a service job that involves country hopping cause you won’t see the country youre in much, but a great cliche that happens to be pretty good is teaching in mainly asian countries. Have a friend having a lot of fun in Korea at the moment teaching english to kids, it seems pretty great over there even though the locals are sometimes a little overfascinated at her skin

13

I disagree but I’ll not argue your personal experience since you’ve lived it, not I. I know from my experience the 2 or 3 powerful drugs I was prescribed against ADHD were totally ineffective. In my case the ‘inappropriate’ behavior of ADHD is being scattered brained. In my youth I wasn’t sheltered as much as most. I’ve lived in projects and wandered through red-light districts as a child. Not the registered and organized types of vice activity you find in the Netherlands. No, I’m not a rapper.

Making theft and other crime legal will make the crime stats look nicer we know. If it’s not deemed a crime then the stats and behavior won’t be recorded. The lifestyle of opium use and the dens opium was abused in the days being before being restricted from general usage wasn’t known to do it’s addicts living that lifestyle any favors.

Cigarettes are legal everywhere I know of and yet still they are smuggled and the tax seals falsified because criminals can make a profit that way. It’s not drugs that are breaking the laws but criminals that are breaking the laws. Making criminal activity legal in an attempt to make undesirable activity and harmful behavior disappear doesn’t make the activity or the harmful behavior disappear. Criminals will simply profit unpunished and undeterred.

With legalized recreational drugs people will become addicts simply because advertising and peers enticed the curious into using drugs in their company, just as I became a nicotine addict that way. There is no doubt that there would be more addicts with availability of such drugs over the counter. And there is no doubt criminals would smuggle such drugs and lace them with fillers and other chemicals in an attempt to make more money from those addicts.

And of course making those thing legal won’t make those bad effects acceptable to the victims will it? Addiction is still miserable in the various states of withdrawal.

What I went through to get off of legal cigarettes. And the wheezing and suffering of too many cigarette smokers I know and have known. I’ve personally burnt myself, been burnt by others, and rolled a car in a car wreck because of cigarettes. I know a man whose face ejected shards of windshield glass for years after his wreck driving drunk. Something Europeans have to contend with much less than Americans do as Americans have no public transportation in most places.

Read the passage about the old marine from Allen Carr’s original version of ‘The Easy Way to Stop Smoking’. Heck, read the entire book, Allen Carr’s attitude is uplifting. I still have the stained, bent-up book after 12 years and a half dozen readings.
+++++
But on to fun things to do with your time:

I once visited Seoul for a week once and it was such an adventure wandering around without a agenda, without expecting to be able to speak English with people you meet like you can in much of Europe, and not being able to read the signage at all to be even able to guess what might be being said like you can almost do with some languages in Europe. I finally figured out the Seoul subway map and navigated according to the sun. When we communicated it was usually via impromptu original pictographs.

On topic - smiles begat smiles so yes any job with cheerful smiling patrons would be enjoyable. And I’ve had jobs with those kind of patrons and coworkers like that, lucky me.

14

I gave up smoking about 2 1/2 years ago, after 16 years of smoking. Was a good decision! Smokings a very silly habit

The problem with you calling drug use criminal is that criminality is completely arbitrary, they weren’t made illegal because they were ‘bad’, it’s impossible to even argue this because otherwise so would tobacco and alcohol. What’s empirically good and bad are not particularly linked to laws, so saying something like ‘making crimes legal is a bad thing’ is to assume the crime is bad in the first place, and it assumes that legislation comes about because of genuinely well founded altruistic decent humanity. How many world leaders do you know like that. How many people full stop? Theft is illegal for a good reason, you are taking something that someone else owns. It’s also funnily defined however, i can go into a house that isnt mine and take their tv and be penalised by the legal system. A country’s armed forces can go into another country on the pretence of humanitarian agenda, despite far greater need elsewhere for decades, against a large opposing majority, take control of that country’s resources, then their armed forces leave, and this is not theft, its what gave your car the energy to become a wreck.

Talking about the legality of something is weird unless you can prove beyond doubt that the proposed crime be against the best wishes of the populace. And you’re right alcohol and tobacco is smuggled but it’s not even remotely the problem that the drugs trade has become, not within a million miles, theyre a crime because they’re a crime, nothing else, and i suppose i’ve known the culture long enough to see who the bad guys are. Hard to explain when people are so convinced that breaking a law is a terrible thing. Same people talk loudly about how stupid they think religion is.

They’re both still indoctrination, you’re meant to not do something because you know its bad out of your nature and you have the personal experience to make that judgement, to do anything to hurt another person should be against your nature, it’s quite obvious where the line is there. With a bit of insight into how legislation is actually implemented you realise that it’s absolutely not part of an empathic altruistic nature intended to stop harm against the people in the remit of the law. You only have to be too ill to work in this country to find out quickly how messed up everything is. People are dying in what’s meant to be an advanced nation on the whims of a government purely interested in securing money and status following their term in office

Not much about Unity or work there, sorry, or well, make sure you find work and can maintain it

15

Well this is a gossip section but I still disagree that legalizing drugs will lead to their decline in usage. I think popular culture declining misidentify drugs as lifestyle enjoyment and artistic aids of the elite rebellious independent class of artistic people will fade them into obscurity.

Peaches Geldof the conformist rebel dies of heroin overdose and very young too while the white collar men and women rebellious conformists I used to work with will play baseball and softball well into middle age and have a lot of fun doing it.

You are only partly right about lifestyle being indoctrinated into their choices though. One lifestyle choice you could almost guess from context and the other choices you wouldn’t guess so easily, because those people are mostly Swiss and most Swiss had not heard of baseball before being asked to play and saying why not?

16

You’re making some very inaccurate statements of who takes drugs and why they take them there, the rich and famous are a tiny niche of what is an enormous ‘industry’ spanning every class and culture on earth and is prevalent absolutely everywhere to a degree you may not be aware of. Peaches dying, Amy Winehouse dying, high profile drug related deaths of a very particular type of celebrity, not representative of drug users in the main whatsoever. You’ll be amazed to know pretty much any person takes them and generally it makes absolutely no difference to their lives. They go to work they play sports they watch tv with their family they are you and me and everyone else on earth. Most people who take recreational drugs are perfectly normal people. Normal people are generally smart enough not to broadcast they take drugs loudly around those who do not understand that the fact they take drugs makes absolutely no difference to their life other than they feel pleasant by artificial means more regularly than those who don’t take drugs. You don’t think people around you are high because a normal person acts completely normally, because they know its stupid to act high around people who don’t understand, and typically you dont walk around town off your face unless its 4am and you just got out of a club, and you dont look like youre high unless you’ve been particularly strenuous about being high for a few hours (club the typical example). Plus every drug is different, d you drink cigarettes? Do you smoke beer?

I don’t think drug use would go down, but it wouldnt necessarily go up either, and wether it went up or down the fact remains the vast majority of drug users will be completely normal people doing completely normal things most of their lives, professionals and labourers, people from all walks of life, being completely capable of functioning like anyone else. It’s like saying everyone who drinks alcohol is an alcoholic. Ive met more alcoholics than people addicted to illegal drugs, and ive met more people devastated by alcohol than illegal drugs. More people die from alcohol related deaths than any other social-associated chemicals, even by proportion, and its not even like it’s a tiny elite of people who do this. Ten years ago a million ecstacy tablets were taken every weekend in this country alone. Now it is an even more massive market and the problems caused by its criminality are increasing. The deaths behind the drug (And i’m not advocating it’s use, im not a fan of that one either although ive had my little journey with it) including the famous Leah Betts case were mainly caused by lack of education, chemicals other than the drug expected being present in whatever form they consumed it, or they were also, believe it or not, and its not mentioned very loudly cause you know, most adults do it, drinking alcohol, and it was typically the alcohol that brought the problems on.

You’ll find it interesting that there is legislature for new chemicals to be researched and if found potentially dangerous, banned, over a relatively short trial period. They havent banned alcohol yet, or cigarettes. Governmental decision makers don’t tend to talk about alcohol related fatalities over the course of a year, or the cost alcohol has on health and social services. The most deadly drugs available are also the legal ones. So you either have to present a really good case for why these legal substances should remain legal over a vast amount of statistically proven healthier alternatives, in terms of mortality rates and hospital admittances, or face the basic hypocrisy of arbitrarily making one chemical illegal over another, and you have to investigate why some things are being allowed despite being absolutely deadly (There’s still quite a high chance either of us could die of lung cancer despite having quit now, ive read the book you’re talking about btw, its very good, the man completely understands the smoking mentality to the finest detail, its almost impossible to smoke having read the book because the man absolutely knows what hes talking about and hes absolutely right). They’re not still legal out of humanitarian kindness, there’s one really obvious reason they’re legal and its the same reason the illegal ones were initially made illegal, and continue to be kept illegal, can poke around in american history for all that but the easy explanation is that some people need to get paid and they’ll create a problem they get paid to fix if they have to.

Your comment about the swiss was apt. They might have said the same thing on being offered cocaine. You never really know. They’re everywhere (drug users, not the swiss, or maybe the swiss too)

17

Im optician by education, but i rly didn’t want to get in to that industry when i realized what it’s about.
Thing about me is, im skilled with technical stuff, but im not… “charming” or “well-spoken” or even “confident”
And whole point of the job is to convince people to buy the most expensive dolce&whatever frame and lenses with 10 coats they don’t even need, since most of the stuff is ether ordered or done by machine(auto-lens grinder) it’s mostly a merchant type job. And even if by some miracle i managed to find a no-working-with-people position i wouldn’t be thrilled about every day going to grind lenses from 9 to 5…

At least some portion of my education i managed to apply to game development, mainly lighting (obviously XD).

Right now my plan is to keep trying to “make it” in game development till i die XD
And now i know truly what “get rich or die trying” means and how it feels to live by it XD

18

How do you mean pear shaped? Seems to me like you’ve made a critical realisation and that’s forcing you to do something about it.

19

There is a saying, the grass is not always greener. I have had a lot of different jobs. I have been lucky enough to be able to travel around the world working in different jobs, (mostly tech related) but not always and I have only been happy doing a few of those jobs, the point is, it does not matter what job you are doing, just do what makes you happy, the fact that you are already contemplating other professions, suggests you have given up already.

The way I think is, never give up!

20

Pear-shaped is a colloquialism that means “screwed up”. He means when things don’t work out and life gets really hard suddenly. In this instance, he specifically means that he’s unable to support his gamedev lifestyle because he’s not earning enough money from it to live.