I’ve just wrapped up my biggest VR convention project of the year, CozyCon Cretaceous!
It was a dinosaur themed event which happened in a VR world I designed to show off the vendor assets nicely, and to be fun for people to explore!
To this end I’ve hidden some cute and fun things around the world. I tried my hand at voice acting one of the NPCs, which I’m proud of. One of the other staffers at CozyCon did the orange 'ceratops' and I did the purple one.
I had lofty goals to do character modelling and animation this time around, but I only got around to tilting the head and wagging the tail a bit. I have half-modeled the megasloth concept we had, but never completed it in time.
I have to work on that in the future. Temrin Sanjem, the leader of the CozyCon team, has given us ample time, but I did that ADHD thing where you procrastinate until it really is GO time.
In the interim I haven’t been sitting on my hands. This year I’ve volunteered at so many events I can’t even remember them all off hand. I’ve also been aggressively looking for a job in the background of all of my creative work.
It really does seem as if the financial situation in Toronto, and in Canada as a whole, has not even begun to tailspin. I think the worst is yet to come. With that said, what is a programmer to do? I haven’t been able to find any web development or game development work. None at all for over a year now!
This has really affected our finances. We are on what Victoria calls, “rice and beans protocol,” which consists of a lot of simpler bean and rice meals with far less meat. This is a diet change that most of the world should probably move toward anyhow, but it’s definitely a sign of the times for us.
To our credit, I had been saving aggressively for retirement before this whole economic downturn (recession, let’s call it what it is). To that end I have been using up some liquid funds we had as a “rainy day fund”.
Well that is nearly running dry now and I really do need to figure out what it will take to stand out in the sea of other applicants. Every month I read the Hitmarker newsletter, and every month there’s another round of layoffs. Even more people looking for work, all the time.
While worrying about all of this, I’ve been brushing up on my React skills, as I feel this might still be a valid point of entry into any company who might truly be hiring.
The matter of hiring is a bit of an open secret right now, very few companies seem to actually be hiring for their open positions. Instead, in order to appear profitable and growing to their investors, they hold positions open for hire ongoing with no intent on ever filling them.
This should be illegal. It makes it so those of us trying to find work are up a creek without a paddle, as it were. Getting support or even attention for the employment crisis going on right now is really hard when every company seems to be actively hiring all the time.
I like to keep busy with pretty things and hobbies as well, which I’ve obviously had copious time for.
