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General Meta

State of the Blog

Back when this blog was the most active, I liked to kick off the new year with a post that shared some of my intentions for the coming year. Although it included things I wanted to do with the blog, it went beyond that, and would lay out projects that I was hoping to make happen. As 2018 comes to an end, I’ve been feeling like it’s time to do something similar, focusing on this site.

As I’ve written before, after this site was on what amounted to “life support” for quite a few years, I started writing again regulary a couple of years ago. In part it was by merging my media consumption diary with this site (it used to live on Tumblr), and then it was by blogging about Japan-related happenings again. I eventually tired of the latter — it just wasn’t the same when not there, and made me miss my life in Japan more than anything else — so I stopped, and tried to focus on things that touched my current reality, i.e. being a game developer here in Montreal. I launched what was to be a weekly column called “Game Boy,” but as much as I enjoyed writing those posts, I started feeling like I needed to write something “proper” (meaning more thought out), and then I started procrastinating a bit, which led to no new posts. At the same time, my media consumption diary (called “Debaser“) started building a huge backlog, to a point where I just stopped updating it, other than adding the movies that make up my movie marathons (as I like collecting them in a post when I’m done said marathon).

What to do?

For the foreseeable future, I’m doing two main changes. First is that I’m no longer going to log all of my media viewings like in the past, and instead will just continue to write-up the movies I watch as part of my various marathons (or whatever content fits the bill, as I did for my October horror marathon). I’ll also keep doing my seasonal anime posts, which I started doing again last year (here are this year’s winter, spring, summer, and fall posts).

As for the rest, I’m going to combine my old blogging style — quickly written short posts — with my current gaming interests and life. I’ll still tag them in the “Game Boy” category, which will make them all easy to find.

I do still like the exercise of writing regularly — whether anyone is reading or not — and so I just want to find a way to do so that is interesting and fun for me, and doesn’t feel like something I need to do or that I’m behind on.

In the meantime, I invite you to check out my “Favorite Media” list for the year, an annual post I quite enjoy putting together, and that I’ve done for 9 years now (20102011201220132014201520162017, 2018).

Categories
Game Boy Games Personal

Game Boy 013 – Rejection

“Game Boy” is a weekly column in which I write about being a game developer working in Montreal. You’ll find them all under this category, and it starts here.

About a month ago there was another game dev hashtag making the rounds, in this case, #ShareYourRejection (or rather, it wasn’t just tied to the games industry, but the examples I saw in my timeline were game dev-related).

I make no secret that it wasn’t an easy process for me to get a job in the games industry, once I decided I wanted to return to North America and work in games. I applied to countless companies — through their website — and would never hear anything back other than a confirmation of receipt, and then sometimes a notification that the position was filled, and that I would continue to be “considered” for future openings.

(There’s one company in particular — you can probably guess if you know my tastes in games — to which I applied for quite a few positions, with that type of response every time.)

Yes, at times it was feeling like nothing would happen, and that maybe my dream of working in games was a futile one. Despite that, I still left Tokyo without a job lined up, hoping that things would work out. My wife and I stayed at my parent’s home (in the province of New Brunswick) for just over a month while I continued to apply for positions — and at that point, I finally got some phone interviews happening.

How did I finally break through? I got so tired of applying through websites and nothing happening that I figured that I would need to try and get in touch with a recruiter directly, and that’s what I did. There was something that looked interesting at Eidos Montréal, and so I reached out to a friend who had ties to them, asking if he could get me the name of someone I could email directly. 

Following that first email, I got a reply that they’d be interested in talking to me, asking me what role I’d be interested in (they had a few they thought would fit my profile), and then I did a call with the recruiter, and then a call with the person who would become my manager.

The whole point of this post is to say that, yes, rejection happens, but if it’s something you really want and that you think you could really do, then you need to persevere and figure out ways to get through. And yes, getting in touch with a human being — instead of just a contact email or upload link on a website for your CV — has a much better chance of getting the attention of the company.

(Let me add that I did the same thing for Ubisoft, once I got laid off from Eidos Montréal, and that also worked out.)

I’m still a newbie in the industry — I’m at about 3 and a half years now, 2 and a half at Ubisoft, with a trajectory that went from Production Coordinator to Project Manager — but I’m always happy to share anything I can share with anyone who is also interested in doing the same. I have in fact already been contacted a few times by people asking me for advice, and I’m always happy to help out any way I can.

It’s maybe also worth noting that I did all of this once I was already in my 40s, and so it’s never too late. 

Categories
Design

Papers, Please

The latest edition of my old “On: Design” column in the Japan Times is made up of a rather nice selection of paper-related goods.

Categories
Design Events Technology

It’s a Sony

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I love my buddy Sam‘s monthly “Tokyo Thrift” column over at The Verge — in which he uncovers classic Japanese electronics — and he ends 2016 in style with a massive look at the current “It’s a Sony” exhibition at the soon-to-be-gone Sony building in Ginza (it will be replaced by a park). Take a stroll down memory lane with tons of tech that reminded me how much I used to love Sony electronics (before I turned into an Apple fanboy).

Categories
Design

Picks from TDW

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The latest edition of my old Japan Times “On: Design” column — now written by my ex-editor, Mio Yamada — covers a few of Mio’s picks from last week’s Tokyo Design Week. Pictured, Makoto Suzuki’s Capa Chair. Here she also offers her highlights from TDW itself.

Categories
Meta Personal

2005

This weekend I managed to finish going through the posts of 2005 (all 1063 of them). As I was going through these posts, I could see that it was a really important year for me. My first professional writing work started in 2004 as I became editor of MoCo Tokyo (a spinoff site to MoCo Loco, where I was also a contributor), and then at the very end of that year I started my monthly anime and design columns for Tokyo Q, but it was in 2005 that I started my monthly “On Design” column for The Japan Times, wrote for Gawker’s Gizmodo and Gridskipper, and also wrote some other freelance pieces. I’d definitely point to that year as the start of my writing career.

It was also the year I started writing almost weekly round-ups of Japanese magazines — which years later led to me starting the now-defunct The Magaziner website. It was also the year of me and Jesper’s first big collaboration together, in the form of our “Mamma Gun” exhibition/event at Cafe Pause, part of Swedish Style/Tokyo Design Week.

I’m pretty thankful that I can go through archives of my life like this, and see exactly how things happened and evolved.