I’ve found an island in the sea of job-hunting. I’m working with 3atmospheres, some nice folks out of NYC. I’m doing Django development primarily, and I’m likely to start posting some things about that here, as I work on interesting problems.

A lot of things have supplanted my writing here: most of my writing has been about game design, most of my thinking about life has been in discussions with the lovely Allie, and a lot of my energy has been devoted to job-searching.

The job hunt is interesting. Definitely harder than when I graduated. I think that’s partly because of where the economic climate has gone, and partly because of where I seem to be positioned at this point: I keep getting comments along the lines of “we actually think you’d be great in our R&D/data modeling/labs, but they’re not hiring at the moment”, when I’m applying for straight-up software developer positions. I think that the computational linguistics makes me come across much more like that. Maybe I should work on emphasizing my web development experience.

Right now, I’m willing to look anywhere—I have an urge to peregrination—but if you have job leads in the web development direction (or, frankly, in the direction of machine learning and natural language processing!) in New York or the Bay area, let me know!

But for all that, I’m really glad of the serpentine path I’ve taken. I don’t regret a step of it right now. Even as I’m feeling professionally stymied, I’ve gained emotional and aesthetic experiences that I would not trade. I’ve had a glimpse of what I value most in life, and what I want work to exist to support. It’s pretty great.

And man. I’ve published a game. When did that happen? Can it happen again?

The strongest message, for me, was the people carrying posters that said “We are the 99%—and so are you.” That was, I realized, the point. I think that, more than anything else, this is a transpartisan movement, trying to unite people who have, for at least a decade and probably longer, been split over relatively false issues, while their common economic interest is undermined.

That’s the point of this. It’s not about existing political divisions. It is, really and truly, saying “these are the super rich. We are the ‘everyone else’. These are the battle lines.”

Right now, I’ve had a great up and a bit of a down, and the whole thing has me feeling down. First, the up: Gen Con was wonderful. Met many folks I had internet-known, met many new folks, sold half our stock (51 games out of 98 that we brought; apparently 20 of a new RPG is doing well, so we’re happy) and got a lot of good feedback.

And the down is that my favorite restaurant in Boulder—one of my favorite ever, anywhere—is closed for good. Himalayas always felt like home, like a place where I could get those reserves that I feel I lack here.

Maybe I’ll just end up in Toronto. Or Dublin.

In Nora England and B’alam Mateo-Toledo’s endangered languages class, we were discussing the issue of getting community members—most particularly kids, the lynchpin of language revitalization—to care about their endangered language. And most particularly, to care about learning that language.

I thought, immediately, of the (misguided) idea of gamification, that is, adding game-like elements to non-game activities. This is the right impulse but the wrong approach. Better than gamification is what I call “finding the fun”. If there is any hope for getting people to do a non-essential activity, you’ve got to find the ways in which it is fun. Taking things that are fun in other contexts and bolting them on is wrong.

So how do you find the fun in language learning? The fun of language is communication. The fun of language learning is mastery of the language to the end of communication. I think that the first thing is to tell people it’s a game. Huizinga, I think, talked about how games supplant the usual social contract of a group, for the duration of play. So by saying “here’s a game,” and actually making a game, you can get people to do things that they might otherwise be reluctant to do. Now, make the game’s victory condition require communication. Make the game’s rules require communication in the target language. Kids will probably want to learn the skills to play the game, which happen to be the language in question.

Preliminary thoughts.

That’s really awesome.

• cucumber sandwiches
• bread, cheese and pâté
• hobnobs and McVitie’s digestives
• Pimm’s
• mustardy potato salad
• treacle tarts
• nutella

There was nothing not good about this.

At the end of meeting, lots of kids came in, all the kids from the First Day School whatnot. And I just had to smile; I love seeing old people and young people all intermixed.

On top of that, the social expectations of the site are such that talking with people you don’t know is encouraged, which just makes it great at community building, rather than Facebook’s community-recording.

I got a great compliment from a student the other day—she said that I was the only TA she had this semester who seemed to know the material. I then had a conversation with another student about the ways in which what they’re learning in intro Ling isn’t, per se, true, but is, I hope, a set of useful simplifications.

This is probably just end-of-semester workload blues. Lemme write 20 decent pages more and talk with you again. I reckon I’ll be fine in a few weeks.