We were bored so much of the time, but not by choice - surely, we were trying to create opportunities for ourselves, but the raw materials just weren't there. Nobody wanted to hire college students with zero years of experience when people with five or more years were lined up around the block waiting their turn.
(I can't help but wonder: if all that LipDub-fuelled optimism had arrived earlier, would I ever have left?...)
Now, anybody who's experienced boredom for months on end knows how dangerous it can become. It got to the point where we were stowing old Christmas trees in each other's rooms, ruining our neighbor's beer parties with our sobbing, and putting firecrackers in the microwave.
PROTIP: don't do this. Your house can, and probably will, explode.
One of my roommates figured this out and in an expedient and paternal way, put a stop to it before we killed ourselves.
In the midst of all this, I get an e-mail from the lead designer of Descent III telling me that he likes my artwork.
This was a big deal. It was like staring at a stain on the wall for three hours, just to have Frank Lloyd Wright come up and congratulate you on your posture.
Sean Lynn's a cool guy, and politely withstood my barrage of questions and youthful assumptions about the video game industry. It turns out, my father was his advisor back in college, so he recognized my last name when he saw it on Gamasutra.com's student gallery. I'd submitted some drawings to it a while back, and they evidentially got accepted.
I drew a nearly endless supply of pictures like these between 2005 and 2008. It tied into a narrative about persecution and land rights that I remember people tuning out when I talked about it at the dinner table. I'll probably be digging up more of them as time goes on.
Man that stuff about the apartment brought back memories. Was it Jeff or I that stopped the firecracker business? I seem to remember stopping you from putting it in the oven which seemed like an infinitely worse idea.
ReplyDeleteI totally don't remember the Sean Lynn thing and even now I can't remember if you even told me about it (although I spent so much of that year completely unaware of anything that was going on outside of my head). That's really cool that he found you though. Even cooler that he liked your stuff. I know for sure you never showed me those second two pieces and I don't know why because they might be some of my favorites you've ever done.
I really like your writing and hope you keep this blog updated fairly regularly.
Thanks for the support! I'm glad you're liking the direction this is taking. Sorry you never saw those last two drawings - I was pretty sure I'd shown them to you; for a while, they were the only substantial things I had finished, but I might've just sat them up on a MySpace page and assumed everyone I knew looked at them.
ReplyDeleteJeff had to have been the one to put a stop to the firecracker business, 'cause you were a partner and founding member. I don't remember anything about the oven; I'm no Rhode Scholar, but I like to think I'd've been smarter than to do that - unless the oven was off, and I was just trying to psych you out. I can see myself doing that at age 19 (with a possible encore performance at age 45, God willing).