Ladybugs due for delivery this Wednesday. Word on the street is, females lay 10 – 50 eggs every day, so assuming half of the ladybugs my mom gets are female and fertile, she could be looking at 60,000+ brand new ladybugs within a month. Tee-hee. Can’t wait for the reaction and how she takes care of this problem. Stay tuned.
Beginning to emerge from my crunching stupor. Finished everything on my task list last night, and to my surprise, I was able to go home before midnight for once. So I’ve been taking as it easy as possible and relaxing today, hoping nothing crops up, and in the meantime I’ve been paying all the bills I’ve studiously ignored all month.
On a note of disturbing relativism, I’m becoming acutely aware of how much my internal sense of time relies on arbitrary structures, such as a “weekend.” I had a total of one day off in the last month, and excepting that, not having weekends to indicate what time of the week or month it is it feels like the entire month I just went through was just one very long, continuous, neverending week. Sort of like that last sentence.
I never know what day of the week or month it is, and all the time I’ve put in at work destroys the sense of the passage of time on a day-to-day level as well. “Thank goodness it’s Friday!” I’ll hear someone say, to which I reply with a very startled “It is??!”
In my head, I don’t even remember the month of April. It’s just gone, like it never happened, except that our game has a HELL of a lot more art in it than in March. 🙂 That’s probably for the best, because I’d rather forget it ever happened and move on to thinking about what to do with my time, instead of not having it.
That’s hardly a complaint, though. They told me at the interview here that they’re going to crunch like mad for this project and future projects, and that when they say ‘Ready At Dawn’ they damn well mean it. They also said that some of the guys here actually live here during crunch. I mean that literally. At least four people here spend the night at the office for up to a week at a time, sleeping maybe four hours a night before getting back to work. That’s hardcore, and I respect the hell out of them for that. I especially respect the founders of the company because they work as much or more than *anybody* here. You know they’re serious.
So yes, I knew what I was getting into, and it’s a price I pay gladly for a job working on a *kick-ass* video game with amazing people.
And in other news, I’ve been forcibly making time to read and have any anchor point of sanity that I can. I’m still passionate about business, and I managed to finagle an advance copy of Nobodies to Somebodies: How 100 Great Careers Got Their Start from a blog I frequent called 800-CEO-READ. It’s an online business bookstore and review site, and has absolutely fantastic reviews and resources. I highly recommend them.
Anyhow, Nobodies to Somebodies is a fantastic read so far. The author approaches over 100 high-profile successful people in business, non-profit organizations, politics and more and interviews them, and weaves it into what is essentially an analysis of the transition from a nobody to someone successful, with a series of relevant and fascinating anecdotes gleefully sprinkled throughout.
The author does his best to come away with a series of methods of how people made the leap and is weaving a pattern of success to examine and understand better. I’m still only partway through it, but I love it. I’m such a sucker for business famous success’s biographies, and even aside from that it’s a highly compelling read. It’s definitely worth a purchase once it’s released. Again, wicked mad props to 800-CEO-READ, yo. Read their reviews and buy their books. They’re on the bleeding edge of the latest and greatest in business books.
Aside from that, I’ve been enjoying reading Business 2.0, a magazine I recently discovered. For biz magazines, it’s decent. It’s mostly light, fluffy reading, but enjoyable and inspiring overall for stories of how this company or that CEO pulled off something impressive. There’s an article about four tightly focused and well-positioned companies that are successfully competing with Wal-Mart that was surprising and interesting, if not particularly thought-provoking. Definitely worth subscribing to if you like that sort of thing.
I’ll finish off this post by saying that Kung Fu Hustle is one of the best movies of the year, and if you liked Stephen Chow or Looney Tunes, you should see it.