Find a job you’d be happy doing, so you can pay for the things you really want to be doing. - Teshness is a wise fellow.

Find a job doing what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.

It’s my experience that this is not only shallow and semantic, but the philosophy is actively bad for long term health.

There are a few aspects to this:

  • Turning a love or hobby into a job is effectively ceding control of that interest to those who write the checks. Whether you’re working for The Man as a cog in a machine, or The Herd as an entrepreneurial wizard, you’re still tying your love to money. That always changes things. And, as the EASpouse storm made more aware, and this story of Free Radical underlines (hattip to Anjin), passion is easily exploited by unsavory management, canny to optimize assets and maximize revenue.

 

    <...>

    Find a job you’d be happy doing, so you can pay for the things you really want to be doing.

     

    via tishtoshtesh.wordpress.com

    Sorta dovetails with how, when I conducting interviews (when I've been in the position to) - passion is all very well, but what I want is *professionalism*. What I want (in terms of interviewees) is more along the lines of passion for doing a good job, rather than passion for the field itself.

    Kopi luwak - what's the big deal?

    Disclaimer: I'm not a habitual coffee drinker, don't really like the taste of most coffees.

    I experimented with cold-brewing some store-brand ground coffee a few weeks ago, and the result was rather pleasant to my ugh-its-coffee sensibilities. Very similar to a good oolong, only far more concentrated.

    The nuggetboy though, is a mad coffee gulper, so when a Balinese colleague went home for the holidays, I got her to buy me some kopi luwak. It's much cheaper if you buy it back in Bali - the 50g bag of ground kopi luwak she got for me cost about US$15 - and a Balinese native is going to be able to get the authentic stuff.

    Having brewed up this coffee and had some, both the nuggetboy and the nugget agree that the taste is incredibly similar to cold-brewed coffee, only of course, it's hot!

    ...so to all you coffee-gulpers out there who've tried kopi luwak - what's the big deal? It's so similar to cold-brewed (to my unrefined palate) that there's basically no difference - other than how you can have it hot. Is that it? If you like cold-brewed coffee, but want it hot, kopi luwak is your solution?

    Because otherwise, it seems silly to pay that much for coffee when you can get a very close equivalent by using a store-brand and cold-brewing. Not to mention, you don't even need sophisticated equipment to cold-brew. A french press and some disposable tea-bags will do. (The tea-bags are for better coffee filtering.)

    More stuff on the Interwebs about kopi luwak from an actual coffee drinker.

    P.S.: Nuggetboy's review, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth that I was making him drink POOP COFFEE OMG POOP COFFEE was, 'Yeah, it's pretty good. Very smooth.' >.> While that's not a bad review, I'm still not seeing where the omgbestcoffeefeeintheworld is coming from.

    Thinking of Kickstarter? Check out Warballoon's brave breakdown of where the money goes first.

    Update #19: What the hell did you do with our money?

    Posted on April 15

     

    In honor of tax day, we thought we would give some insight to our backers (as well as potential kickstarters) to how we spent the funds we were given at the end of September. Hopefully it sheds some light on why money disappears so quickly for game development.

    Our kickstarter earned $36,967 after asking for $20,000 so that was incredible.

    To begin with, we didn't get all of that. We lost about $2,000 to no-shows, just people that pledged and the funds did not transfer.

    That got us down to $35k, and kickstarter and Amazon Payments take their portions, which got us down to right around $32,000.

    Now, right off the top you had $10,000 for prize fulfillment. That includes printing the posters, the shirts and shipping everything (thanks Australia). If we had to do it again, we would have probably had the price point a bit higher for the t-shirts and posters, as those turned to be a very large expense. We also would have included the cost of a 3rd party fulfillment house - we just aren't equipped or skilled in that area, and it was (still is) something that we struggle with.

    After that, we had $22,000 remaining. From there:

    Music - $6,000
    Attorneys, startup fees, CPA - $4000
    Poster art - $2000
    iPads - $1000
    PAX East - $3000

    TOTAL: $16,000


    Leaving us with around $6000, which is income, so that was taxed (piece of advice to other kickstarters - spend that money before the end of the year).

    So were right around $4000 remaining and even that cursory math isn't working as there are other things that weren't big tickets but sapped the coffers. There's odds and ends etc, so that goes rather quickly as you can imagine.

    What would we do different? Keep the attorneys out of it. We got a little nervous after we recieved all the Kickstarter money and wanted to make sure our business was set up correctly. We registered our LLC's, got operating agreements etc, but in hindsight a nice piece of napkin paper probably would have done just as well. You plan for the worst (we all start hating each other and people start leaving) but if anything the team has gotten closer, so it seems like a lot of wasted money. If we could take it back we would. Maybe we will get another attorney and sue them.....wait.....

    Rewards are something to watch out for as well. We just didn't fully appreciate the cost of printing 200 posters, shirts, and more than anything shipping. Shipping is a) expensive b) a pain in the ass when you have tubes and c) time consuming. None of those things are productive. We don't resent having sent that stuff off - we think the posters and shirts are awesome and we are super proud of them and it seems like everyone loved them, so thats great. But they were a lot of work.

    So that gets us to the present. We have still taken a lot of debt on ourselves (over $50k), and hopefully this can help give insight to other kickstarters and would-be-developers on what to expect. We promise to keep this stuff open as possible and if you have questions, or feel like telling giving us a piece of your mind for the way we spent the money, hey, we're all ears.

    Tell us your thoughts.

    All that said though, its been great and the game would not be where it is if it wasn't for kickstarter. We're extremely confident were going to hit our summer release date and that never would have happened without you guys. We have made a game we're really, really proud of and you guys should be too. We have always felt an obligation to make your investment worth it, and hopefully we dont disappoint.

    Cheers,
    The Warballoon Team

     

    via kickstarter.com

    I don't know anything about this game, but it's very brave of them to post the more or less exact breakdown of what happened to their cash.

    Guild Wars: Sleekly Seksy Sins of DOOM!

    While reading this here post, I came to the realisation that very few games I've played allow for the kind of sexy Kate Beckinsale has in Underworld - you know, all sleek and black and covered and reeking of dangerbyooty. In fact, the only game that came to mind that let me come anywhere close to an approximation of that look is Guild Wars, with their girly sins.

    Best part is, two pieces of this set are starter armor models, two are non-elite, and only the boots are elite. (Elite = expensive.)

    The guy beside my blondie is Unknown Sin Who Happened To Be Standing There, and my girlfriend is Suicide Granny.

    Guild Wars 2 Beta: Either don't play a charr, or wait for the actual release

    Incredibly beautiful world. Unfortunately, its beauty is matched by its lagginess and confusingness (lol is that even a word) and bugginess.

    Especially for the charr personal story, things are so ridiculously easy up to the arena bit, the leadins of which are ridiculously easy... then the siege devourer appears. That + lagging at least 3-5 seconds on all my skills in there, not to mention moving, makes the fight impossible. Not sure what's happening there, I don't lag THAT badly anywhere else.

    When I managed to finally beat it on a fluke, I couldn't figure out how on earth to get OUT of the arena, so in desperation I teleported out.

    WHOOPS! Now I have to do the fight AGAIN, everything I did has been reset.

    ._.

    Also keep getting errors when trying to log into my existing charr, and when trying to create new characters. I have no idea whether that's because we're only allowed one character in beta, since the error messages certainly don't say *that*. So I'm left trying to log in over and over, and then seeing errors over and over.

    And the LAG! Not even just on skills, MOVING seems so slow compared to GW. Not to mention the zoom. WTB MOAR ZOOM PLZ. Zoom feels like I'm stuck in a closeup. >.<

    Contrast this to how amazingly smooth the intro is for a newbie in Prophecies, and how you can zoom way back to get some proper perspective.

    I'm probably not touching GW2 again until the actual release. The beta can go hang.

    Unhappy nugget is unhappy.

    Added:
    So I went and tried a human necromancer after it stopped bugging out... Uh... okay the Charr setting is gorgeous. The human one is just blah, on top of all the other problems.

    The human area actually left me convinced that GW is more beautiful than GW2. The charr area at least really impressed me in terms of looks.

    ...I feel like someone who got engaged to this gorgeous all-round wonderful (by general repute) girly, even though there were some niggling misgivings, and who decided to BE OPTIMISTIC. And then this morning I had me a little grope and... AAAA THERE ARE TEETH WHERE TEETH SHOULD NOT BEEEEE.

    ._. Here's to hoping launch day doesn't make me feel the same way.

    Pan-fried miso-marinated steak with onions, salted fermented soybeans, and strawberries

    DA TASTIES!!!!

    Zomg this is absolutely lovely. Particularly because I have trouble getting steaks as rare as I like in most restaurants. They look at me and insist on hearing 'well-done' when I say, 'rare', which results in my having to start repeating, 'BLOOD, I want BLOOD.' The blood trick gets me rare steaks, but also very strange looks.

    But nao, nao I can cook my OWN! Mooohahahaha.

    Steaky Goodness Requires
    Miso - enough to liberally coat and massage into your steak bits
    Cooking wine - I use Chinese plum wine
    Onions - enough to cover 2/3 of your pan after slicing
    Salted fermented soybeans - roughly 1/6th of the amount of onions you use
    Steak! Any sort, after the 24-hour miso marination it'll be juicy and tender
    Strawberries - enough to arrange prettily around the plate
    Ghee - dollops for frying

    Side Dish
    Sweet corncob - 1 per person
    Ghee -  to taste
    Salt - to taste

    Marinade da Steak

    1. Slice steak into 1.5 inch thick bits
    2. Massage with miso till steak is coated and happy
    3. Plop in a soup dish
    4. Pour plum wine over the lot till the bottom of the dish is covered
    5. Cover dish with aluminium foil, toss in fridge
    6. Ignore for 24 hours

    Make da Steak

    1. Dollop ghee into frying pan, use more than you think you'll need
    2. Wait till ghee does a kinda nice streaky thing when you tilt the pan
    3. Scrape miso off steak bits with spatula (if you have paper towels you can blot with those, I am too primitive a cook to have them)
    4. Plop in pan, steak bits should sizzle nicely but not attempt to kill you via oil splattering
    5. If steak attempts to murder you with oil splatters, turn heat down until it stops doing that XD
    6. Cook to the doneness you like
    7. Put on plate to let it rest

    Make da Tasty Soybean Onions

    1. Mix sliced onions and soybeans into your leftover miso and plum wine marinade
    2. Pour the whole lot into the pan of tasty leftover cow-juice and ghee
    3. Cook until onions are nicely caramelised with just a hint of bite

    Make da Silly Corn

    1. Violently yank corn leaves and silk off corn, cackling all the while
    2. Pour a mug of water into rice cooker
    3. Put (empty) bowl in rice cooker
    4. Balance corn on empty bowl
    5. Close, hit cook, ignore till it beeps

     

    Serve da Tasties

    1. Move steak bits to new plate, so their juicies don't bleed all over and offend your eyes - and so kittehs can lick the resting plate
    2. Cover with tasty soybean onions
    3. Slice strawberries and arrange around steak bits
    4. Steal corn from rice cooker
    5. Dollop ghee on corn
    6. Sprinkle salt on corn


    EAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT! YAY! EAT! EAT! EAT!

    Particularly try eating strawberries with steak AND onion and soybeans all in one mouthful. O.O It is surprisingly wonderful - the strawberries sit on top of everything like a sweet fruity melody, and the rest is just amazingly umami.