itch.io

It's okay. 

I am stuck with a few mental illnesses [autism, clinical depression, OCD] and some tendencies to have occasional emotional flare-ups or meltdowns, which means when I have tried working a normal 'job' I lose it because regardless of my skill level, creative ability, and intelligence, which is pretty strong, I always fail to keep the work due to either emotional volatility 'incident' or bailing occasionally to avoid a public meltdown and not being at every group meeting/hour I should be there.

All of which has kept me out of the 'conventional' job market, and then after a while I went without a job and after that... prolonged unemployment was another red flag that meant nobody would ever hire me for any in-person thing again. Never mind that I have a college degree or a massive laundry list of art and technical skills, I can't people well and I get worn out in social settings, and am a weird introvert guy. So basically my emotional weaknesses have forced me to freelance online and it's not ideal sometimes but it still works better and more sustainably, than anything else I have tried. And now I am leveraging the low-wage freelancing to slowly cover the costs of building *product lines* on itch and elsewhere [Etsy, eBay, etc] - and the hope is some of these will slowly take off and I'll be able to build on the first mild successes and just sort of slingshot from there on forward until I'm able to stop the more tedious micro tasks [mTurk, etc] and do creative work full time.

People are freaking out over this coronavirus thing and reordering their lives enormously to deal with remote work, and it's weird for me because I've been doing gigs for people online for two decades at half of minimum wage or so, and in an odd way I'm pretty well positioned because as far as I can see this is a hard time for almost everyone but for me very little has changed. I am suddenly seen as semi-expert due to the fact that I have spent the last few years working from home and I've got an edge in that sense. Other people are jumping into eBay sales blind - I have 380+ positive ratings already as an eBay seller, selling mostly made-to-order artworks and my stock media collections on DVD, plus a few scattered used items or supplies once in a while... I have almost a dozen items already listed on Etsy and it would be more if I hadn't successfully sold five of them off [and gained my first two ratings there] in late 2019 *before* the coronavirus hit. The situation we face now is one that works well for introverts, we are able to handle it better than others and we can survive it with fewer issues, and some of what I am doing may be perfectly timed if I can make it work. Handmade art, not so much, but digital content... think about it, all the movie studios are suspending production, so is Netflix, live entertainment and sporting events, talk shows, everything in entertainment is rapidly shutting down except video games. And if I can get a game out and launch it well, this could turn out well, especially given that 'virtual tourism' is one of the categories of products expected to boom like crazy this year. And I think first-person exploration in adventure games like 'Miniature Multiverse' kinda fits that niche well. I can imagine Myst-likes, VR gaming, and open-world or first-person exploration-game anything, being a big thing in 2020 as well as social multiplayer gaming, it's a way to fill the desire for A) travel to interesting places and experience them and explore them, even if airports are not an option and B) experience social gatherings. 

Yeah, I have a long track record of misfires, hard work that turned out to be depressingly unsuccessful [financially, not creatively failed] projects, but the good news is I have a good family that is able to support me and cover the bills I can't pay. Their help is crucial; my dad was a scientist [geophysicist] with a few patents over the course of a nearly-30 year career and he has been successful, so I don't need to earn a lot to manage. My family will cover a few of the core costs of my life and I cover the rest, ie they have a house and I still live in it. They cover most of the essentials - the room/board and electricity, internet, and critical stuff like food/water. And I work so I can cover a range of discretionary stuff on top of that. [Software, project costs, etc] and they are okay with it as they know I am trying anything and everything that I can, and that I am working hard even if it doesn't result in much income, but ideally at some point I will hit on something that works out and I'll be able to suddenly pitch in more and not be a burden on them any more.

So, that living situation means I can handle a lot of failures, one after another, and still survive it. And maybe eventually the skills I've built will pay off somewhere even if the past projects I built them with didn't. I actually am fairly upbeat about my near future prospects; I'm sure I'm close to a breakthrough finally, even if only a modest one. 

And your problem with the BSOD - I am really sorry that happened to you. That sucks. I don't want to diminish your problems or the five month project you lost. I had to reinstall the Windows OS on a computer once from the command line. I copied a ton of file directories off C drive using BIOS and then wiped the internal drive and reinstalled Windows on it from scratch. That happened once. Other hard drive failures in past, one from a lightning strike in a big thunderstorm that emerged really fast, others during a move between states with family or just for no evident reason. They just stopped working or began having the 'click of death' but I've been fairly lucky and reasonably well prepared; most of my work over the years isn't lost even as the hard drives get replaced because of cloud backups and local backups which are definitely a priority for me.

And yes, some desktop PCs have failed but the software's always the internal-drive and the registration info for it is on the externals and my phone, and the project files all on external storage as well and in the cloud. So if/when a computer bites the dust I can scramble to get a new one and then reinstall and reset up my workflow on it and transfer all the hard drives to the new system. A delay, sure, but not catastrophic loss. I've learned to do all this the hard way, pretty early on I started figuring this out - redundancy and backups and contingency plans for hardware failures are crucial if you intend to protect your work!