Looking Glass

sometimes you’re in the car and you’re wondering - where the fuck am i going? what am i doing? why don’t i just go do anything else?

and sometimes you’re in the car and you’re wondering - how did i get so lucky? how is this real? am i grateful enough for all that has been done for me?

sometimes you type the text you shouldn’t send and you send it. and sometimes you don’t send it but you do have a full conversation with your dog about it. and sometimes you aren’t really sad yet but you can feel it percolating under the surface, hissing like it knows it will overcome you if you let it. and sometimes you aren’t really happy yet either but you get the same kind of something; a beautifully fine edge like the hair on the back of her neck. like if you reach out you could brush against a meadowed life. and sometimes quiet is just comfortable and sometimes it’s what isn’t being said and sometimes it’s a horrible exit. 

and you want to tell your past self - we made it out and we found a home! but you know she wouldn’t understand, because she doesn’t know what home is yet. and besides, you still say “im going home for the holidays”. you mess up and call the hotel home when you mean safe. sitting around a campfire, you find a warmth inside of their laughter, you mess up and call that feeling lovely when you mean belonging. 

and sometimes you’re like - wow! i’m really glad i’m alone for this. and sometimes it’s like. fuck thank god im not alone anymore. and you aren’t alone anymore. or if you are alone, you’re okay with it, because you are someone else now, and can be alone and happy about it. 

and sometimes it’s like. my childhood ended. i don’t know when. but i’m about to go close another part of it. i am aging, or i did age somewhere and forgot to notice it. the spoons are where we keep them, but the back of my hands have new scars and my sense of time is different.

if you have never worked a media job you literally cannot serve up a “but they’re so NICE and give TREATS” opinion — my studio only occasionally asks us to work a saturday and it’s usually voluntary, we’re fed, and paid our day rate, and i am still exhausted come monday. and that’s after a standard 8-9 hour work week. 

hauling 10, 12, 14, 16 hour days, doing so repeatedly, doing so with no end in sight is beyond exhausting. i have been adjacent to an entire group of my friends going through endless crunch — a death march, as its referred to — and it was emotionally and physically devastating on them. 

and that feeling doesn’t end when the product is shipped. you are expected to come back to work on monday, you get some platitudes from your leadership (the ineffectiveness of which put you in the crunch position in the first place, so their words only make everyone feel worse) and you are expected to perform. but you can’t. you need to recover. for days, for weeks, for months. 

or have we already forgotten the kotaku article about bioware? 

“I actually cannot count the amount of ‘stress casualties’ we had on Mass Effect: Andromeda or Anthem,” said a third former BioWare developer in an email. “A ‘stress casualty’ at BioWare means someone had such a mental breakdown from the stress they’re just gone for one to three months. Some come back, some don’t.”

i stopped seeing my friends for months when this happened to them. and when i did see them, they weren’t themselves. they were crying all the time. when i worked these kinds of hours under this kind of pressure at my marketing job, i was crying all the time. you spend all of sunday dreading monday. you stop going to sleep until you’re too exhausted to funciton, because going to sleep means you wake up to go and do the thing you’re dreading. 

i think people outside of arts careers, specifically media arts careers, think that we go into this for the thrill of creating and that’s it, we can subsist off of that. full offense, but you’re incorrect.

it’s just a fucking job. entertaining people is not worth the kind of burnout crunch puts people through. there is nothing romantic about that. media workers are there to do a job and crunch is nothing but a failure of management that makes games and tv shows and movies worse. no one does good work when they’re tired. 

at an amazon warehouse, they cut down on the number of reported work-related injuries by giving the whole staff a pizza party for every week without a single injury and hurt employees just stop reporting them because they didn't want to face the backlash/cause their fellow staff and friends to lose it.

zhongli fan art for twitter