Futures (31 Aug 2018)

I'm going to be graduating from college in December and I'm a little bit freaking out. Not because I don't have a plan, but because I have six plans.

Melody the grad student

I may hate college, but that doesn't mean I'm not good at it. I'm still not entirely sure if it's college in general I hate or just my college in particular, but I've got a hunch it's the latter. In that case, I could absolutely try to get a master's in computer science at a halfway decent university.

This would be the next step towards getting a Ph.D. and becoming a computer science professor, which is a thing that I think would be super cool. However, the step itself would take a whole bunch of work and I don't necessarily have all that much interest in CS theory. Someone suggested that I could pursue a master's in philosophy instead, which is an intriguing but counterintuitive prospect that I haven't necessarily thought all the way through yet.

I don't think I could take another semester of college right now, but most places are probably set up for people to start in the fall and not the spring, so that works out.

Melody the indie miscellany dev

I am a walking collection of half-baked project ideas waiting to be built. Web application that bridges Twitter content into the ActivityPub/OStatus fediverse (Mastodon et al). No-code-required Discord bot toolkit. TodoMVC but for desktop GUI frameworks.

If I had the time, I could actually build some of those things. I'd need to make money somehow, though; if this were me full time I'd probably be on Patreon or trying to figure out non-shady ways to monetize this stuff. However, being solely responsible for things that people actually use would be super stressful. Plus I don't think I have the discipline to do anything if there's nobody to make me do it.

Melody the indie game dev

Games are cool. I've made a handful already for game jams and whatnot. Actually, the first thing I actually did as boringcactus was make a game for a game jam.

The trouble is that I don't have a big-I Idea that I would pursue if I decided I wanted to be an indie dev. Most of my jam games are either finished or not worth finishing. I'd love to make something that's an indie success story like Night in the Woods or Gunpoint, but those games already exist. Plus the odds of taking off like that are kinda one-in-a-million.

Melody the musician

This is a long shot. But music production and performance is a thing that's always been important to me. Early in high school I made some garbage tier EDM that didn't go anywhere.

What I'd really like to do is live looping covers of things that weren't really designed to be replicated like that. I think something like this live performance of Marian Hill's Down would be super amazing to do with more complicated songs. I wrote a REAPER plugin that would help with stuff like that, but I haven't actually used it for anything yet.

Melody the small tech co employee

This is a rant that I'll probably give in more detail some other time, but I think the Silicon Valley venture capital model is directly responsible for how shitty the tech industry is.

If I wanted traditional employment, the best environment for it would be a small company that isn't beholden to a VC firm. A company that can keep its standards and leave growth on the table if it'd be unethical to pursue it is a company that I'd probably be comfortable working for.

Melody the sellout

Of course, small companies don't get that way by hiring every rando with a résumé. Big companies with bad ethics are almost always hiring. And they're the most likely to still be around several years from now.