A Day In the Life of The Unemployed Geek

Routine.

Most people fall into habits, predictable patterns that become their daily rut, the path they choose to follow day after day. This doesn't stop cold when the paychecks stop coming in. The path mutates as you fall into new habits... hopefully cheap or free habits.

Not like this. I try to keep my Fabergé Egg Habit in check.

I've started to fall into my own kind of habits. Get up (whenever, variable based on how late I stayed up and if the wife needs a ride to school), check Facebook and E-mail, apply for jobs via e-mail, and work on a blog post while being distracted by social media and video games.

I typically start writing these and tracking down relevant images as soon as I'm sure about what I want the day's post to be. Having a schedule to keep, I think, helps keep a person sane. I try to vary the posts I make here to make sure there aren't too many about games in a row, and keeping an eye on making sure that I occasionally talk about being unemployed without this turning into a weepy LiveJournal.

Maybe I should have had "Horde or Alliance" listed in Geek Wars.

Every day, I at least log into World of Warcraft to check on a few daily quests and maybe run a dungeon with people in my guild. Three times a week in the evenings, my wife and I raid 25 man or 10 man content, working in our roles in a team to kill difficult bosses and distribute loot. We're both officers in the guild we've been in for almost 4 years now, and I was Guild Master until fairly recently when our founding GM returned to playing again, and I turned the reins back over to him. The concept of “gaming responsibilities” is big enough to get a post all its own, and something that people who haven't ever played in a raiding guild in an MMORPG probably won't ever understand. It is a lot like being on a sports team, but all the management and organization is done by the players, everyone's ego is always involved, and if people in certain positions don't log on... there's no game at all.

Outside of gaming, I spend a lot of time on the internet in general. Reading and commenting on other people's blogs (Morning Coffee FTW,) using StumbleUpon to discover new sites and Reddit and Digg to check up on news, share websites and generally participate in an internet community. I've been on SU and Digg for a very long time, but only recently started adding other users to my network, and just started on Reddit and honestly, feel kind of like an outsider there. Sometimes, Reddit feels like the first day at a new high school when you get into the cafeteria for the first time. Everyone seems vaguely hostile and the whole environment is exclusionary until one of the “cool kids” accepts you. I genuinely like the stuff I encounter there, so I keep at it, and keep getting downvoted.

Why do you hate me?  "Your content sucks."  More  downvotes... sigh.

Aside from that, checking for sales on Steam, watching sci-fi on Netflix with the wife or playing new computer games or on the Xbox/Wii... I prepare and organize the weekend Savage Worlds RPG game I run, schedules of the players permitting. For someone with a whole lot of time on his hands, my days are pretty busy (if not properly “productive”.)

As a sidenote, I'm delaying the Uberman Sleep experiment for at least a week, as I got a ticket to C2E2 (Formerly called Chicago Comic Con) and I'll be there this weekend. Also, the guest post from Joel at A Momentary Lapse should be ready soon, I may replace tomorrow's regular post with it, or if not... then Monday.

Long Article. Time for this Irishman to locate some Corned Beef and Cabbage, and then... Raid Night.

Slainté, and FOR THE HORDE!