But that's not what I wanted to talk about in this post; I wanted to talk about two unrelated things.

Seeing the DTVM Lecturers (some of them)

To be honest, ever since I got into SIT, I'd been wondering whether I should visit the DTVM lecturers, but I kept telling myself that if I were a lecturer, a student would just be one of my "clients" and once he's gone, I get to take a breather and remove him from my memory. Plus, the lecturers must be super busy and all that which was why I kept deciding against awkwardly visiting them on my own.

But I ran into Ms Gamar, Mark, and a new journalism lecturer on Monday. It was actually pretty nice catching up to them and it reminded me of how different polytechnic and university are. Polytechnic, as Pascal put it, was "playtime", in which we literally stress ourselves out over a 6-page concept paper (to be fair, it's more of the quality rather than the quantity). In university, we easily write a 50-page rule book in a matter of days; we make an entire game in a week (I like to exaggerate this fact; it's not really true but please just let me frame it like that) and we do not treat using photoshop like some super difficult thing (tbh, it's probably just the fact that writing students are generally less software-savvy). Here, we learn illustrator like it's nothing in one day. I'm quite impressed with myself.

No matter what, though, my roots are always in writing. I take my English minor really seriously, I'm always writing, always trying to get writing jobs and I'll join competitions. In GAM, I also try to convince my group to let me write. This is because, as much as I love games, I know that my greatest strength is still in writing and I'm actively working to use that as an edge. Sorry if I sound super serious and career-driven, but we all need thoughts like this sometimes.

So I guess, a theme in my life is that I never really know where to land. I'm not 100% a writer, not 100% a game guy, not 100% a film guy (I think I'm <10% a film guy at this point), and there are still a number of things I want to do: Software development (sometimes I kind of envy the RTIS and their sadistic courses), web design, and teaching.

Which leads to my next point:

Acorn

Between the this-blog-is-dead period and now, a number of things happened. Because I treasure this blog and I want to write everything in it, I'll eventually get to those other things, but for now, I just want to mention that I had a short run with Acorn Training, in which we would go to primary and secondary schools to facilitate workshops about character development, leadership, and stuff like that.

What it made me realise was that my methods had been wrong. I'd always been too soft when put in leadership positions, be it in NS or in Uber or when dealing with kids. I need to be firm. Also, experience can be 10 times more important than whatever principles I have, because everyone has principles.

Anyway, I also realised that I really dislike dealing with kids. They can be cute and innocent and all that but I really dislike having to put on a facade when talking to them. I don't like talking slowly, sugar-coating my words, and speaking in proper English. I guess I have to speak proper English in proper situations and that is okay, but somehow, talking to kids just tire me out.

I'd stopped working in Acorn for now because Digipen was stressful and I didn't feel like I was earning much there. I spent half the time travelling to a project, which usually only lasted for 2 hours, and maybe I got $20+ per project? I can't remember but it's really not a good source of extra cash for me, unfortunately. If I could commit to doing one project after another, it would be great, but maybe not now.

Since Wei Jian is back from Australia, though, maybe we can do one together. We'll see how it goes.