sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

My friend Naomi is a Black trans woman with a disability who was homeless for a lot of last year and the year before. She is housed now, but is still waiting on benefits, trying to get specialist medical care she needs, and is working on recovering from trauma.

She is also getting top surgery next month, yay! To help her recovery from surgery and to get her stable longer-term, we are asking for help. Recurring donations are especially helpful so she can budget month-to-month.

Donate here: http://tinyurl.com/NaomiStability

Thank you, and all boosts/reposts appreciated!

my personal goal is to try to get at least one new person to question the normative concept of intelligence every week

I made one of these last year but circumstances are a little different so I'm pinning this one and being explicit about things.

If you know of any opportunities doing game dev either as a programmer or designer, or anything related to customer service or community management, please throw them my way. I haven't been able to run full numbers, but I estimate that I have 3 or 4 months left at best before I'm out of money and have to start making drastic lifestyle changes and decisions. Possibly less. (EDIT FROM THE FUTURE: this has extended for a bit longer, but how much more so is debatable.)

Remote work is highly preferred. If that's not possible then hybrid work in the New York City area is ideal.

My portfolio of work is here, but my general skillsets and experience shake out as follows:

• Experienced Unity developer—been teaching the engine for 6 years and using it for at least 8, and have tangible experience with programming localization systems, user interfaces, using Yarn Spinner for dialogue systems, menu items, and file input/output systems. Most of that skill is transferring very cleanly over to Godot and can be utilized in Unreal if adequate training time is provided. I'm pretty familiar with and comfortable in C# as a result.
• I made Final Spike, a one-on-one beach volleyball game of Windows and Mac that's been at the Game Devs of Color Expo, PlayNYC (twice) and MAGFest.
• High-tier documentation/coordination skills—I literally helped make and write the curriculum I taught and was good enough to teach its variations to teachers at partner schools all over the US.
• Experience with 3D modeling and to some degree animation, mostly with Blender.
• I have several Medium articles about game design and development, and if you filter my chosts for game design thoughts, I've done a pretty good job talking about my design principles and ethos--I most recently wrote and posted a piece about my time playing Legend of Legaia on stream. I also do fiction writing on the side and have been for years.
• Comfort and familiarity with G Suites and the Affinity Suite—I make my own graphics for streams and did my own art for Final Spike.
• I moderate for several gaming communities on Twitch, Discord, and Guilded alike (including my own!), and have been coordinating events and helping to draft and enforce community standards in most of them for about the last two or three years. I've been a streamer for nearly four years myself now and my content mostly centers around playing RPGs and fighting games, talking shop about their design and play philosophies, and working on my current project, Shootlanzer. My stream archives are available here, and my stream link + current schedule are listed on my profile page.

Anything else that isn't listed here? If you or a prospective employer need it, I can figure out how to learn it. My starting ask for a long term salaried position is $80k, but I'm also fine with freelancing or contract work as long as the rate is at least $30/hr.

Spread the word if you can and feel free to reach out to me at sn.heron@gmail.com.

In lieu of that, if you feel so inclined to help offset my expenses then the best way is to put money in my ko-fi. I keep most of that money and monthly subscriptions at even $5 go a long way towards helping offset my groceries and other incidentals.

Thank you. And for anyone else also looking for work: godspeed.

Funnily enough, in my experience, many folks who have whispered "you can just make [x] at home" in my ear do not make [x] or even [a-z] at home.

Shoutouts to the folks that eat their words (positive) though! 😌