My Digital Life

Long time no blog!
For those of you who know me know that since early 2015 I've been going to college to get my degree, which I changed from game design to marketing. This is going to wind up being a long post so strap in dear readers. My plan was to learn a skill for my second career so I can supplement my pension in 2022 and quit my job of (at this time) 25 years.

I'll be getting into my assignment after I let all of my readers know how I got to where I got to;)

I started at Full Sail, which turned out being a fraud of a "school." Full Sail started out fairly promising for the first four classes which they call the core four. There was a lot of instructor interaction, live lectures, and questions were answered promptly.

After that it started to slide downhill. 99% of the material the instructors used was found on YouTube and you were given a discounted subscription to Lynda.com. No text books, digital or otherwise. Very little reading in fact was assigned. If you couldn't see it for free like the rest of the world on YouTube then I guess they figured you didn't need it. I got fed up with lazy instructors, bad assignments, finals that had nothing to do with whatever material I had watched on YouTube and a general attitude of self importance due to their hype machine.

So after looking around I found a better school, a not for profit school, that accepted all of my credits I had earned the past year and moved onto greener pastures. Full Sail was four times more expensive per month than my current university is (Southern New Hampshire U) per term! Yeah, it's crazy expensive.

I transferred and started classes early last year! After a few terms and getting into the game design part even more I found that it really wasn't the skill I was looking to learn. It's a super competitive market, pay is fairly low to medium, and you generally had to work at a company with resources to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish. Not exactly what I was wanting to do.

So I did some more research and found a lucrative field that was flexible enough to be used in a variety of ways! Marketing with a focus on social/digital media. This will be a degree I can use on my own and create digital products, I can contract with someone and work anywhere I choose as long as I have my laptop and internet connection. I can do any of a number of things where this degree will apply for me and supplement my future pension handsomely!

My first assignment is to create a blog, how little my fellow classmates know I've written this one over the span of more than a decade and even though it was dormant, I felt it might be time to awaken it once again, perhaps briefly, perhaps as I used to blog. A daily basis before work.

Let's see here:
1. What sites/applications do I visit most often? Describe them.
I use my email application the most on a daily basis. I check it constantly for new emails on a project I've been working on since February and is still in work.

Facebook was a site I used constantly until my divorce. I would look at it all day on my phone to see who was doing what. I caught onto the fact that it was nothing more than a voyeuristic practice to compare your life with your friend's lives to see who was winning, who was happy, who was sad, and who was getting by. It turned into a source of anxiousness over time and I quit cold turkey. It's still active but I rarely log onto it. So you can say I have a very negative reaction to Facebook and believe it'll eventually be replaced by something else in this digital trending world. Will it go the way of MySpace? I doubt it but I suppose it could.

I use the Twitter app a lot during the day to catch up on news from work. In the evenings I'm usually on the SNHU blackboard for a few hours per night. I try to do two to three hours of homework each night and make sure my assignments are good before I turn them in.

MMORPGs were a huge part of my life for maybe 12 years, from Everquest to WOW and dozens of games in between. That was a social way of adventuring together and forming "friendships" through a common cause and platform. Yeah at the end of the day none of it was real but for someone that could use social interaction without being social, it was perfect.

The shiny parts of the MMO have kind of faded since their heyday in the late 90's and 2000's as gamers have latched onto more niche games on the mobile platform and for a cheaper to free cost. They aren't required to wrap up a large amount of time to complete something and can quit anytime they need to and put it back into their pocket.

Digital media in marketing today is very much a growth industry and is practically dawn before a golden afternoon. Companies, particularly gaming companies, worked out a free model to play their games. However they do offer you ways to enhance your game playing time by offering powerups, time savers, extra lives, bonus levels, card packs, or any of a thousand different ways to support the game makers and the overhead of running the game itself. I've found that I've spent more money of "free" games than games I purchased outright! That's not uncommon either as one of my close friends and gaming buddies, Abostang has done the same!

This was a brilliant stroke of marketing! It is similar to the drug dealer's pitch, the first one is free! This also translates to subscription services. Remember when Netflix was just DVDs by mail and you got six with a coupon when you bought a new DVD player? Remember when Hulu was a way to catch up on the network shows from the previous evening? Now look at them! For a reasonable price per month, you have access to more entertainment than you could watch in a lifetime! Updated each and every month as well!

Overall once you learn that if you just enjoy a medium for what it is, the brief time passer, the movie in the minivan to keep the kids quiet, or the salvation from the realities of the daily grind, you find that you can live with it and your decisions and move on when you get bored with whatever is your distraction at the time. 

So there I was in 2015. I had watched some streaming series on another Netflix binge and had finished it in record time. I asked myself if this is what I wanted to do every evening, come home, binge some show, go to bed, go to work, and do it again with weekends being reserved for the serious binging time. I had been a constant volunteer at my local community theatre for over seven years at that point and found myself burned out. No, I needed a challenge, to build my mind back up again instead of letting it atrophy in sitcoms.

What would I do....what indeed.....