Fan To Pro - The Blog of Professional Geekery

Launch or Be Lunch, Day 1 - AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!: Last Minute Doublechecking

Give me just a second.  I need to get something off my chest.

Launch or Be Lunch, Day 28 - Building a Better Yin-Feng, Part 2

Well, as you'll recall yesterday, I detailed the fun of trying to find a name that fits for our dear Yim-Fong Yim-Feng Yin-Feng.  All the headaches, the horrors and the hemmorhaging of trying to find the perfect name for a character that is so vital to the series.

Well, I am happy to report that I have teh easy part of the deal.  The artist, my lovely wife Ayne, has the bigger headache of actually coming up with the visuals for Yim-Feng.  So, here you go, a Fan to Pro exclusive - the first drawn image from the final work sessions.

Go Farther: We Need a Fandom Job Site

 came up in a recent podcast, but it's something deserving of it's own post.  It's a  a business idea if you will that I welcome some of you out there to try, be it as a hobby or something commercial.  Just let me know - hint, hint.

We need a fandom job site.  By we I mean "us assorted fans, geeks, otaku, nerds" and the like.  Well, and the world, but that's only because the world needs us nerds and fans and technophiles.

I'm not talking a website for jobs applied to fans (though that might be cool, if difficult).  I'm not talking about anything for profit.  I'm talking about a site where people post their needs for people to help with fannish events and projects and endeavors so they can find the right folks.

Consider a few examples of who could be recruited through such a site:

• People could recruit for convention staff.
• People could recruit for speaking and doing events at conventions.
• Fannish websites and similar endeavors could find new staff.
• People doing nonprofit projects that may look good in a portfolio, could find contributors.

Of course this is a tool to do what I love to emphasize - fansourcing, leveraging your fandom connections to get things done.  In this case, it's a way to help people make new connections, stretch themselves, improve themselves, and maybe get something to put on a resume.

I don't see it being hard to implement:

• The technology is probably already out there in one form or another anyway.  You could start something in Drupal or even Joomla, or slam together some code modules.
• The talent base is probably easy to find as well - your basic "LAMP" knowledge would let people run it.
• There are plenty of fandom people with design skills as well who could make the look just right.
• A lot of people would probable be on board to do it.  Though,ironically, sourcing a site like this would probably be easier if a site like this existed.
• The basic job-search metaphor is very familiar to people.

Oddly the main challenges I see would be that promoting it properly would be hard (so people didn't get the wrong idea), and policing it properly would take work to make sure posts are legit, control spam, etc.  You'd need a dedicated core of people to do it . . .

So, got some spare time?  Spare programmers? Spare ambition?  Want to help your fellow otaku, fans, and geeks?  Here's a suggestion right here . . .

. . . plus imagine how this'd look on a resume and what kind of contacts you'd make.  Why if you did this it could lead to full, paying jobs someday . . .

- Steven Savage

In which one of your bloggers apologizes

Everyone who reads this knows that Fan-to-pro has it's crush objects.  One of mine is Emergent Game Technologies.  However in a deep irony, I tend to get their name wrong - sure I get the Emergent part right, but I've also called the Emergent Development Technologies and Emergent Technologies, and probably a few other names besides.  Once I get a wrong name stuck in my head . . .

So, with that correction issued, let me note one of our crush objects is EMERGENT GAME TECHNOLOGIES - along with Crunchyroll and a few others (maybe I get their name wrong as its so tame?).  Anyway, they're quite nice folks, have good technology, send them a resume and stay on top of what they're doing since they've got some big clients.

- Steven Savage