Tiny Subversions

If you have a Facebook account, click on this link to use the Blog Network thingie and join my community. This way you, my readers, can talk to each other. If you want.

Actually I'm having second thoughts about introducing you to each other. It seems like some horrible breeding experiment waiting to go wrong.

Also, as a reminder, I'm speaking at PAX this weekend! For some reason they don't have the schedule in HTML, only in PDF, but here's the info for my talk:

10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Raven Theatre
Breaking In: How to Get Your Foot In the Door
So you've got skills and you've got passion, but you have no idea how you're going to break into the game industry. You send out resumes, and nobody ever gets back to you. In this session, Darius Kazemi covers exactly how, even as a lowly student, you can make friends at game companies and eventually, maybe, turn those connections into a career.

I will devote 25 or 30 minutes to my talk and the rest to Q&A.

I'm thinking what I will cover is this:

• My usual five-minute blast of "how I got to where I am, starting with high school." This is really helpful for establishing context, and is generally entertaining.
  
• The caveats: my advice is only useful if you're already pretty knowledgeable about video games, and you have something of a portfolio (or are working on it), and you really actually want to make games and are not just someone who likes playing them.
• How to apply for a job the official way (website-->resume-->interview).
• How to apply for a job the unofficial way (I know a dude who's looking for a tester, I'll forward your info to him).
  
• Swallow your pride. Take any job you can. I took a QA job for $10/hr even though, looking back, I was in some ways overqualified for it.
  
• How to turn that crap job into something good. (I probably rename my talk "How to Get Your Foot in the Door, And Keep It There.")

Maybe some other stuff too. As usual, though, I think the best stuff will come out in Q&A.

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