“There are cracks in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” - Leonard Cohen

With all this alone time, I’ve been continuing to work on the character models from The Amaranth Chronicles. If I’m going to eventually pitch this to a studio, it would help if I could provide a vision of what a season of episodes will look like. The way I envision it, I imagine Deviant Rising will be the backbone for the first season. My hope with these models and renders is to, eventually, animate a trailer for Deviant Rising in hopes of getting a studio interested. But right now, frankly, this is just some sort of therapy for me while the world out there, as it was, collapses. Strangely enough, one of my blog readers mentioned that Shakespeare wrote “12th Night ” while he was quarantined during the black plague. Interesting… He also mentioned that as unseen as I feel, maybe I should enable comments on my posts so my audience doesn’t need a megaphone to reach me. It sounded like good advice, so comments have been enabled.

Anyways, today we have renders of Jerula, the software tech from The Amaranth Chronicles: Deviant Rising. Jerula is a strange mix of personality quirks. On one hand he’s very much the tough guy in the Aurelius - Jerula duo, while still somehow being the software geek. He’s got a bit of a temper and is a computer programmer that can bench press you. I don’t remember if we gave his height in the book, but Jerula is a giant. Chris and I envisioned him to be about 6’6 but that is by no means canon. Luckily, he’s one of the good guys.

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been a product designer for thirteen years. The majority of my experience is in app design or, more colloquially referred to as, User Interface / User Experience. At the risk of sounding further self indulgent, my resume and portfolio are pretty distinguished, but I'll spare you the details and just put a link here for the curious: Alex The Actualizer

If I’m being honest, my career kind of started by accident. Thirteen years ago, the first games were hitting the Apple App Store and people were making millions of dollars just from the novelty of having a virtual lighter they could flick on and off. Touch screens were new, and anything and everything that was even momentarily entertaining was making $1 a download. Back then, I had a little fledgling website portfolio and was soliciting my skills on Craigslist of all places. I lived in Fremont, California in a little apartment complex on Mowry and Blacow Road. The unit I lived in was something called a “junior one bedroom”. This meant it was a studio in which they had installed a wall and a doorway down the middle. It felt like a long dark cave but, luckily, mine was on the first floor and the little outside area off the back overlooked the pool. It was a very modest place to live back then, but it came with a hefty monthly rent that I was barely lifting. I had a part time day job working for a company building class curriculum for their summer tech camp courses for kids. I had taught for the company over the summer, and they brought me on to flesh out their classes. I was just scraping by each month. I remember once pulling the couch cushions apart looking for loose change that may have fallen out of my friends’ pockets in the hopes of finding enough for a burrito from Taco Bell after not eating for a day and a half. To say I was poor was an understatement. Trying to make enough money to eat semi-regularly, I began posting my little website on Craigslist just trying to see what type of work I could fish up. As I poke around on the internet archives “Way Back Machine” today, a partial image of my first portfolio - Pectabyte.com v1.0 - can still be found. I regularly took BART up to San Francisco to meet with prospective clients. Eventually, I left that little apartment behind and was able to move into a bedroom in the Presidio. After two years of pedaling my little website, a recruiter from Samsung reached out to me and said they were working on some sort of new type of phone to compete with the iPhone and needed someone who “knew 3D”. I didn’t think I was going to get the job but I figured the interview was good practice. There’s something to be said for not being terribly attached to a certain outcome. The first guy I interviewed with was a very short but very spirited Korean guy whose phone rang during the interview. He answered it in Korean and then put the phone down on the table. I, playfully, said “Sir, I was always told it was rude to answer a phone during an interview.” he laughed, and then a second and then a third phone rang. By the end of the interview, he had three phones out on the table. Two of them were iPhones and one was a Samsung flip phone. “Well, one out of three ain’t bad,” I said playfully. They ended up offering me the job before I left the building and I had the nerve to tell them, “Can I get back to you early next week? I’ve got another interview tomorrow with LG.” It wasn’t true, I just didn’t want to seem too eager. I was a high school drop out that was proficient in several powerful software design suits, and just went from making $14 per hour to being offered six figures a year at the age of 23. I worked for Samsung, under the VP of R&D for two years, and it became very apparent that 3D modeling and animating was actually the least of my responsibilities. The majority of my work was designing user experiences and interfaces for an upcoming line of touch screen based phones that became the Galaxy line of products.

Yeah, pretty cool first job, sort of. While the projects I was working on were novel, I felt plunged into the deep end of corporate and Korean-corporate culture. The silver lining was how educational this first job was in, literally, every way. However, the scars it left would be better labeled under the keywords “draconian” and “cyberpunk dystopian mega corporate rule”.

I had a lot of surreal, enlightening, moments while working there, too many to list, but one that sticks out in my mind was attending a Samsung sponsored event over at the incubator where Elon Musk started Paypal. The event was a private speech by the guy who had triggered the 2011 Egyptian uprising. Media crews were there that night and he kept saying, “Please no pictures. People may want to assassinate me.” I remember wanting to laugh, that anyone would think this otherwise completely unremarkable programmer, who just happened to start a Facebook group for people in Egypt to organize, would be under threat of assassination was preposterous. This was long long before the Storm Area 51 Facebook page and even before Edward Snowden. Both of those guys had a poise and presence about them that this guy just didn’t have.

This event was down in the valley, and that night I crashed at a friend's house so as to not have to drive all the way home to San Francisco and then back to work the next morning. Samsung didn’t believe in offsite work. Control, absolute control, was their way.

Starting my truck the next day. This supremely awkward Indian guy just hoped in my passenger seat and said, “Hey, I know you. You work in the same office. Mind taking me to work?” I was totally caught off guard and I didn’t want to seem rude, so I took him with me. He proceeded to complain that his wife doesn’t obey him and that he thought she should. He literally said, “Hey, I’m not some weird guy,” at least three or four times on the way to the office. Frankly, the guy was kind of a pathetic creep.

After work, I was grabbing a drink with a friend. I was young and desperately trying to fit the world as it was into a cohesive image for easy digestibility in my own mind. The previous night I was standing in the place Elon Musk had started Paypal listening to an awkward, nerdy, computer programmer try to paint himself as some sort of Klingon warrior for starting a Facebook group on his lunch break (its literally all he did), to this supremely creepy and tone deaf Indian guy barfing his psychosis all over me on the way to work, to sitting here having a drink with my friend who had just finished telling me he used to be a gay porn star with my last name.

I remember being profoundly confused. I had been told my entire life I would be flipping these people’s burgers. I remember wondering what the difference was between someone with a vision who “makes it” and someone who was just bumping into the walls feeling around in the dark for something familiar. As best as I can tell, the difference between these types of people is the vision and its resolution. Most people have no vision, and at the end of the day the best they can say is they got through it. As Jim Rohn said; “Learn to get from the day. Not just get through it, get from it. Soak it up. Each day is a piece of the mosaic of your life.”

I can now spot this in people earlier. I now know the difference. I can spot the illumination further away, and it is only because others are so dimly lit. As I write this I received a cold call from a recruiter who is looking to place a candidate at Herbal Life. The contract is for three months and would be remote until “the corona virus is under control”, and then it would be on site in Torrance, California, a nine hour drive away. I asked him if he googled where Torrance, California is located. He said “yeah, it’s somewhere near Silicon Valley.” This is what I mean by “the dimly lit”.

… But the cracks in that darkness are so much brighter now…

In my last post I said Cade represented my focus, and Lithia, my permission to be inspired by the authenticity of my emotions. If this is true, then Jerula would be the embodiment of achievement. To pick up that which is heavy, to put it down, to pick it up again and again until I grow bigger, until my efforts are visibly undeniable. Some things are achieved by building your strength and not by random happenstance. Jerula knows big things take time.