blujai831.dev

My name is Jaime. I'm 30. If we know each other offline, my pronouns are he/they; else, they/she. Rationale here.

I'm an unpublished hobbyist game developer and have been since birth. (I'm not joking.) I have yet to ever publish a game, because I have a habit of always moving on to a new project before finishing the current one, but I have a strong work ethic, and this bad habit only applies to personal projects, where I have to be self-motivated.[1] I am very diligent about completing assignments in a timely and orderly manner.

Those of my unfinished games which are source-available will be on my Forgejo instance, though there is currently only one there. (Others either have not yet reached a point where I'm confident enough in them to put them online, or are long lost to the passage of time.)

I also dabble in software development in a more general scope. You can find my non-game software projects on my Radicle seed. (Radicle is a peer-to-peer Git hosting platform. One might think of it as a decentralized alternative to GitHub.)

On both my Forgejo instance and my Radicle seed, you will find repositories that appear at first glance to be empty or not meaningfully populated. That's because they are configured to present the main branch by default, which I choose to reserve for feature-complete and known-working refs, and many of my projects have yet to attain that standard. There is actual work hidden in these repositories. To see it, be sure to switch to the dev branch.

In particular, stick-the-quick on Forgejo is currently in a very incomplete state even on the dev branch, but this is only because I have on multiple occasions reached a wall and had to overhaul the project. Most of this history was lost when I had to migrate to a new repository due to a change in choice of license agreement.[2] However, my work prior to the most recent overhaul is still available for review, and, while messier and uglier than the current dev head (hence the need for overhaul), was considerably farther along in feature development. To view this past version, switch to the preoverhaul1 tag.

Sometimes I write ridiculous diatribes about my thoughts on various things. I guess it's kind of like a blog, except instead of "posting" to it per se, I just add webpages to it from time to time with no date information etc, and there's no comment section. So like a really lame blog.

It's a long story.

Around age 18

My single mother was lower-middle-class and didn't have the money to send me to college easily. Luckily, right out of high school, I earned a full-ride merit scholarship. Unfortunately, it was for Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, and I live in California.

I decided to go for it anyway. I greatly overestimated my ability and willingness to get by on my own out there. I couldn't do it. I hated it there. I had to come back home. What terrible luck that it took me two years to come to a place of acceptance about that.

Around age 20

I tried to apply to UCSC as a transfer student, but my credits from Ursinus weren't taken into proper consideration. They transferred over as raw credits, but they couldn't be applied to any prerequisites. That meant I had to start over as a freshman, and we didn't have the money to start me over as a freshman at UCSC, so I took classes at Cabrillo for two years instead.

Around age 22

I transferred to UCSC and did reasonably well.

Age 23

In 2018, my mother died unexpectedly.

We had a bond so strong it could probably be described as codependent. She was my everything, in nearly the same way that I was hers. She was, at the time, my reason for getting up and trying every day—my reason for living.

I tried to keep going, but I couldn't. Only a year later, I had to drop out. I had no choice. I was broken.

Age 24

My uncle was willing to house me. I supported myself with the life insurance money.

Age 25-27

I tried to live on my own. For $2k/mo, I rented someone's garage that she'd heavily renovated and was marketing as a studio apartment. (She wasn't even ripping me off, that's just how bad the housing bubble is around here.) It was part of an effort to start putting my life back together, that also included going to therapy and reaching out to social workers for life coaching. I held it together practically, but didn't make much psychological progress, primarily due to poor living environment, isolation, the pandemic, and the increasingly tense political atmosphere at the time. I nearly ran out of money, and would have had to move out for that reason if things had gone on any longer.

I made plans to end my life, but reconsidered. I made the mistake of telling my life coach. Not of my own volition. The subject came up somehow. I forgot how. I assured her that I had changed my mind and was going to dispose of the means. Nonetheless, I still ended up hospitalized. I consider that a clerical error.

I wound up having to move out of the studio apartment because of that whole fiasco, instead of due to going broke. My uncle let me stay with him again.

Age 28-29

I emerged from bereavement and tried to make plans to finish my education. I wanted to return to school, but didn't manage to.

Age 30

I am returning to school imminently. I hope to at long last enter the workforce the instant I graduate.

Why I didn't just work before graduating

While I was still in school, I didn't work because, despite all the setbacks, I was actually working at a fairly high academic level—good grades, ambitious course selection—and I wasn't confident I could maintain that standard of academic work while also working a job.

Immediately after I dropped out, I didn't work because I was completely miserable, and barely even saw any point in living, let alone living well.

Later on, I didn't work because my experience being miserable had left me with very little confidence in my work ethic, and I feared that if I tried to work, I would just end up getting myself fired for not showing up enough or something, and then that bad rep would follow me forever and no one would ever hire me again after that.

Later still, I didn't work because I was, well, because I was busy working. I was trying to learn more about software development (because I had lost faith that I could make it as a game developer), build a professional portfolio, and get some work experience with volunteer IT work at the same volunteer center my life coach worked at. She was able to put in a good word for me, and I was able to help them out for awhile. They were very impressed with my quality of work, but I wasn't. I felt like I was slacking. And yet, still in the recovery process, I was too psychologically burdened to do any better. I wound up leaving the position. They wanted me to stay, but in my mind, I was doing them a favor, whether they realized it or not: I was sparing them the trouble of relying any longer on someone who clearly didn't have their act together.

Later still, I tried to find jobs in IT, software development, or related fields. I couldn't because I had no credentials. I could have worked at a grocery store or something if I were willing to do so, but you have to understand I live in Santa Cruz, California, where the rent is so obscenely high that if you "work in a grocery store or something," you outright can't afford to live—simple as that. Why do you think we have such a big homelessness problem here? I don't think it's right, but as long as I live here, that's how it is and I have to plan accordingly.

And that brings us to now, at which time I'm not working because I'm back in school. I don't believe in half-assing things. When I do something, I do it right, and I do it a hundred percent, and that means I don't distract myself with other things—even if they're also important.

If it seems like things should be easier for me and it doesn't make sense that I'm having such a hard time with them, I can shed some light on that. I have some unfortunate thing going on upstairs that defies classification. It's like if you sampled high-functioning autism, ADHD, and PTSD from being molested by my own father as a child, and took an average of the three. It's not all of any of them, but it's some of all of them. Whatever the hell it is, I'm legally disabled on that basis. I don't love it, and I want to get better more than anything. But for now, it is what it is.

Why is your life story so negative? You seem like a really negative person.

I'm not. I can be a bit negative sometimes—the lingering remnants of my prior depression, I guess—but this isn't my life story. This is the story of why I'm unemployed. Of course it's going to be negative. I've had plenty of positive experiences I'm very grateful for, and I'll write a list of them in another section below as soon as I have the time. It's just that they don't tend to be among the reasons I'm unemployed.

Things I'm grateful for:

• my late mother, Lorna, who was my hero, my protector, my role model, the light of my life and my raison d'être;
• my uncle, whose very generous hospitality I hope to soon no longer rely on, and who is kind, smart, and funny—and with whom I've shared mutual life assistance, as well as mutual emotional support during times of bereavement;
• a certain really positive and caring Discord server that's gotten me through a lot;
• to have grown up in Santa Cruz, such a liberal county, and so close to the ocean;
• good food;
• indie games;
• the government welfare I reluctantly rely on as I try to develop resilience and overdue life skills and work up to getting a job;
• the beauty of music;
• my former taekwondo instructor Master Mikols, who was almost like a spiritual leader to me in my youth;
• Santa Cruz Community Connections and Santa Cruz Behavior Health, institutions which helped me rebuild my life;
• that I remain in passably decent health despite being so very large;
• the open-source movement.