Basic Knowledge for the First-Time Job Seeker

 

Yeah, I think at this point we’ve abandoned any pretense at having a theme for this blog.  Welcome to Lost to the Aether, where we talk about whatever random thought floats to the top of my mind on any given week!  Today’s topic: Entry Level Jobs!

High schools and colleges have been having their graduations in recent weeks, or if they haven’t yet, will be hitting them soon.  That leaves a lot of youngsters out there with nothing to do.  Which means a lot of youngsters trying to find jobs for the first time, so they can get money for whatever it is youngsters like these days.  Those Britney Spears albums and Pong arcade machines and what not.  And, since my organization seems to get a couple open entry-level part time positions each year that get a lot of applicants fresh out of high school, and since my organization finds some sort of fiendish delight in making me staff them, a lot of these youngsters are going to be coming through my doors looking for jobs.  And not a lot of them actually know what they’re doing.  It’s not their fault.  They just haven’t gone through the whole process before.  They still waste both my and their time, though.

So, in the hopes that typing this up is going to make at least one prospective job seeker bother me just a little bit less, here’s some common sense things people should know before the first time they apply for a job.  As the title states, this is pretty basic stuff, and mostly for first-timers in the job sphere.  If you’re looking for a full-time mid-level position, this stuff probably isn’t going to help you much.  Because you should know it already.  If not, then shame on you.  Besides, I’m just drawing on my personal experiences as an interviewer, and I don’t handle anything higher level.  But hey, if you’re wanting to bone up before you go for your first job, you’re in the right place!  Let’s get started!

AAA Games are Getting Too Fat

It’s hitting the point where companies are turning over their financial years, meaning that for those publicly traded we get a nice look at how healthy they actually are. For a lot of the big name companies, those finances aren’t looking too good. SquareEnix posted a massive loss for the year, EA’s finances were bad enough that their CEO resigned, companies are falling all over the place, and the picture’s only going to get darker as more and more companies report in. But what’s the problem, exactly? Their games do seem to be selling well. Where is all that money going?

Do you remember when it was considered a major milestone for a game to sell a million copies? I remember. Seems like it was a long time ago. I was a mere teenage heartthrob then, I wonder what I’d think of the market now. Just on Square Enix’s side, we have Tomb Raider selling an expected 3.4 million copies, Hitman Absolution 3.6 million, and Sleeping Dogs 1.75 million of physical copies alone, and they’re all considered failures, enough so to tank the company’s finances. AAA games are selling very well. Think of all the developers who would kill for 3.6 million sales. Yet they’re still losing money like a salaryman in Vegas.

Dead Space 3 famously had to sell 5 million copies to hit its break-even point, a mark it now seems certain it’s going to miss. It does highlight the source of the problem, though. AAA games, the games developers are throwing all their development and marketing dollars behind, are getting waaaaaaaay too expensive. Sales may be great, but the amount they need to sell to cover costs is just getting ridiculous.

You make your own Demons:Iron Man 3 Review

We write about a number of things here at Lost to the Aether.  Mostly video games and writing.  That’s two things.  Two’s a number.  It seems to me that both my writing posts and my video games posts have their own audiences, and when I write about one it tends to alienate the other.

Well that’s not good enough for me!  It’s inherently unfair!  So with this post, in a move for equality, we’re going to alienate both groups equally and talk about movies!  Besides, it’s so rare I get to talk about something topical.  We’re going to review Iron Man 3, out in theatres for a couple of days now.

The original Iron Man movie was good, momentously so.  It was one of the films that performed solidly enough to bring life to the superhero movie genre, and is one of the few superhero films to make an origin story entertaining.  Iron Man 2 took all that momentum, and let it fly away.  Let’s not talk about Iron Man 2.  Following that, Tony Stark and Iron Man stole the show with the Avengers, leading the pack in one of the highest grossing films of all time.  There’s some good legacy built up behind the franchise, is what I’m saying.  So how does Iron Man 3 hold up?  Is it a worthy successor to the films that have come before it?  Is this the life changing movie of the summer?

The Right Time to be Sexy in Video Games

The upcoming Dragon’s Crown has a pair of ridiculously oversexualized female characters. If you’ve been paying attention to the internet, you may have noticed a small circle of stupidity revolving around those characters. If you haven’t heard of it, some dude at Kotaku said some stupid things about the character designer, said character designer posted some stupid things about Kotaku Dude, everyone apologized. As a whole, the event’s not really worth paying much attention to, so of course video game media is all over this.

It did get me thinking, though. Sexism, against both genders, is very prevalent in our modern entertainment. Video games are no different. We, as a culture, need some good discussion about this sexism, yet it’s almost impossible to have. Both sides of the argument gets so stupidly aggressive whenever it comes up that even if there are good points, they’ve already burnt their bridges and ruined any hope of getting anyone to listen. Video game news sites aren’t any better. So many of them have posted so many ill thought out editorials in blatant attempts at getting hits that it’s next to impossible to tell when an honest attempt at advancing the discourse is being made.

Luckily for everyone, I’m here. I’m still pretty new at this whole blogging thing, and I’m probably not that good at it yet, so I’m not going to be able to end sexism in gaming with a single post just yet. Instead, we’re going to start pretty small, and with a subject matter I know well. Today, we’ll be talking about sexiness in games. Specifically sexy woman characters. If you know anything about me, you know I’m the closest thing we have to proof that God really did create mankind in His own image. I figure that makes me the most qualified to talk about the issue of sexualization in games.