![\"purple](\"https:\/\/www.lilithebowman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/vrchat_2024-09-11_20-05-543288041192030330635.jpg\")
<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>To this end I’ve hidden some cute and fun things around the world. I tried my hand at voice acting one of the NPCs, which I’m proud of. One of the other staffers at CozyCon did the orange I had lofty goals to do character modelling and animation this time around, but I only got around to tilting the head and wagging the tail a bit. I have half-modeled the megasloth concept we had, but never completed it in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have to work on that in the future. Temrin Sanjem, the leader of the CozyCon team, has given us ample time, but I did that ADHD thing where you procrastinate until it really is GO time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the interim I haven’t been sitting on my hands. This year I’ve volunteered at so many events I can’t even remember them all off hand. I’ve also been aggressively looking for a job in the background of all of my creative work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It really does seem as if the financial situation in Toronto, and in Canada as a whole, has not even begun to tailspin. I think the worst is yet to come. With that said, what is a programmer to do? I haven’t been able to find any web development or<\/em> game development work. None at all for over a year now!<\/p>\n\n\n\n This has really affected our finances. We are on what Victoria <\/a>calls, “rice and beans protocol,” which consists of a lot of simpler bean and rice meals with far less meat. This is a diet change that most of the world should probably move toward anyhow, but it’s definitely a sign of the times for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To our credit, I had been saving aggressively for retirement before this whole economic downturn (recession, let’s call it what it is)<\/em>. To that end I have been using up some liquid funds we had as a “rainy day fund”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well that is nearly running dry now and I really do need to figure out what it will take to stand out in the sea of other applicants. Every month I read the Hitmarker <\/a>newsletter, and every month there’s another round of layoffs. Even more people looking for work, all the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While worrying about all of this, I’ve been brushing up on my React<\/a> skills, as I feel this might still be a valid point of entry into any company who might truly be hiring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The matter of hiring is a bit of an open secret right now, very few companies seem to actually be hiring for their open positions.<\/em> Instead, in order to appear profitable and growing to their investors, they hold positions open for hire ongoing with no intent on ever filling them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This should be illegal. It makes it so those of us trying to find work are up a creek without a paddle, as it were. Getting support or even attention for the employment crisis going on right now is really hard when every company seems to be actively hiring all the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I like to keep busy with pretty things and hobbies as well, which I’ve obviously had copious time for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve just wrapped up my biggest VR convention project of the year, CozyCon Cretaceous! It was a dinosaur themed event which happened in a VR world I designed to show off the vendor assets nicely, and to be fun for people to explore! To this end I’ve hidden some cute and fun things around the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2371,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,375,12,376],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-musings","category-online-events","category-rant","category-volunteering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lilithebowman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lilithebowman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lilithebowman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lilithebowman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lilithebowman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2368"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lilithebowman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2383,"href":"https:\/\/www.lilithebowman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2368\/revisions\/2383"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lilithebowman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lilithebowman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lilithebowman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lilithebowman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}'ceratops'<\/code> and I did the purple one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>