My mom wants to write a children’s book. She read a few books on it recently and they all pretty much told her she wouldn’t make it which really discouraged her. One of them said 7% of people who try to get published actually get published.

“You’re just saying it to encourage me,” she said when I told her I loved her plot.

“You know it’s something I need to do before I die so you’re saying it’s good so I’ll do it,” she said when I told her I loved her plot for the second time.

“It’s hard for you to be unbiased,” she said when I told her I loved her plot for the third time.

I wasn’t. I really liked her plot. It has a twist that I think is adorable and I think it works. If I had kids, I’d read it to them. But I don’t, and that’s probably a good thing that I don’t, so I’ll read it to my cat. She’d like it because she likes to hear me speak. And I’d like it because it’s a clever plot and my mom’s pretty fucking cool for a mom sometimes.

But anyway, that’s not the point. The real point is the world is basically filled with how-to’s and naysayers. Oftentimes they’re the same thing. Look up a resume guide, watch them tell you exactly how to write your resume to get maximum views by recruiters. Then follow that exact template and watch as you get no replies in your inbox because that guide wasn’t completely right and you relied too heavily on it.

The video game industry is really bad at this. I got told so many times my resume was bad by all kinds of people (to be fair, I got told it was good and I got helped by so many others, so this isn’t to say the entire industry is bad or anything). But I got a lot of interviews and callbacks and eventually a great job. I’m thankful for every single callback, too, because they taught me to value my instinct a little more. To believe in myself. That kind of shit.

Anyway, they tell you a lot of times what you can and can’t do. The thing is, you rarely stop and question who they are–and why they’re telling you that you can’t do it. Sometimes it’s just because they like having the power and they would be sad if you got some power too. Other times it’s because they’re negative. And sometimes, very rarely, it is because they’re right but you should never let that discourage you or take their word for it.

You can pretty much do anything you really want to. Even if you can’t, even if it really is the impossible, I’ll tell you this: if you don’t try, you’ll find yourself regretting it someday.

I sincerely hope my mom writes her book and illustrates her pictures. I hope I get to help her get it published because, like I said: I loved her plot. Her artwork ain’t half bad either.

At my old job, where I worked for three years on an indie game, the developers were mostly smug and full of themselves. There were a few good ones, of course, but if you were a community or administrative person, you were nothing to the majority of the development team. You couldn’t code so you weren’t worth the time of day. Worse, any ideas you had that were actually good were eventually purposed into the developer’s brainchild; reworked so they got credit ultimately. Praise was nonexistent.

It got old pretty quickly.

I wanted the name Ashelia.com since I started using Ashelia as my online handle back in 2006. But, as is the case with any short and memorable domain name, it was taken. It was taken this time by a particularly egregious fellow–he’d bought it to camp the name because it was related to Princess Ashe. He had it functioning as a gallery to Final Fantasy XII for Google keyword traffic and plastered with ads.

It made him some money or so he claimed.