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Whilst in a YouTube rabbit hole on game design (more below), I learned that the 2016 Hitman reboot looked super duper fun. So I bought it, and boy oh boy is it paying off. It's a funky concept - it has 6 levels, which are designed to be replayed a dozen-plus times. It's supremely cleverly designed. On a recent visit, my brother and I dug deep into the game and really came to grips with 3 of those levels. My brother's picky about games - he needs a lot of depth and strategic options - and so he sticks to franchises he loves, like the Arkham franchise and Dishonored. In a single weekend, Hitman sunk its teeth deep into him. We're both in love with the hilarious possibilities for assassination and the butterfly effect of each action in the game. There's a "Hitman 2" (something like the 10th actual game in the Hitman franchise) coming this year, and we're both hype. 

The feather in its cap: it's the rare game that keeps me up past my bedtime. 

In days past, if you had a deep curiosity about game design, it was hard to come across serious information about it. Print game magazines, fun though they were, never went deep enough. Occasionally, a book got published that might have some tantalizing details about the super-fun-sounding inner workings of game creation. Occasionally, Gamasutra (a game dev news site connected to the GDC conference) would publish something cool. (Side note: Virtually all of my senior thesis citations were to Gamasutra articles.)

Now, there's a wealth of fun stuff to dig into. GDC has a YouTube channel that posts older talks (say, from the previous year's show). It gives a great impression of what it's like to attend the good talks. Amateurs sometimes make great analysts, as is the case for Mark Brown's Game Maker's Toolkit. My favorite of them all is Extra Credits, and despite the silly voices and artwork is written by a professional game design consultant, James Portnow. (Side note: Most of my senior thesis citations of Gamasutra articles were written by Portnow.)

Evo, the fighting game tournament, is still the best thing in esports. It has the unpredictability and spectacle of March Madness, but condensed into a weekend. It has the most diverse, respectful, hype community out of large competitive game communities. While the rest of gaming struggles to contain toxicity, the fighting game community overwhelms its own members with its positivity.

Special shout out to fellow UT and Rakuten alum Doune2 for nearly taking out the eventual winner in pools! I did *not* think that I'd see up and coming esports players in my personal life in my 30s, but here we are. Looks like I'm a Tekken spectator now!

Still good. It occasionally airs on Adult Swim, even now. I try not to spend too much time indulging in pure nostalgia for its own sake, but if you need 20 minutes to reminisce, this show won't disappoint. 

The time came to pick up some new skills - particularly, AWS. A Cloud Guru is actually making it easy to understand, and AWS is hard. I'll be transitioning my skillset to AWS over the next few weeks, thanks to these guys. 

I try to profess my love for online learning often. It's great for the students and great for the teachers. 

For teachers, it's great economics. Create the course once, then it sits there and makes money. You may occasionally create updates, but that's better than the college circuit where most live on food stamps and still work stupid hours, while delivering the same lectures again and again. (Not to mention the convenience factor of just having to do it once and update occasionally). 

For students, it's also great. It's convenient (take the course any hour of the day and at your own pace), doesn't create insane debt at $30/month, and is quicker to respond to what's needed in the workplace than universities or community colleges.*

*(Don't get me wrong - there is a place for a 4-year, liberal, classical university education. But not if it costs $200,000, doesn't teach people to think, leaves teachers in poverty, and creates people who ask if they can turn in double-spaced papers and if points are taken off for spelling mistakes. I have immense pride in being a Plan II graduate - I got way more out of my education than the average state-school sociology major.)

Part of the software technorati I follow on Twitter helpfully pointed out: In what other point in history could anyone learn the skills to land a 6-figure job within a year?* This is an incredible democratization of opportunity. 

*(Money doesn't buy happiness, but it can buy you out of stress and poor conditions. Again, at what other point in history?)

Friends, believe the hype. Online education has come.