Whole-ass one thing

Note: this was originally published in Weighted Tangents, my Substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

Blame Nick

In early March of 2013 I sat close enough to the stage during the recording of Nick Offerman’s American Ham that if you’re watching the Netflix show and you squint at just the right angle at a very precise moment you can see me in the audience. I don’t remember much about the show other than being exhausted from teaching high school and wrestling with whether or not I should leave the profession, when Nick’s closing monologue about “paddling your own canoe” struck a very precise chord in my heart and I decided to upend my life.

I guess you could say it’s Nick Offerman’s fault that I became a data scientist, because not long after his show I left teaching, left NYC, and embarked upon a cross-country move with someone I wasn’t at all confident that I should be dating, where I immediately fell into a deep depression fueled by 15-hour World of Warcraft gaming binges. I was not, you could say, in a good place. I did, however, get really interested in working with WoW data and started looking for ways to make that my actual job.

Permit me to gloss over all the details of that particular train wreck and fast forward to a year later, when I had secured a job as a data scientist with an esports start-up and was driving my little Subaru to the Dallas suburbs, feeling as if my stars had aligned and my life was finally coming together. To this day I still can’t believe I talked my way into that role, but I figured that with a semester’s worth of graduate statistics in R and a natural aptitude for math, I could learn the rest on the job.

Charlie Work

I remember the excitement of being at a start-up - in esports no less! - and feeling like this was my opportunity to become the best possible data scientist that I could be. I’d spend hours imagining how I would use this role as a way to land a career-defining role at Blizzard (back when Blizzard seemed like a great place to work), but in my zeal to show my new colleagues just how valuable I could be, I did anything and everything that was asked of me.

Translation: I ended up doing a lot of Charlie work.

And when I look back on all of my “data science” positions, it wasn’t just the esports start-up where I was doing Charlie work. Each and every one of my data science roles has been absolutely dominated by Charlie work. Whether it was becoming a Salesforce developer, or the time that I had to help organize moving rooms of office equipment from one building to another, or the three weeks I spent cataloguing and organizing the internals of a disastrous supply closet, my willingness to do “whatever needs doing” - while also doing data science - has never served me well in my initial aim of becoming the best possible data scientist that I could be.

Do one thing and do it well

I’ve finished up my first 3D character animation course, and in our final session our mentor took the time to answer all of the questions we wanted to ask her both about her career and animation in general. If I could sum up all of the advice she gave over the course of the evening it would be “if you want to be a character animator, animate characters.”

With almost every response we were cautioned to be careful how much time we spent doing the Charlie work of animation, or working on types of animation that weren’t exactly what we wanted to be doing. Over the course of the conversation I learned things like:

• The people who animate crowds of people are not the same folks who animate characters! These are often different teams with different workflows and requirements, and while there may be some movement from crowds to characters, the longer you’re in crowds the harder it is to move to characters.
• If you get good at mocap animation then you will do mocap animation forever - which is awesome if you love it! But if you don’t your brain will go numb and you will lose your creative will to live.
• If you “help out” with storyboards (or lighting or rigging or modeling) then this is likely to become your new career, because you will develop new and different skills while your character animation peers are deepening their character animation skills.
• Take the first animation job you can get and plan to spend nights and weekends working on your demo reel, shipping off an updated version to studios every three to six months. You may do this for the rest of your career.

I think the reason this advice took me by surprise is because I find it so hard to imagine a career where you say “no, this is the thing I want to do, and I want to do it well” and then simply dedicating yourself to it. What is that like? Is that what software engineers get to do? Data scientists who chose better career paths than I did?

Regardless, I’m turning this idea of going all-in on character animation around in my head and thinking about what that could mean for my skill development. I’ve never gone all-in on anything for long enough to see what could come of it, and it’s intriguing.

News and such

• Since school’s out for the next two weeks I’ll be doing several animation streams on Twitch — I’d love for you to stop by and chat!
• This newsletter started as an experiment to see if I enjoyed writing on a weekly basis, with the intention to stop at the end of 2022 if I didn’t. But I do enjoy this! And I’m appreciating the heck out of y’all reading. I plan to continue writing throughout 2023, and will keep all of my newsletter posts free for the year.

Release the drafts!

It’s been a weird week for movies and TV y’all

• Now that I’m done with a warp-speed re-watch of Game of Thrones I feel a bit lost, like there’s nothing quite that good on TV at the moment.
• I’ve tried watching any number of shows but everything is falling flat, even Community¹.
• I will, however, start putting three of my favorite Christmas films on repeat:
  • Christmas in Connecticut — I’d let Barbara Stanwyck step on me, but that’s besides the point. This is a lovely little romcom romp best enjoyed curled up under a blanket on a midday “working from home” coffee break.
  • The Desk Set — OK it has a Christmas scene but I’ll accept your argument that it’s not a Christmas movie per se. But you can feel the deep love Hepburn and Tracy have for one another, and a huge portion of the plot revolves around shiny new technology disrupting the workforce and automating workers out of a job - something I feel might appeal to y’all.
  • Tokyo Godfathers — I am very, very late to the Satoshi Kon game but am deeply in love with his work. Tokyo Godfathers has to be up there as one of my all-time favorite films (and if you want an in-depth analysis of its animation, Animation Obsessive has a brilliant piece up!) Imagine this: three homeless misfits, an alcoholic, a runaway, and a former drag queen, find a baby in the trash on New Year’s Eve. Sure it sounds more like the setup for an awful joke than my pitch for a heartwarming holiday film, but trust me - it truly is a masterpiece.
• In her talk “A Game of Construction” at NormConf, Helena Sarin said “some people watch TV, I make art” and it has haunted my brain ever since. Perhaps it’s time for a little three month “minimal TV” experiment where I replace watching TV with making art, see what happens, and share the progress here.