I don't know how much more of this I can take without my head exploding

From the AP:

U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey, Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites)'s personal human rights envoy to Iraq said Wednesday.
...

"She was held for about six weeks without charge," the envoy told Wednesday's Evening Standard newspaper. "During that time she was insulted and told she was a donkey. A harness was put on her, and an American rode on her back."

...

"I am satisfied the case has now been resolved satisfactorily," the envoy told British Broadcasting Corp. radio Wednesday. "She got a visit last week from the authorities, and she is about to have her papers and jewelry returned to her."

via Josh Marshall.

Jesus wept.

And now the news

So, it never rains but it pours.

As most of you know, I've been mostly unemployed since October, 2001, when Unplugged Games shut down. For the last thirty months, I've been bringing in some money--initially, unemployment insurance payments, then a series of freelance and part-time jobs--but not much. Then, just in the last month, that small rain down did rain, drop after drop.

Drop one: For several months, I received a stipend from Unplugged, Inc. (the successor company to Unplugged Games). Those stipends stopped about a year ago because the person running Unplugged Version 2.0 couldn't afford to keep paying people out of his own pocket; I've continued to do work for them in the expectation that eventually Unplugged would reach the point at which it was bringing in enough revenue to pay its employees.

Unplugged took a gamble in late February/early March and shelled out a lot of money to Paramount Films for the wireless game rights to the movie Mean Girls. I bashed out a simple game loosely themed on the screenplay (which I liked a lot, by the way--I haven't seen the film, but the screenplay was smart and funny, much more so than the trailer or commercials for the film). Paramount required an up-front guarantee of $N for the rights, which we would owe regardless of how well the game sold.

Well, Mean Girls was the top-grossing film in America last week. And with that, $N suddenly seemed like a very small price to pay. Unplugged can now start paying its key employees, including the company's owner, who has also been working on spec for the last two years.

Drop two: As I mentioned last week, I've been training for a test prep company. There were two obstacles I had to pass; one of them, scoring high on a practice SAT, I passed last week. The other was getting the go-ahead from my trainer--at the end of the fourth training session (out of five), she could have said, "Thank you, but you're not right for the company." Instead, she said, "Come on back for the last session; you pass." So I'm now officially certified as a teacher; my last training session is tonight (Thursday).

Drop three: Remember that financial services company that I also mentioned last week? They called me back for a second interview on Monday (March 3). Well, I thought it was a second interview. It turns out they really only had one question: "Is this amount we're offering a good enough salary?"

Geez. I barely restrained myself from saying, "HELL yes, that's enough money"; it's more money than I've ever made in my life. (Well, on two occasions, I've made $100/hour for computer consulting. Those jobs have both lasted less than two hours. This isn't at that level, but it's a lot more than two hours.) There's a full benefits package. They don't care how I dress, and they mean it--sandals in the office, wahoo! I start on Monday, full-time.

I'm going to keep working part-time with Unplugged (nights and weekends, as much as I can) until such time as I decide that I can move back into game design full-time. Because of the financial services job, I probably won't be able to teach test prep. When I do move back into game design, I hope to have the flexibility in my schedule to teach--for a very long time, I've had a intermittent nagging urge to be a teacher, and I want to see what it's actually like.

(It might be genetic. My mother was a substitute teacher off and on during my childhood, and taught basket-weaving and associated crafts for fifteen years; my father was a corporate instructor for much of his career, teaching environmental regulation for the EPA; and my sister is leaving her job in private practice to become a teaching fellow at NYU's law school, with an eye towards entering the professorial job market when her fellowship ends. Of course my sweet nellorat is a teacher, among her many professional hats. Even supergee taught for a year, though he doesn't look back fondly on it.)

I'm also going to have to curtail my copy-writing activities for Tor--I love the work, but it takes me a solid day of doing nothing else to read enough of a book to write copy or a reader report, and full free days are going to be in short supply for me again. Again, maybe when I move back to game design I'll be able to pick that back up, too.

But for the first time in, well, ever, I feel like I have too many financial options instead of too few, and I cannot believe how relieved I feel.

Total Eclipse of the Muppet

Hmm....

( Answers here )