Blogging, writing, humor, and game designer ACE
January 13, 2013 2:40 PM

I'm John Harris, and it kind of makes me uncomfortable to say it, but I kind of rock. I am also pretty desperate for work.

I was a runner-up for the Best Post Contest here on Metafilter 2010 and 2011, and I won it in 2012 with High Weirdness By Mail, which took me weeks to put together. If you need a blogger for some project, I'm yer guy.

I have a near encyclopedic knowledge of computer and video games. I've designed a number of games from the old days of the Commodore 64 through to the present. One of those was Mayflight. I'm working on a cellular automation-based world simulation, written in Python of all the cockamamie things. I can also write code in C, Inform 7, Game Maker's language (GML), Second Life's language (LSL), and Javascript. Did I mention I rock?

What's more I can write. I'm pretty funny, or so I've been told by friends, clowns and a personal experience with St. Chuckleas, Catholic saint of seltzer water. I have a M.A. in English Lit. I wrote my master's paper on H.P. Lovecraft. I am both miracle ingredient Z-247, and a bona-fide supraman who can quote Joseph Heller when the circumstance demands it. Did I mention I also know HTML? Like, personally, he went to my high school, he's pretty cool but kind of snooty. Also let me add that I can draw pixel art and make video game sound effects pretty damn well.

I wrote the column @Play, on roguelike computer games, for noted (but sadly defunct) game culture site GameSetWatch, and I still write for Gamasutra from time to time, including their sparsely-populated series Game Design Essentials, in each of which I cover 20 games, and tell you things about them you've probably never heard of: Real-World Games - Unusual Control Schemes - RPGs - Difficult Games - Mysterious Games - Open World Games - Atari Games (that one's terrific you should read it now). I participate in Roguelike Radio once in a while, and have interview Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress twice, once for RR, another time for Gamasutra!

Won't you please consider hiring me? If you're making a computer game you probably should. I'm also suitable for puppet shows and bar-mitzvahs. I am willing, and in fact not-so-secretly hope, to relocate somewhere other than Brunswick, GA, although preferably to somewhere that my ludicrously facility at stringing together English sentences will be of use. If you want to know more about me you can check my Metafilter profile page. I actually can do all these things, so many that, no lie, I ran out of space in the tags field of this post.

In any case there I am, self-consciously pimping my exploits to the world. Please understand that I'm not usually like that, but goddamn it the situation demands it. In summary please hire me, I'm pretty good at a lot of different things, enough even to make up for my tendency to randomly leave sentences hanging _

posted by JHarris to Writing/Editing