I recently joined an online co-working group (mostly for freelancing and professional artists who’ve been cooped up indoors and can’t dart out to the local coffee shops to haunt their tables, but also a handful of others who are students, or just working from home and find it helpful to be able to recreate the library/office space ambiance) at the invitation of an acquaintance, and I’ve found it to be pretty interesting.
It’s cool to be around other creatives, though there aren’t many among them who dabble in gamedev, (a few have expressed interest in Twine in particular, so Manon’s masterlist of resources over from Tumblr has been getting some mileage.) I think it helps to have a group of people to hold me accountable for tasks- I’ve mostly used the accountability thread for finishing up schoolwork, and since I’ve been terribly sick, I’ve taken things easy. After getting a late night burst of inspiration to smack out some words for my SeedComp entry, though, I might pop in a little ‘hey, I want to implement the code for that written portion today, and if I get more done, great, if not, then I’ll be content with having met my first goal’ to see if that helps me stay on track.
Also, one of the members uploaded a super cute ‘work ID’ card template for people to fill out. I’ll share mine, since I’m not sure how public the others would want theirs to be: it was fun decorating it!
Before Covid i was quite interested in being at in-person co-working spaces. In fact, there were quite a few interesting ones as well as “maker spaces”.
These seem to have disappeared now. or have they?
Some of these spaces were very reasonable cost-wise. I think some were run by google and you could go there any time for a cost of just a few dollars - a year!
Some other spaces were wannabe co-working spaces that wanted “bums on seats” to make them look “working”, so they’d throw really cheap deals out.
My plan was to sit there with my laptop hacking away, occasionally annoying people asking about what they were doing.
In the one I’m a part of- there’s two major voice chat channels, one for silent working, and one for chatting while you’re working. People are free to turn on their cameras if they’d like, and it’s a bit like just being in a Zoom call with other people. Sometimes people share their screens while they’re working as well, especially if one of the artists are doing digital inking for comic pages, which is fun to tune into.
I’ve considered using a physical coworking space for my job (power outages are not uncommon up here), but the position involves taking and making phone calls, and I fear that I’d be a nuisance for others working in that space.
In fact, ahead of the storm dumping on the US right now, I went and got a hotel room instead so I could show up to work on Friday.
I’m still here, however, as my Consumers Energy account informs me that my home has no power. Just paid for another night, so it looks Christmas Eve in the hotel.
