Whilst I have yet to work out what career I would find most fulfilling, there are certain career-paths I find somewhat interesting. Talking to people in those professions would involve, you know, talking to people, and, therefore is out of the question. Luckily, there are webcomics about geeks that illustrate the ins and outs of those professions so I can get an idea of what it’d be like to work in those fields without having to spend years working my way into the career only to discover I hated it.

Join me in a tour of the lives of:

Web designers: .net  by Brad Colbow, Ah, the life of a web designer. You just want to be simultaneously geeky and creative and the people who will give you money to do those things are entirely lacking geekiness or creativity.

The Oatmeal has a hilarious example of this, as well.

Software developers: Not Invented Here  by Bill Barnes and Paul Southworth. Sort of like Dilbert but more tech and less misogyny. And there’s a Goth character.

Internet service providers: User Friendly [this is currently on hiatus, but if you start at the beginning there are daily strips from 1997 to 2009. Hopefully, Illiad will eventually return to us with regularly scheduled strips.]

Video game developers: The Trenches  by Mike Krahulik, Jerry Holkins, Scott Kurtz. The comic itself is enlightening, but the blog posts beneath each comic are written by people in the video game industry and those are…eye-opening.

Librarians: Unshelved  by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum. Books! Books everywhere! And the general public! The general public everywhere!

Grad students: PHD  by Jorge Cham. Sometimes I think that if I excelled at structured learning, I’d enjoy a life in academia. Then I realise I’d have to get through grad school…

fucknogradschool is a Tumblr account (page? blog?) rather than a comic, but it gives an excellent idea of what post-grads feel/think/experience.

On the other hand…

Bonus Content!

In a similar vein, Penny Arcade is about gamers and gaming, written by gamers. I have never played a first person shooter or MMORPG or…most other types of very popular games, but I enjoy learning about them and hearing people’s reactions to them. Their blog is also amusing and informative and helps me keep up with what my gamer friends are on about.

Also, PA is where I learned about 3-D printing, thanks to these strips:

Here is a video of 3-D printing:

Super Extra Bonus Content!

Shapeways is a site with lots of nifty products created by the general public…who happen to know how to design in three dimensions. You can also create your own designs and they’ll print them for you.

Thank you for joining me in this tour of careers-I-find-interesting-but-not-interesting-enough-to-pursue.

And if you know of any web comics about writers or bookshop employees, please leave a comment.

Poe was old-school even in his own time, tending towards overly-elaborate language no matter the audience–but modern fans can rediscover some of his work in a modern way through the  iPoe apps for iOS.

They’re incredible, interactive versions of several of his stories and poems. The text is unedited, but there is music and artwork and elements controlled by the reader. Volume One ($1.99) contains ‘The Oval Portrait’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (which allows you to dismember the old man, whee!), ‘Annabel Lee’, and ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, as well as a brief biography and sketches from the making of the app.  All of these are excellently rendered, though I think Red Death is my favourite. Early on, you can make a Raven peck out a bit of a corpse, (which I had to do a few times, giggling every time) and the final arrival to the party is delightfully creepy.

Volume Two ($2.99) contains ‘Hop-Frog’ and ‘The Black Cat’, with ‘The Raven’ being added at a later date. Bonus material includes The Edgar Allan Poe Route, featuring information about his haunts (apologies) and another sketchbook. The pages you read from are a bit more ornate in this one, but it felt like the illustrations were less interactive than the first volume. Part of that could be down to the fact that ‘Hop-Frog’ isn’t one of my favourite Poe stories, though the app brings it more alive to me than before. All of the selections in both collections are extremely well-done.

My only quibble is that you have to forward all the way to the end of the stories to loop back around to the beginning, rather than being able to access a menu after each tale. That aside, I’m looking forward to ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ though it’s quite long and don’t really expect it to appear.

Here is the tumblr account for the collections, which has illustrations both from the apps as well as other artists.

Other apps of interest to the Poe-ophile are hidden object games based on ‘ Murders in the Rue Morgue ‘, ‘ The Black Cat ‘, ‘ The Premature Burial ‘ and ‘ The Gold-Bug ‘. All four are made by ERS Games and distributed by Big Fish Games for the PC, though the first two are available for iPhone/iPod through iTunes.

I’m about halfway through ‘The Black Cat’ and it’s one of the best hidden object games I’ve played. Atmosphere, music, game play, story line, etc is outstanding. I have nothing bad to say about it. I’ve also started ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ which is similarly engrossing.

You can play free demos of all four and then purchase the full game, if you’re hooked. Prices are a few dollars for the apps and up to $15 for the PC versions, though Big Fish usually has some offer on that will bring that down a bit.

[Some people can get the PC-only games to work on Linux with WINE, but I'm having the devil of a time making that happen. If it works I'll happily purchase both of the currently PC-locked games.]

I’ve looked at some other apps, none of which impressed, but if you find any with merit, please leave a comment.

My current favourite distraction is Arcane Empires , a strategy game with a Steampunk feel. A pretty typical strategy game, the goal is to build a city and grow an army in order to continue building your city and growing your army. You mine and farm resources as well as learn magic in order to advance your goals. There are alliances (which are good) and a global chat feature, that takes up valuable screen real estate and cannot be shut off (which is bad). It’s free and would be fine for all ages if you could turn off the global chat. Currently I’m levelling up so I can train armoured mammoths. Very looking forward to that. Available for Android and iOS devices.

For those that prefer their Victorian a little less parallel-universe-y, I recommend Blackwood and Bell Mysteries & Gardens of Time . They’re by the same company and look extremely similar. The game play is the same, as well: you’ve just come on as a new detective and you earn coins and points by doing hidden object scenes in order to find clues. You then use those coins to buy things for your London street in Blackwood and Bell or garden in Gardens of Time. It’s the sort of game where you have to wait for your energy to refill so that can be frustrating. Also, you can’t really decorate your garden or block the way you’d like, as you have missions where you have to have a certain number of items before you can level up. So your screen winds up being cluttered with the multiples of the most high value items rather than a mix of what looks best. Still, they are a bit of fun. Both are free and can be played on Android and iOS devices, as well as on Facebook.

Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles . I was really looking forward to this one, but there was a load screen between every scene and sometimes when trying to do something within a scene. The graphics were good, as were the hidden object scenes and minigames. The storytelling was fine from the preview I played, but the load screen issue gave me too much time to think, ‘Why am I doing this when I could be doing something productive?’ Really good hidden object games should make you regret wasting that five hours after you’ve done so, as you were too engaged at the time to notice. I opted not to purchase the full game, but it’s $2.99USD

Before you go mad buying electronic gift cards for the people you either missed out or simply have no clue what to get (or as a little extra something for the geek in your life) check out these apps and services.

Apps for Windows

Apps for Mac

Premium Web Services

Mobile Apps

iOS Apps

Android Apps

Also, see my posts on cloud storage space and mobile productivity apps .

If you’re looking for games for your gothy/geeky friends, you may try:

Apps for the Darkly Inclined (part one)

Apps for the Darkly Inclined (part two)

And here’s one I haven’t yet tried, but looks right up my street.

Little Inferno for the Wii or PC

It’s dark. It’s twisted. It’s by three indy game developers who don’t even have an office.

And it’s $15 (DRM-free) for Windows versions. You can also sign up to beta test the Mac or Linux versions.

The guys at Penny Arcade have captured my attempts at QWOP.