Gearfuse

The very Frenchly-named Jean-Baptiste Gouraud designed these ingenious Freedombook Facebook business cards. The cards encourage the recipient to “Confirm” (or “Confirmer” if you want to sound pretentious) Gouraud as a business connection, or perhaps as a life partner, if that’s how you roll.

The card holds hall of the pertinent information, including phone number and e-mail address. Let’s just hope that your perspective business partners aren’t so enthralled by your business card that they forget to actually use it how it was meant to be used.

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Woke up to this cartoon on Tumblr. It’s so, so true, especially after my cousin received $75 in iTunes Gift Cards for Xmas. I mean, who really buys new music? Apps, apps, apps!

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Get ready for some news that will blow your fucking mind. Ready? CD sales are down. I know! Down? How could this be? The execs at Atlantic Records feel the same way. Seems during Q4, Atlantic Records had 51% of all sales come from non-physical sources like iTunes sales and ringtones. The New York Times found it “shocking,” so what does this mean for us? It means more and more people are transitioning to iPods and MP3s over Walkman and CDs.

NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker sums it up nicely, calling the transition “trading analog dollars for digital pennies.” Touche.

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So, you want to work in the game industry. You want to live, breathe, think, screw and shit video games for the rest of your life. Unless you want to be a master of the custodial arts, game design is the last thing you’ll want to major in. As Frank Caron of Ars Technica points out, the game industry is a very brutal and competitive field. He offers some words of wisdom for those actively pursuing their dreams by suggesting more broad majors just so you have skills to fall back on in case the game industry’s doors were closed.

A few lucky souls may wind up producing art or doing programming for projects directly out of trade school, but for the vast majority, unemployment at the hands of a limited skill set will be the unfortunate reality.

Ouch. Thanks to Frank, if you want to get your foot in the door of the industry, you know what to do. Broaden your skills, whether it be computer graphics, programming or both. Last but not least, kiss as much ass as possible.  My advice? Become an indie developer.

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