I like food.  

I mean, I like the culture and the feeling of food, the idea of it as a thing that links us and propels us and drives us to become more than eaters harvesting nurtients from organic objects, but instead seekers of taste and flavour and aroma and texture and everything that strikes the senses as we dine and indulge.

It’s no wonder then that when a local international food market opened up near me, sitting here in my quasi-career change retirement and looking for something interesting to occupy me in the hours of the day when I wasn’t behind a keyboard or writing code or making art or studying for the next phase of my serious career, when that market opened that I found myself with a part time job amongst all that interesting sort of food culture.

It was a fit. And then it wasn’t.

I left that place and still had food culture on the brain.  And that analytical, data-processing brain of mine had already long been thinking about how I would automate many of our frustratingly manual processes with a good database and some customer model simulations, y’know, in code of course. It would be an interesting exercise, no? To walk through the aisles of a grocery store and map it into a complex digital economic simulation, figuring out all the maths of supply and demand clashing with the forces of microbiology and human pyschology.  Complex and challenging and—

Politics. I forgot about politics.

About the same time I was thinking about starting work on a simulation of that store I found myself weighing my future at the same, and internal politics played my hand for me and I gave notice.  I had been through one career burnout already. I wasn’t queued up quite yet for another—or a retriggering of the last one.

You may know the next two months of that story if you’ve read this blog. 

I started coding anyhow and my food market simulator idea became the foundations of a silly little cozy game roguelike pixel party coding project now known as Pleck’s Mart.

But as politics are wont to do, the politics played out, calmed, resolved somewhat, and the vibe of the store reverted—and me, keeping my finger on the pulse of that place, a sudden found myself being offered a chance to go back and do that thing which I had originally thought would be my job: be a food culture guy working in a trendy local international food market. In other words, I am back at work at the place that lightly inspired me towards a video game idea.

The coding may slow somewhat, but the fresh opportunity to observe a real food market with the eyes of a guy who has been trying to simulate one in said code—that is a priceless opportunity, no?