Yeah, another delay – holidays, illness, work craziness.  I am so glad I’ve got vacation time coming up.

So first up, more detail on the Magical Power Generator idea.

Basically I noticed in things like anime (especially Fairy Tail which inspired another generator a year ago – which is how long this idea was sitting in my head) and video games there’s magic that’s sort of a “superpower” – not a ton of chants and material components but more blast-and go.  You also see this to an extent in video games.  It’s a “set” of abilities as it were with names as simple as “Dance Magic” or as complex as “Lightning God Slayer Magic.”

Needless to say, that started giving me ideas.

So what about a generator that makes these “types” or “sets” of powers, but also tosses in some good expansion.  Sure you may have “Air Magic” but why not “Wind Bewitchment?”  Why not have “Celestial Beast Snare Sorcery” along with “Animal Magic?”

On that level, why not make options that allow for some poetic alliteration?  You could have “Water Wizardry” out to “Dark Demonic Decimation Diabolism?”

So as you can guess this simple idea is fun (in fact I have most of the data),  though getting the poetic alliteration is a wee bit challenging – but is teaching me some new stuff.  Let’s hope I have enough sane time to do this!

Now with that being said . . .

The new year’s coming up and last year left me with enough ideas I don’t think I need to do a new poll (or “yes, I know, plot twist generator.”).  However I do want to consider it.

Things I HOPE to do are:

• More Tumblr feeds.
• Automate the Twitter random idea feed.
• Consider a Patreon to ditch ads and give me more layout options.
• Try to do some events/teamups/more contributors to the codex and others.

Oh and use that portable dev environment I have yet to use.

This was a pretty insane year.

Finally at Muse Hack I did two columns on the question “is there a gap in hiring in IT” – if you work in IT you’ve heard the claim it’s hard to hire people.  In part one I examined the basic numbers and what they tell us, but then dived deeper into specifics and reached some surprising conclusions.  Short form, there’s probably a gap for senior people, it’s concealed due to certain factors – and we’re making it worse.  If you work in IT check it out . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.