Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

I’m working on a mini-series dissertation about story in videogames, a several hour long sculpting tutorial, a novel, and at work I just got started heading up a small team making a very interesting piece of content for Guild Wars 2 that I proposed.  So I've had a lot of late nights while my brain is storming when I want to be sleeping, but overall I’m really happy and excited for my future.  

I made a particularly talked-about level for the game Guild Wars 2.  I was on a team within the company that is responsible for making special holiday content.  Halloween was our first holiday, and our first time updating the game in a major way since we launched a couple of months ago.  So I really wanted to make a splash.  Previously, I championed the addition of jumping challenges in Guild Wars 2 during development, and eventually got enough traction that all the maps in the game were required to have one or two of these different-than-normal-GW2-play areas.  So I thought it would be nice to make a new jumping challenge for Halloween.  The main character in our game world for Halloween (he's been around since the first Guild Wars) is Mad King Thorn.  A crazy, supernatural guy with a flaming pumpkin head.  Now, I had been asked by many players during our beta process to make harder and harder jumping challenges.  So I thought this was the p...

CAUTION: STRONG LANGUAGE: (In response to a video of someone –not the person below- running a very difficult jumping puzzle map I made for Halloween in Guild Wars 2) Josh Foreman   4 days ago Dang, great job. I built this map and I was thinking maybe 5% of people would make it to the top. Did not expect success vids within a couple hours! ChildrenofAmory   2 days ago So you're the dick responsible for this poorly tested piece of shit. Between this and the giant middle finger that is the Holiday skins, did you come up with anything that you intended to simply be fun for everyone? 5%? You created this, with an estimated 5% success rate? For a holiday event? Seriously, go fuck yourself. The fuck is wrong with you? ChildrenofAmory   2 days ago I mean what the fuck are you thinking, shoehorning platforming into a an engine with collision and camera as bad as GW2? Then forcing us to do it in a group? The only reason this thing is remotely hard, is you u...

On a FaceBook group someone wrote the following: "Ultimately, every spiritual valley  brings me to the same choice:  I must decide between trusting God more,  or trusting Him less. There is no third option." It prompted me to share my experience as follows: What does "trusting God" look like in action or attitude, Kim?  I ask because I don't know.  In the past I have done what I would call "trusting in God", and it looked different every time.  For instance, there was a time when I had just got into my chosen profession.  It had taken years to get into the video game industry.  Jobs were VERY scarce and the number of applicants for every position was huge.  I had a new baby, and was struggling financially from schooling.  After 6 months the studio I had just landed a job at got closed down by the parent company, Sierra.  (They made a bunch of adventure games back in the day.)  Well they offered us jobs at Sierra so w...

So I was in a creative team meeting at church last night.  This is where the pastor and a few of the quirky artistic types in the church get together and hash out sermon series themes and figure out what kinds of assets we can create to help communicate those themes.  (Usually power point background images or little animations and such)  I don't remember the conversation that lead to it, but at some point I let it slip that I "don't believe anything this church teaches anymore."  Which really isn't true.  It's only specific doctrines that seem to be held up as literally true, and are taught that one must believe the literalness of the symbol in order to 'be saved' that I no longer believe.  Anyway, Curt gave me a 'serious' look and said we should probably talk about that.  So I wrote him this letter and thought that it was a pretty good (relatively) short and concise time capsule of my believes circa 2012, so I'm posting it for fu...