I've always thought to myself that if Three Six Mafia could win an Oscar, a rap group known for making throw away hip-hop about wheels that keep spinning when you stop, then I too could find success in the endeavors of my life.

Three Six Mafia doesn't know how lucky they are.

Generally all aspects of my life have been mildly successful. I graduated college with high marks carrying a handful of undeserving awards and accolades. I met the girl of my dreams early on and married her right after college to make sure she didn't have a chance to run away. A few months after being a fresh college grad I soon found a job that was quasi-related to what I might actually enjoy spending my life doing.

I'll spare you the boring details but I soon began to realize that corporate life wasn't for me. It's just too stifling that it puts the kibosh on your creativity the minute you step into the vast cube farm. I still have said job because I need to pay off all the loan sharks coming at my knee caps with bats, however I knew it was time to branch out a little bit and explore new possibilities.

So I came up with the incredibly brilliant idea to start freelance writing to cover my beloved videogame industry. I was fortunate enough to run into a gritty personality from Estonia who generously gave me an opportunity to write for his site ThatVideoGameBlog.com in exchange for one of my kidneys of course. That's just how they operate in Estonia, don't ask me why.

After I healed up I started writing news posts right away covering videogames of all shapes and sizes. It was fantastic and continues to be a great labor of love even today. Unfortunately it seems though that it will always be just that, a labor of love. Sadly because of the huge market saturation of videogame websites/blogs I figured out that it would be near impossible to get paid to write about and review games. After I finally got over the delusion that I could eventually get paid to write about videogames, I decided to keep on writing out of the love of the craft and games, but I also started my next insane endeavor.

Endeavor #1 - FAILED, at least for now.

Since I'm full of awesome ideas I came up with my next little piece of brilliance in April of this year, I started a webcomic. Great idea right, there's not enough of those out there. As you might have guessed from earlier on in this entry, I'm an artist of sorts. I love to draw, and I love to make people laugh especially myself. I started a webcomic about general geek stuff mostly about videogames and as of today I'm up to 25 comics. Yay, go me! Sorry.

The problem with webcomics and any endeavor involving the internet is promoting them, it's much like trying run on a beach with an anchor dragging behind. You're at the mercy of the cesspool that is the Internet and you can easily get sucked deep into it's bowls if you're not careful. Fortunately for me I do the comic because it's fun and it makes me laugh. However it would be nice if people got to see it and although some people do it's nothing to start bragging about. At times it seems impossible to penetrate the giant wall that gets you users and there almost never seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

So lets say this endeavor fails which is too soon to tell at this point, I have at the very least learned a ton. I learned that the Internet sucks but I should have already known that. I've also learned a lot about making comics and at this point I haven't even mastered it so there's still a butt load to learn in that respect. On top of that, I've learned how to design websites, albeit very poorly but I've learned nonetheless.

At the end of the day I have to tell myself that doing the webcomic is more about giving myself a reason to create. At work I don't really get a chance to do that nor is it an environment to which creativity can flourish. It's sad but true, sing it James! Branching out and possibly failing miserably would make one reconsider branching out at all, right? Not quite, in fact...

I have other brilliantly crazy ideas! But it's too soon to talk about those, maybe later.

In the end everyone should branch out and do things that are difficult and challenging. If you stay complacent in your life, you'll never reach your full potential. At the end of the day and no matter how hard I fail, I'll make sure to keep getting up and taking abuse as I know there will be at least a minuet amount of growth.

You can catch Emmanuel's webcomic [Here] as well as other random antics of a videogame playing artist.