Як ти? How are you? 💙💛

Як ти? How are you? - this is a new way of saying I love you, I care about you.
On the image above, the person hasn’t been online for 2 days to see the message. Are they in a bomb shelter? Are they still alive?

Fuck this war in Ukraine.

Somebody I love has lost their business and home. Somebody has lost their job and was displaced. Somebody got detained for 15 days. Somebody lost a leg. Somebody lost a husband and a kid. I am talking about the people I know personally. These are not Instagram stories, these are people, these are lives.

On the first week of the war I felt almost guilty for being safe, guilty for daring to even think about our startup that we had to put on pause.

“Put on the life west on yourself and then help others” - the life-saving manuals say. That’s what Lera (my co-founder) and I did to our emotional health, in exactly this order.

Two of us recorded an audio diary, our emotional journey as a non-representative example of how to live with war and suffering in our backyard.

We didn’t hide, we didn’t move on, we decided to live with it and stay sane, help others. The pain didn’t go away, but at least we found a reason to be beyond the two weeks until “the life goes back to normal”.

Our new reason to be is the jobs page for Ukrainians.
Yes, it is focused on one single country and one single industry. But we do what we can do well:

• all jobs have direct HR contacts and specify if English or Russian is enough
• all companies specify if remote is an option
• we have a Telegram chat to directly help all involved with Lithuanian games industry folks helping Ukrainians

The next step - meetups and events for Ukrainian games professionals to meet the locals here in Vilnius.

And by locals I also mean Belarusians who had to flee their country that is temporarily occupied by kremlin. Yes, Belarusian gamedevs are locals now, and they also want to welcome Ukrainians to Lithuania. 💙💛

This text feels like a dump of personal emotions and it is. I tried to show how I mentally coped with the war in the backyard (where my family and friends have to fight russia) and was able to stay somewhat sane and relatively productive. I am not pretending to be a role model and a perfect example. But here's my way.