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Resolutions, three months too early

It’s three months and a week before 2018, but it’s not too early to think about goals.  Once upon a time, I used to strongly poo poo New Years resolutions, seeing them as a wonderful way to hex your own self growth.  Looking back, my ability to manage my own self growth didn’t really put me in any position to dismiss how anybody else does things, but I still think the word “resolution” encourages lofty dreams with no plans to encourage real follow through.  (There’s probably a clever line to be had here about Thoreau’s castles in the air crashing helplessly to the ground.)

So, “resolutions” are still bad.  Let’s call them goals.

Continue reading “Resolutions, three months too early”

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Hobbies include digging on Spotify

Hobbies include digging on Spotify for obscure bands that nobody knows about, finding something amazing every couple of months, getting really angry that nobody knows about them because they deserve exposure, and doing nothing to rectify the situation because I’m really insecure about my musical tastes.

I don’t jealously horde music, I’m just anxious as hell about sharing anything.

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I’m the guy with the car

A couple of months ago, I was thinking about those guys (they’re usually guys) who love old cars and stumble upon a great deal for a classic car that they love, but is in awful condition, and so they buy it, excited at the prospect of fixing it up and restoring it into the beautiful machine it’s supposed to be.  But then they don’t.  The car sits in their driveway or garage, hopefully covered by a tarp or cloth.  It’s in the way.  His family, when they notice it, just find it annoying and in the way.  When he remember it’s there, he feels a guilt that he isn’t working on his worthy project, if he ever even started it.  If he spent significant money acquiring the car in the first place, the guilt is doubled.  The dream becomes a weight around his neck.

It turns out restoring a car by yourself, learning as you go, is really, really, really hard.  The concept of the project is simple and exciting, and the fantasy of the final product even more so.  Step beyond the concept and the fantasy, and you discover a staggering amount of work ahead of you, demanding incredible time and commitment.  The more beautiful the dream, the more you have to sacrifice.  Give up your weekends.  You’re tired from work, but you don’t get to goof off tonight.  That’s a really weird problem you just ran into–time to hit the books.  Or you can wait and put it off, and in twenty years you can look back on this as the thing you never did.

A couple of months ago, I had the horrifying realization that I was the guy with the car.

For the last few years, I’ve been slowly working on a GameMaker project, and by “working on”, I mostly mean “feeling guilty about not working on”.  I could use the partial excuse of having been really sick for four years, but who am I trying to supplicate?  The only thing that matters is the dream.  In some respects, that dream began with this project.  In others, it date backs to concepts I’ve been slowly developing over the course of a decade.  All I have to show for that decade is a few design documents I drew up over the years, all of which are now very obsolete.

There’s good news, though!  I’m no longer okay with it.  For the last six weeks, I’ve been hustling like crazy on my project, and my progress has been incredible.  By the end of the weekend, I’ll have completed the guts of a module that six months ago I couldn’t imagine ever being finished.  At my current clip, I might have something worth showing as a work in progress as soon as the end of the year.

My project is a JRPG called Behemoth, which is shaping up to be a strange marriage between MegaTen/Persona and Puzzle and Dragons.  I’m building the whole thing from scratch in GameMaker because RPG Maker is terrible and can’t possibly do half of the weird garbage I’m planning.  I’m about to start working on the battle engine–hopefully next weekend or sooner–and I’m very excited.

It feels really good to move towards your dream.  This will be a beautiful machine.

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Our secret blackberry patch is gone

I have no sympathy for people who accidentally cause incredible destruction. Humans are fundamentally, across the entire planet, an invasive species. Our ability to dramatically evolve within a single generation has taken us outside the world governed by ecosystems. We do not play ball with the world. We control it, outcompeting everything around us. Like all invasive species, we will live high until we have consumed the entirety of our environment. And when there’s nothing left, we too shall die. 

If we manage to survive what Carl Sagan called our adolescence, our descendents will look back on us with scorn. We triggered one of the planet’s great extinction events, all because people needed something to do, because we decided that people having something to do was a precondition for participating in society. We even realized what we were doing, and then we did it anyway. 

That 15 year old kid who threw the firecracker that destroyed the Columbia Gorge: I hope deep guilt and shame haunt him for the rest of his life. His is the great human sin writ small. Forgiving him means forgiving ourselves for what we’re doing to the world. We don’t deserve it.