So: yeah. No posts in over three months. That’s not good.
I wish I could say I’d been silent because I had this SUPER-AWESOME PROJECT that’s fired me up in all the right ways and I’ve been spending every waking moment apart from eating, sleeping, and maintaining the day job on it, but I haven’t. In fact the urge to create almost anything has been absent for some time now. Part of me is afraid it will never return.
This past week I ran out of excuses to tell myself. I’m burned out.
The good news, I’m given to understand, is that burnout can be cured. Someday I’ll be able to make things again.
The bad news is… it’s going to take a while. I’ve got close to 29 years of creative failure, political exhaustion, family estrangement, and general depression in life to work through. There’s no easy or fast way to get back to creating, and the fast ways I’ve experienced before are both a) temporary and b) extremely painful. I’ve had enough of pain.
I will continue to maintain this site, and try to put a blog post up here every so often. But expect things to remain pretty quiet here for the foreseeable future. I just have to hope that I will find my way through this dark valley… and that there will still be a world waiting for the things I want to make once I get back to the light.
I celebrate Christmas, but there are so many holidays that fall in this particular season, and so many ways to celebrate them. Whatever holiday you celebrate, whether with others or alone, with a grand feast or a simple meal, with music and presents or just a moment of quiet contemplation, may you experience peace and happiness this season.
So, apparently over the weekend, Tumblr, in a bid to try and make its site safe for all, decided to alter its rules on adult content, and to hand over policing of these rules to an AI. While the full enforcement of these new rules are slated for mid-December, the AI has already been busy flagging posts as adult content.
Indeed, my twitter feed today has been full of people surprised that their material has been flagged. Worse, a lot of what’s being flagged isn’t “adult content” – also known as Not Safe For Work (NSFW) – at all. To name only a few examples, the AI, in its diligence, has been flagging:
Cat pictures,
Posts about protests,
Pictures of the posters’ kids,
or, in my case, work-in-progress screenshots.
Yes, I had a picture flagged as “adult content”; a screenshot of an image of a woman, fully clothed, just standing, as provocative as a potted plant. Granted, the picture is some years old and my word was my art bad then, but… NSFW? Really?
I think I need to state, before we go further, that I understand and approve of the need to police social media sites in particular and the Internet in general. The days when we could treat the Internet as an untamed frontier, where everyone can be free to do as they will, are long gone. In fact, I would argue that if we had some competent policing of the Internet and the social media services that reside there even two years ago, a lot of the western world’s current misery could have been avoided.
But the current methods of policing being tried – with private companies trying to put bandages on their brands by using AIs and algorithms – is incredibly damaging.
As a series, Doctor Who has been somewhat hit-and-miss with me. I followed it since its revival in 2005 (thanks to some help from my friends, as I had no cable or Netflix access then), but stopped watching sometime around 2012-2013. The tone of the series had gotten a little too clever for its own good, and a little too detached from its roots as a science fiction show, and the general plotting borrowed too much from the whole “puzzle box” / “everything is connected” approach that was more at home in superhero comics. In sum, Doctor Who had adopted almost every gimmick of modern television writing guaranteed to push me away.
I connected more with the original Doctor Who, low-budget special effects and outdated tales notwithstanding. This past summer, BBC and Twitch TV teamed up to broadcast a Doctor Who marathon, showing almost every available episode from the first broadcast in 1963 to the finale in 1989. This gave me a rare opportunity to finally catch up on the series of which I’d only seen parts before this year. 25 years of shows is too much to sum up, but I found a lot to like in those old episodes; the show rarely strayed from its roots, but never felt stale, even toward the end when one could see the show was running out of steam.
The marathon rekindled my interest in the show, and so I picked up the first of the current season on iTunes, the first episode to star Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor. After watching it – and then watching it again – I picked up the season pass. Now, five episodes in, I’m thoroughly enjoying the show for the first time in a long while.
When I was growing up, the first computer I used on a regular basis was a Commodore Vic-20. It came into the house one Christmas, I think in 1983 or 1984. We’d hooked it up to a small black and white TV, and I’d spent many an hour learning BASIC and making programs – many of which didn’t really do anything, but the process was certainly fun. Later, the Commodore was replaced with a custom PC built by my uncle, loaded with a version of DOS and with an orange monochrome monitor. Programming went by the wayside for a while, but I got my first real taste of computer graphics with early CAD and paint programs like Dr Halo II. It was also my first time we had computer games we didn’t have to program in at first (the Vic-20 didn’t come with any storage capacity beyond RAM – we did get a cassette tape storage device later, but it wasn’t the most reliable thing in the world).
Come the 90s and I got a PC for my birthday, with an actual colour monitor, new games and graphics programs, and a BASIC compiler. It was around this time I started trying to make my own games. Which, given the limitations of BASIC, was hard. Harder still, when comparing my creations to the games I was playing at the time; such as Wing Commander, UltraBots, and SimEarth. By the time I’d moved out on my own, the urge to make my own games had largely died out, pummelled by the growing gap between my own skills and resources and the quality of games I could just pick up on disk for fifteen dollars.
(It didn’t quite go away, though. If a game had a level editor, I’d find myself making levels, maps, and even missions for as long as it would hold my interest. I think my longest stint of map-making came with the 3D mech game StarSiege. But I digress).
I bring up all of this because a couple of weeks ago, I started to teach myself programming and game creation once again. Right now, that means acquainting myself with modern tools for the task, specifically the Unity game engine, the 3D modelling program Blender, and the script editor Visual Studio.
Of these, Unity has proved the most accessible, with a drag and drop interface that lets me bring in whatever assets I need (objects, textures and materials, scripts, sounds. etc) and connect them together to make a working game level. Plus, Unity’s website has a series of tutorials and sample projects that are good at helping people learn how to use the engine fairly quickly. The learning curve remains steep, but there’s plenty of help along the way.
I wish I could say the same for Blender, which – while a very powerful tool, especially considering it’s free and open-source – is somewhat lacking in the tutorial area. Or more specifically, the tutorials Blender has produced seem to be made with Lt. Commander Data in mind (when I described one of these tutorials to a friend, he asked me if they had a “ritalin” button to slow them down. They don’t, more’s the pity). YouTube has a wealth of videos, and the Blender manual is more helpful, but I suspect I’ll be doing a lot of trial and error to learn how to use it right.
Visual Studio is where my atrophied programming skills will be used most; no tutorials there, so I suspect I’ll have to track down a number of resources for C#, the programming language in question. But, I’m pleased to report, some of my programming skills seem to be coming back faster than I thought.
It’s too soon to say where this new hobby will end up. Maybe this will be the new Thing I invest all my spare energies into; or maybe it will be a passing fancy, to be dropped at some future time. Or maybe – and this is my preference – it will join my other creative dreams and even breathe new life into them. I’ve decided… not to try to force a given path this time; just to learn and play and see where it takes me. Perhaps keeping a hobbyist’s mentality is the healthiest path. We will see.
