Potato is yum

I don’t consider myself the best writer, musician, producer, creator, or whatever. In fact, I often ridicule myself for my lack of skill. I know a lot of people tend to say statements like, “I am my harshest critic” or stuff like that. To be honest, I think this is bullshit. I can only hate my creations so much because at the end of the day I made it and am inherently biased. Somehow, I really don’t think it’s right for a creator to judge the quality of their own work.

To be clear, I think the ability for a creator to judge the quality of their work is very important. In fact, that’s what I’m going to talk about. However, I’ll talk about the approach I take to judging a final version of all my creations. In the end, I have to balance many factors that are weighed differently depending on the circumstances. To start with, I guess I could sum up my approach in a single sentence. I want to make something that respects the only thing a consumer cannot get back from consuming any media: time.

I find that a lot of stuff now days simply doesn’t respect your time. Half the time I spend at work is honestly not really doing any work but simply just waiting for random crap to be approved. When I go on youtube my homepage is littered with AI slop. When I open up a new AAA video game to relax in my room I get hit by an unskippable five minute cutscene. Like I decided to play a game not watch a movie dammit. If I wanted to watch something I’d go to netflix. So when I look at a lot of modern media I can’t help but feel like the amount of media I’m actually consuming is tiny compared to what I had planned for. When I sit down to read webcomics I dedicate a part of my daily expenditure of time to looking at that thing. Unlike money I can’t get that time back. That time is gone. That’s a second of my life I’m never getting back. I only have so many seconds to live alright? I want to make the most of what I’ve got. I can always make more money, I can always get a refund, I can’t get my time back.

This idea has become especially clear to me when I got diagnosed a few months back and landed myself in the hospital. I suddenly came to the very real reality that life is finite and limited not just for me but for everyone. I’ve made a post previously about how I tried to optimize everything in my life and I still believe that it is not healthy to optimize everything. However, I think that revelation was more of the fact that being optimal doesn’t mean doing something all the time but adding another activity to do which would improve my efficiency and overall make myself more optimal. Rather than saying you shouldn’t optimize it was more of a message to show how I was optimizing incorrectly and that there is more to efficiency than simply work.

When I make something, I want to make sure the people who consume what I make can efficiently take it in and turn it into something useful for themselves. What do I mean? Well, when I read a webcomic I turn that into one of two big general catagories: entertainment and philosophical thinking. This is just for me but I’ll break down how this works for me. The obvious component I take out of reading a webcomic is the entertainment value which I glean from it right as I read it. The entertainment value of a work is impossible for a creator to really know unless they get a bunch of people to consume it before the market but even then, it’s basically impossible to know. The philosophical value of a work is much easier to quantify. It is obvious that the philosophical value of portal would be greater than a game like brotato. On one hand, portal is a satire mocking the world we live in with multiple deep questions while brotato is literally just a game where you are a potato shooting stuff. The philosophical value of a work is difficult to see when initially consuming a piece of media. For example, cars held very little meaning for me when I was 8 years old but now that I’m in college holds very deep messages that have impacted my life in ways I probably don’t know.

A person is made by what they consume. It is paradoxically easier and impossible to quantify the philosophical value of any work as many of these deep messages and themes are meant to accrue value for the consumer as they live their life over time. Often, the philosophical value of a good work far exceeds the entertainment value.

When I sit down with something I’ve made, I ask myself, “What can someone get out of this?” If I think someone could get something worthwhile for the time they spend consuming it I judge that what I’ve made is acceptable. Does entertainment matter? Yes, after all, that’s how you get someone to first start consuming the work. But it’s almost impossible to judge if something is entertaining. Why try to make something perfect if perfection doesn’t exist?

So I kinda write a lot more than I predicted. Might be too much. Well, that’s the weekly serious post. Expect a lot of media review next week. Here’s the plan for the week:

• Media Review
• 50 Word Starter
• Sneak Peek At My First Chapter