Potato is yum

I make stuff because I really like other things. This is pretty common actually. I am confident in saying that the most common reason people get into some kind of art is because they are inspired by some other art in some form. And yes, I consider politics a form of art since it’s basically just professional rage baiting with structure and big money behind it. Ahem. Back to the point. Everyone starts making stuff because they have this idea of some kind of initial dream in their mind.

For me, I’ve gotten into many different creative outlets. Let’s just go through the list and put in the “dreams” while analyzing just how delusion I am. To be clear, it’s not bad to be delusional. Like, you need to be some degree of crazy to waste this much time of your life get into creating.

The first creative outlet I attempted was violin. When I was probably four years old I saw one of my pre-K teachers playing that wooden thing and foolishly pointed at it and looked up at my mother while in her lap. That one choice has probably costed my family more money and more suffering than my entire education up to college. Anyway, I thought that wooden thing looked really cool and wanted to play whatever nice sounding thing the lady was playing. Once I got to somewhat know violin I set my sights on the little Paganini. If you play violin you know what I’m talking about. For those who don’t, Paganini wrote some of the most advanced violin pieces requiring combinations of techniques that are practically inhuman. The little Paganini is a heavily simplified version of his piece which is still considered extremely difficult. I had my goal set and I was pretty confident I could do it… until I started actually realizing just how violin was. You see, when you talk to the “best” about “good goals” they’ll tell you the goals for being in their level. My parents and I were talking to contest winners, professional soloists, big concert violinists. There is an uncountable number of people in the world who play violin but there is a very finite number that play in major orchestras. This dream I had was pretty unattainable for someone like me who wasn’t planning on devoting my life to that little wooden box. The source of this delusion was asking for goal advice from the wrong group of people. I found the best way to learn the art but the people who can teach you to make an art form probably don’t see it in the same way as you since they have to be that much better to be able to teach it. To this day I still haven’t gotten around to the little Paganini even though I should be capable of playing it. Over the fourteen or so years I gradually realized that fixating on a single piece kind of killed all the fun in improving my technique and such and decided to pick out my pieces based on where I’d end up playing things. As such most of the pieces I know now are either pop songs or old folk songs to be played with friends or for the older folks in my family gatherings. In the end, I gave up the dream. A pattern that you will soon see is quite common among the forms of art I pick up.

The second creative outlet I attempted was drawing. I always wanted to draw one thing and that is eyes. Someone told me that the best way to improve as an artist is to develop some kind of fetish. I guess I developed an eye fetish. I started drawing eyes on literally everything but really just wanted to eventually draw this space marine. In reality, this whole drawing thing started from my first shot at animation but that fizzled out so quickly so we don’t talk about it. The drawing was pretty short lived and all it took was someone looking at my sketchbook full of eyes and going, “ew”. The dream of drawing a space marine kind of shattered right there at the slightest negative push. I think this happened because something in me felt that I was so far away from where I would need to be for my dream and it felt hopeless. So, setting the dream ended up killing the motivation.

The third creative outlet was game development. I’ve had this dream game in my mind for so long. I even drew assets for the game and everything. I did a crap ton of research for unity vs godot and a whole lot more. Once I sat down to start making my dream game I quickly realized how hard it was to make a game. After completing tutorials and such I would go back to my planning files and say, “Hmm, doing that is hard, what if I tried this instead?” After going in a development hell circle for over two years I looked back at the original document and realized that basically the whole dream game had changed. Was it my dream anymore? Did I even want to make this game? After I found myself asking if I even wanted to make it I realized that my dream game wouldn’t be as much fun as I had thought it would be initially. After two years of learning game design and game development I took a good look at my idea and tossed it in the trash. The dream I had made was made by my fairly incompetent self and the dream game idea was not as glorious as I had thought.

The last creative outlet was video creation. I was actually a fairly prominent figure in the rust building scene and at one point decided I was going to make a documentary on the history of rust building. I did nearly a hundred hours of research and started to learn a ton of video editing things to do the project. However, as I got further and further into it I realized that to make the best dream video I would need to have a whole lot more practice. I thought I could actually do the dream this time unlike my other creative projects and pushed out an announcement to my rust building community that I would delay the video to increase the quality of the video. From then I started getting my hands on video editing software and scripting along with studying professionally produced documentaries. I very quickly realized just how big this kind of project would be. There’s a reason most documentaries have pretty massive teams behind them. It’s hard. While this dream is still ongoing I really don’t know if my personal skill in video editing and 3D animation software will ever reach the point where I can make my supposed magnum opus. I think my wish for the quality to be professional is pretty delusional but that’s my wish so the project will probably be stuck in limbo for a few more years.

As some of you know, I’m currently entering writing. This time, I have no project as my dream. Instead, I’ve set my dream to be completing at least one book. I no longer wish to fall into some massive project I can never finish nor do I want to expect great results from what will be my first creation. I expect it to suck. I might have a really big ego saying this but I love consuming every piece of art I make. I literally go back and eat up everything I’ve made like it’s fresh bread out of the oven. So, even if nobody else reads my book, at least I’ll still be able to read my first completed book and enjoy it whenever I want.

Thanks for reading. This post has much more rambling but probably has more of the me voice in it than usual. I’m probably going to talk more about some of my other weird projects like gardening or woodworking since I do a crap ton of different things. People often ask me how I find time to do all this. I don’t. I have no time. I wish there could be 48 hours in a day. AHHH.

Oh. I almost forgot. Post plan this week:

• Media Review
• 1 week until my book releases announcement
• Prosperous Universe Commodity Market Sim
• How to have fun playing Counterstrike (Satire)