> These projects are very cool, but I think too much futzing for most people.
Why learn an instrument when you can just torrent some music
Why learn an instrument when you can just torrent some music
Do you want to make games? Using something like the PICO-8 will still mean you're gonna futz around. But you'll be futzing around on game design-y stuff, rather than on "how do I get pixels to the screen" futzing.
If you want to make game engines, then the pixels to the screen is the fun part.
I futzed around so much as a kid, but not because I wanted to. It was more because I didn't know any better, and was just trying to get to what I "really" wanted to futz with.
Futzing is great, and I celebrate people who futz on this kind of level. The people who code golf a bubble sort to be one less instruction; the people who can cram a plasma and text scroller demo into 89 bytes; the people who really understand everything about a system from top to bottom, inside out and upside down.
As a society we're not very good at protecting those people from harm (in the form of bullying from other students) or providing them with work that makes the most of their rare talent.
When I was a kid--it was kinda frowned upon. "Don't waste your time fooling around?". I think times have changed though? I hope?
The other day I made a watch band using the leather from my old boots, and dental floss. I didn't tell anyone because I knew it would be considered excentric.
It looks good to me. That's all I wanted.
None of them even questioned the execution, but the point of doing it. It ranged from calling me a stupid hispter up to insinuating I'm a con artist who will use that to rip people off on kickstarter(?!?).
I don't know from Petapixel, but if it's the hobby photographer equivalent of Hackaday, that's terrifying. I'm sure there are serious amateur photographers who are also perfectly nice people, but for some reason the ones I find myself dealing with are more on the "why bother trying to frame anything, it's a phone so it'll come out bad anyway" level. I'm sure that guy would be perfectly at home on Petapixel.