Starting Many Things
jetholt.com
jetholt.com
Although I used to feel bad about all my “failed” projects, I have recently come to view them as all part of my growth. I tend to cycle between hobbies for whatever reason, and every time I come back to a hobby, I get a little better at it, and I think that’s what really matters in the end. Though I haven’t gone back to card magic in a while haha.
> Usually, I try to aim for a certain standard of quality in my writing, and this can really hold me up from writing about something I want to write about.
> Sometimes it takes a week or more just to write one post. Yeah, perfection is killer.
> It gets worse when I add images, because I agonise over them.
> So I’m going to be writing more things to a lower quality. I’m calling these ‘Micro’ posts, and you can find a full list here: Micro.
> They will be just what I’m thinking about, or some small observations, or whatever. Generally without pictures, without proofreading, without rewording each sentence hundreds of times. Almost as if I have a typewriter and a stream of conciousness - no going back to make changes.
https://jetholt.com/may-2020-microblogs/
This idea also fits in with the topic at hand: starting many things. With a rapid-fire, just-get-it-out "micro" posting style, you can spend a little time considering far more ideas than you would have before.
The funny thing is that it would have never occurred to me that this particular post was written in this way because it seems very well conceived and organized.
Funnily enough, I'd consider this post to be on the borderline between a micropost and a regular post.
Of all of my microposts, it's the one that I dedicated the most time to - though still much less than a post that would go on the homepage.
You've really hit the nail on the head though. By writing every day-ish, it lead me to start this post, which made me realise that I needed/wanted to dedicate a lot of time to to fully explain and say what was on my mind. (I reordered some of the paragraphs and added bits here and there, which I didn't do for most microposts to keep them 'micro')
By trying lots of posts, I found one that I wanted to go into detail with, which ultimately lead to it being the first post of mine to rank on the HN front page. Wow!
This is actually the reverse of what happened. Brian May left a career in astrophysics to pursue Queen in 1974, once Queen started getting big. He was about 6 months away from defending his dissertation and earning his PhD. He re-enrolled in his PhD program in 2006, and earned his doctorate in 2007.
Doesn't detract from the author's point, however. Try a lot of stuff. You never know which bet will work out. Just so happened that, for Brian May, being a rock star panned out first!
https://www.spin.com/2020/05/queens-brian-may-tore-his-butt-...
Dude's in a league of his own. XD
Greg Graffin (lead of Bad Religion) has a PhD in Zoology from Cornell. Brian Dexter Holland (lead of the Offspring) just went back to finish his PhD in Molecular Biology from USC. (Like May, he left his academic pursuits when the band got big).
Feynman only won the Nobel Prize in Physics. But he was able to reach a professional, or near professional level in all of those areas. "I got a kick out of succeeding at something I wasn't supposed to be able to do."
Similar feeling to anything development related. I wanted to tinker with threejs. So I built a simple brick builder in it. Pushed the code to GitHub once I was happy and moved on.
@op: this css rule currently makes it very hard to read the page on ultra-wide monitors - the font is very large and doesn't scale with browser zoom.
I'll try to do something about it soon. Thanks!
I think the styling is fine, it's just how it copes with responsiveness.
Try opening it on your phone and flipping over to landscape, or on an ultrawide monitor, or even just resize your browser window to be really wide.
It's a mess, it makes me anxious every time I share something.
I know that I have to fix it for the edge cases but I kinda dread doing the work to do that, haha.
This is me in a nutshell. I wondered, in my teens, why I was so drawn to music when I'd quit whatever instrument I was trying to learn. Turns out when I got a good understanding, that was the good thing, and practicing the same song enough times to get good at it was boring.
> but is playing with being a DJ on Twitch.
I think that's a really great thing about where we are right now... you can learn so much on the internet, and then try it out and see if it's for you, and get feedback. Nice!
If I never did any exploration, then I would have only ever been a writer. I didn't decide to pursue computer science until after putting together a personal website and programming games on my calculator while bored in class.
And if I never explored, I wouldn't have had any career in video games. While it was how I initially started learning proper programming, I wasn't seriously considering that as a career for.
And if I never explored, I wouldn't have gotten into designing board games, which is basically just system design but a lot more fun.
And to get your games signed, you have to go to conventions and talk to publishers, so I got used to traveling and getting more into that too. At least before the pandemic.
Or learning languages, or playing tennis, or hiking, or learning musical instruments, or drawing, or making electronic music, or cooking, or photography.
And within those fields, without exploration, I wouldn't have gotten recognition for multiple different game designs, and I wouldn't be writing humorous fiction, and I wouldn't have come up with two new game designs (and a total overhaul for another design) that got me really excited.
College, at least in the US, seem almost designed to facilitate that exploration. The general education requirements let you have some exposure to other fields, and you can choose to further explore the field by taking more classes or even change your major if you wish. I think some people forget that it's important to do that after they finish college sometimes, and get stuck in a rut in life.
I am probably overdue for a new different hobby, myself. I did take an ESL tutoring course just before the pandemic, but the pandemic hit before I got assigned a student, so that's on hold. It was really interesting to discover how to teach someone that can't speak your language very well, though, and I think I can use those techniques for other things, like my game designs.
Probably my biggest problem is getting to a point where I can say something is finished and move on to the next thing. Because of my background in games, I want to make my game designs very polished, and get them developed by a publisher, and whatnot, but that process takes a lot of work and a lot of time to find a publisher for your designs.
Like I still only have one game signed, not even released, after 3 years of pitching, meanwhile I have about 60 playable prototypes, about 15 of those polished to the point where they almost could be finished products. Like I created art, wrote rules, sell sheets, videos, etc...not professional art, but some publishers have said "I would publish the game with that art" to a couple of the games, so apparently not terrible.
I might try going the Kickstarter or crowd-sale or route at some point, but that's a whole extra level of effort that I'm not sure I'm ready for.
My path to where I am today also has many little 'chances' where my exploration lead my in a completely different path that I wouldn't have been on today.
Like when I was a young teenager, and discovered a forum about a video game that I liked. From there, I picked up video game level design because I was inspired by a couple of the posters. After a while of that, I discovered game scripting, which lead me to pick up programming. When I entered Sixth Form at school, I picked up Electronics on a whim and ended up realising that I really liked assembly language. Things grew from there until I got to where I am today.