Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

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I'm also a long-time fan of Tom7 - I got into him after seeing the video about his reverse-emulation work to get Doom working on a NES - what I like about it is how subtle it is: using the same technique you could play Halo or GTA 5 on a NES, but by using a game that's almost contemporary with the NES it has some kind of je ne sais quoi aspect to it that I appreciate, even if I can't describe it.

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All of his videos are about very distinct projects - not only demonstrating his high level of skill in those areas, but that he's very imaginative and creative. When I introspect myself I can tell that as I've gained technical skills that enable me to (say) recreate his work, I've simultaneously lost most of my imagination and huge chunks of my creativity as I've gotten older: I can certainly try my own hand (working from scratch, without using his work even as a reference) at a robust NES-to-3D render system, but I guarantee that the idea never would have come to me. My question is, how does he do that?

I'm hoping I'm not the only one experiencing this kind of creativity-deficit-disorder?

Not only that, he actually completes all the projects, or at least some of them (because who'd know how many shelved projects are there). I too have a long list of personal projects accumulated over last 2 decades, and none was that impactful compared to Tom's in my scale. And he seems to do all of that while having a daily job (Google) and a family (seen from the PAC-TOM video, specifics unclear) and time to play all the games. How is it even remotely possible???

And running long distances!

In costume!

Yeah this is one of those weird cases where if I was his manager I'd ask "bro, do you need more interesting things to do at work?"

Tom7 is probably my favorite creator on the web, so I guess I'm glad that whatever he's doing at Google isn't scratching all the itches.

I think he's just a complete genius, honestly. I don't think it's possible for a vast majority of us to be on that level

Keep in mind that- as far as I can tell- Tom7 doesn't need to work for a living. He has a _lot_ of free time.

This is the difference for me. There are many things I could do, but far fewer it's worth spending my time on. If I didn't have to make bank the calculus would be very different.

Eh, at least I had periods over the last 15 years where I had a lot of free time and could've done a lot of things I always wanted to do, but just about got some basic things done. Nothing of the scale of some of Tom's projects. He says he's not working on that stuff constantly, but still, he always eventually gets back to these things and finishes them. That's pretty impressive to me regardless of free time.

You sure? I remember him being an engineer at Google. See this from July

https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/pac-tom-pittsburgh-proje...

I'm sure that someone running around city as a pac-man have plenty of free time, job or no job

did you miss the part where he had been working on running every street during 17 years?

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