I don't have my own blog and I'm not sure of the etiquette here. I've been using this jQuery plugin I wrote for awhile now and am just curious what other people think/if they find it useful...
A teenage girl bragging about her fashion sense or poetic style does not directly equate to the statement 'I want to make video games'. Unless, of course, you are implying that anyone who makes that statement has already tried and failed at creating successful video games and are now doomed and hopeless before they even hit the campus floor (as I am assuming that teenage girl is because, well...her poems suck).
I wanted to make video games. I went to a school specifically for that. I made it halfway through. The reality (to me, at least) was that the industry was just not worth it. The average lifespan of a game developer is 5 years...before total burnout ensues, and you are left entirely drained, hopefully with some bank though. But above all that, I decided to drop out because of a very simple and fundamental reason: It took all the mystery out of games...the X-factor, if you will.
This is not just refined to games of course...I feel that this happens all over the place, and the simplest answer as to why could just be that we as humans LOVE to learn. Just the prospect of learning some new language or about a new technology can spike a persons motivation to new heights, even if it is short-lived...we keep going.
I'm 32. I still want to make videogames but I don't want to work for Shit-A. I want to hole up in a log cabin somewhere and code till my eyes ache. Like Jeff Minter. (I seem to recall a comment from John Carmack along similar lines when he wanted to try a rendering technique: something like "I did what I normally do. I locked myself in a hotel room for three days and coded it up.")
Oh well. Until I have that log cabin in the woods my day job involves robot submarines, which is as awesome as it sounds.
It's like the people who audition for american idol. They secretly feel they can sing at the highest but only a handful of them are good at singing. If they knew there's a huge amount of people that think they're geniuses at singing and actually suck they'll more carefully re-evaluate themselves.
Turns out there's a huge amount of people that got CS majors just because they felt it fitting after spending half their life on the computer playing games. Programmers that don't have side projects and don't do it for fun will be way inferior to those who do.
Making games seems like a pretty decent sized side project to me. As a teen I did a number of game like things. Spent lots of time as a coder on a MUD and created a number of simple games. The majority of the people I knew well during that period are now programming successfully. Some of them are even making games for profit.
The problem is, I think, if you say "I want to make games"(or any other thing) but wouldn't spend your next few hours of free time actually starting something.
Grab a process that you forgot to start inside neercs
Great screensaver
Real time thumbnails of your shells
Special effects when closing a window
Various window layouts...
if you are viming on an osx macbook of some sort and are sick of the damn small-ass control key they left us with, i've found it helpful to remap the caps lock key to control. you can do this easily in System Prefs > Keyboard > Modifier Keys. so now you can <esc> insert mode with the ^[, hardly moving your hands at all.
This works for me personally because I very rarely find myself even thinking about or noticing the true CAPS key, but if you are stuck on your CAPS bein CAPS, then this wouldn't be for you :!)
