Prelude

So I was watching someone else’s video about how they perceive originality to be decreasing in the Minecraft YouTube space. My thoughts were that people stress about originality, and that it’s OK to be derivative if you add your own spin to it, like a Minecraft let’s play series where each episode also contains little logs of things you did in real life or on other projects on that given day. Pretty much little retellings.

And while I wrote about that last idea, I realized that it tapped into something deeper in me. It seems, indeed, that that particular example wasn’t just related to Minecraft content in itself; it probably stems from a deeper feeling in me, one of isolation, and about wanting to share my world with the wider world of people. Maybe it cast light on some ways I’ve thought about how to do it, that I’ve wanted, but with which I’ve had friction and ultimately laid to sleep in the sea of defeated ideas. It made me realize, though, that I should think about these things way more, since I’ve felt a bit deprived of well-defined goals (as opposed to general direcitons, like "get a good job" and whatnot).

Drives and challenges

Let me elaborate. One of the things I most want to do in the near future is to make a bit of a log of the cool things I do, to share in video form, like maybe through YouTube and whatnot. Not just my programming projects, but also my little gaming adventures, like all sorts of mod combinations in Doom or Unreal Tournament, or my Mindustry run, and so on.

Practicability

But one thing that’s kind of hodling me back in that department is hardware. I can play games just fine, but recording them tends to make them run slower. Besides, I only have 4 GB of memory. For games like Minecraft, which involve a heavier use of memory, I can’t fit them and OBS at the same time. And if the game runs slow while recording, imagine the final recording itself; I don’t want to have any more piss-poor quality recordings on my channel anymore.

Another thing is that Linux, or more specifically Wayland, can make recording more difficult, or much more taxing on my hardware, depending on the particular method. For context, Wayland doesn’t really like to publicly expose the surfaces of its client applications. Which of course is a completely fair security consideration, but it does differ from every other major display server (including Linux’s own X.org, which is the traditional and still most widely used display server, as well as Windows). This means that you have to explicitly expose a window to be recorded by another application, which is extra setup and often ends up compromising on performance to the point that most games are simply unplayable.

So I guess my mental intuition or subconscious, having realized these difficulties, has felt like it might not want to deal with that, and instead is pivoting towards just working on my projects and showing them to IRL friends or trying to get people online to try them, which usually involves a link, which is why it is important for me to make my projects work on the Web (like Loot & Roam’s current prototype). This has made me a little anxious about working on projects that might not port as seamlessly into a web or mobile application, even though I am a PC mojo and would absolutely love if everyone and their dog owned a PC too. (Maybe one day society will evolve and the grace of the PC will equally touch everyone!)

Finances

Additionally, as I’ve alluded to earlier, I’m quite worried about getting a job soon enough; preferably a much better wage than what I had during my internship, so that I can save up and maybe get a better PC (and still have money left to go out with friends or just enjoy the city’s niceties). This would help deal with some of the performance issues as I get a computer that is actually upgradeable, built from parts I pick and buy myself.

Having burned through my internship cash so quickly made me realize how volatile money can be when you’re not actively reining yourself in at every step (obviously not at all the worst kind of task you can assign to someone with ADHD! /sarcasm). So I’m thinking about using a financial app named Oinkoin that I’ve got on my phone to help with that - it’s open source and the simplest thing I’ve found yet, the ones I found on desktop in the Arch Linux repositories are a bit overcomplicated, especially GNU Cash. But I would say that the situation doesn’t boil down to financial management. The world really isn’t what it used to be, prices have hiked, wages have stagnated, buying power went down, and it really is a whole lot harder to make the most out of your money than it used to be. I’m not going to delve further into this tangent, I’m just saying this is another reason why getting a job with decent pay is one of my major concerns.

In Conclusion

Either way, the end goal isn’t to have money. Financial stability would be nice, and future me won’t bash present me as hard if I at least leave him a decent income to work with to deal with whatever problems he’ll have in that future. However, it will unavoidably be important means to many ends. No, my goal, at least for now, is to work on my projects, realize my creative ideas into reality, and make wide social circles that I can share these ideas with, not only of online friends, but real life friends too. These are my personal goals, not my political goals (which I probably won’t get into in this personal blog, I should probably make a separate website to ramble about politics), but they’re goals alright. And maybe there are lots of roads to them, but I’ll see if I can find the ones for which I have the best predisposition given the skills and experience I already have. In the end, only time will tell.

Oh, and by the way. I’ve been elusively talking about my creative projects here. If you’re wondering about what kinds of creative projects I like to tinker with (and you have a device with keyboard and mouse), check out Loot & Roam! At least its current prototype stage, but it’s already quite playable, and fun to mess around with. See if you can figure it out on your own! (There’s a Help screen accessible from the main menu if you need some pointers.) That’s the kind of thing I really like; hopefully I’ll be able to work on more projects like that in my future. (Even though I don’t really think my future is limited to being about game development. Sheesh!)