Difficult Weather
Both inside my head and outside, this week!
Bleh. Again, I’m writing a post on Monday when I meant to do so on the weekend.
I intended to spend the week on this talky Dreamons scenes project thing, since it should only have taken a few days to transfer and adapt everything from previous projects; I should have had a working scene - a proof of concept - to show by now.
Instead, I spent several days just opening the project and feeling like an enormous weight was preventing me from doing anything on it. The mental weather was particularly inclement, you could say.
So I only managed to do a bit, mostly just code-based setup stuff I can’t really visually show. It’s at the point where the model has a rig I can manipulate to pose it, but a bunch of other key features are mostly missing.
I posted some progress on my Bluesky account, though engagement was minimal, as is to be expected considering it’s not like I’ve interacted with anyone else’s posts and what I was posting probably doesn’t make sense or look very interesting at this point. Maybe that’ll turn into something more if I keep up the momentum and have more to show.
(Maybe I should at least finish the character model first…!)
I spent a couple of hours talking to ChatGPT about my mental health struggles, hoping it might give me some tips about how to muster up some motivation and get something done. Mostly it just gave generic suggestions I’ve heard many times before, though it gave me something to start generating my own ideas from.
What eventually worked for me - kind of - was acquiring the soundtrack of Final Fantasy X (which I recently finished) and breaking up the surprising number of tracks I quite liked into groups of about 30 minutes, then I’d try to work for just one chunk in the hope that I’d build up enough momentum to keep going.
(That’s a variation of a common technique where you just work for 5, 10, or 15 minutes to break through the reluctance to start, since that’s often the hardest part.)
I was consistently running out of steam before even 30 minutes, though. Then I spent at least one day just lying miserably in bed, unable to do much of anything.
It’s not like the creative process itself is the issue, though. Over the weekend, I redirected my attention to a couple of side projects, and I was able to work eagerly on those for hours, despite some real-world stressors (a storm, relatives coming over). I composed two whole new pieces of music and everything!
I’m very aware that it’s the weight of social judgement that cripples me when working on anything intended for an audience (and have written about it a bunch of times). The chances of financial success are slim, and the chances of positive feedback feel small, but the chances of being ignored or criticised feel guaranteed, unavoidable, and crushing.
The same worries I’ve had swirling around in my mind for ages continue to do so. About whether people will like what I make, even see it, attack me, what the future holds, how I’ll support myself when my parents are gone, what I can do instead - if anything - and whether I’ve messed up my whole life with the mistakes I’ve made so far. Etc, etc, etc. Same old, same old.
I still don’t really have an answer to any of that. I just want to spend a bit more time chipping away at this project to see where that goes, since once the ball’s rolling it should be quick - relative to games dev - to keep producing content. Or maybe if I can’t do anything again this week, I’ll redirect my attention to the Dreamons game again for a bit. Though the same worries are delaying progress with that too. Bleh.
A storm hit where I am the other day! Storm Darragh, apparently. It was ferocious… for the UK.
Some places get hit by storms that leave devastation in their wake such as this:
But this is probably one of the worst effects of the storm that hit near me:
I actually spent much of the time during the heavy winds feeling anxious, as I’m never sure of how stable houses - especially old ones like the one I’m in - are against wind. It sounds as if it should be doing more damage than it is, and I suppose I’ve seen pictures like the first one here many times and wonder about something like that happening. Seeing the relative patheticness of even a red weather warning worthy of sending out phone alerts calms those concerns at least a bit.
But the climate catastrophe’s only going to continue, and things like this will become more common and more severe. I’m concerned about that. Among many other things. A big ol’ pile of concerns, growing by the day.
The UFO-related subreddits have been in a frenzy recently about frequent sightings of groups of ‘drones’ around military bases in the UK and above cities in the US. Some people are claiming they’re aliens, and this is the beginning of either a peaceful first contact or an aggressive invasion. Others note that they’re shaped like manmade planes and have blinking collision lights, and are most likely foreign technology… and the harbingers of World War III. I don’t know which is worse.
Oh, and I saw a thing about an AI from Google - Genie 2, apparently - which can essentially generate explorable 3D worlds with persistent terrain. It’s still early days, but the speed of AI developments is so ridiculously fast. It was only a handful of years ago that it could barely generate crude approximations of images. Impressive videos happened in basically the blink of an eye. There’s a lot of pushback against generative AI currently, but how long will that last? How long until all my skills are entirely obsolete?
Living in Interesting Times also compounds my concerns about my future. If there even is one, for any of us.
LOOK A SILLY FACE HAHAHA!