Work Post

3:37pm - I quietly read through the remainder of the Godot Step by Step guide without doing the actual steps and I don't feel I need to after doing the "Your First Game" step and "Exporing" step from before.

That leaves me with the basics of Godot covered, and feeling ready to go back to figuring out the Multiplayer system. And yet! I had a talk with two of my friends last night and it left me wondering what I'm doing with myself and my time.

The reason I was working on figuring out multiplayer was to make a game for my friends and I to play together, since we've had so much fun playing Borderlands 2 together but there are almost no other games like it. I thought that if I made a game like that, not only would my friends and I be able to play it, but I'd be able to make it available for other people to play as well. It could be my 'Big Game' that people will be my patron for. Or not. Who knows?

I'm not sure that's the sort of game I want to make, though. I'm not sure what the sort of game I want to make IS, even. There are so many I could make. I could work on someone else's, too. And yet, what is the right path? I don't know.

See, my friends pointed out that I've lost my passion. I haven't been getting up much and when I do I don't really do anything. While I've been looking for work, I haven't been looking very hard, and only maybe once or twice a week do I do anything about it.

I'm hoping to get a job to help get my life in order, but it hasn't been easy. I want to work a job and work on my programming projects, but only because I haven't been able to make a living on my programming projects alone. I haven't found anything I can do and someone is willing to pay me for at the same time.

I've got a pretty sparse portfolio of work, partly since I keep ending my projects before they're done and partly because I don't do all the short projects that I think of. Also I was flip-flopping between wanting to do work for game studios and work for general programming positions. Unfortunately both expect absolute dedication to your craft, especially if you don't have that essential Degree I'm lacking.

No recent degree, barely any portfolio, I'm not really going to be hirable in that field without a lot of work and dedication that I'm not ready to put into it. But if I don't put that hard work and dedication into getting a job, I need to put it somewhere else, 'cause that sort of thing is the key. Hard work and dedication. I don't know if I have it in me. My friends all say they believe in me, but I don't really believe in myself, and unfortunately I don't 'Believe in them who believe in me' in that Gurren Lagann way.

So I've been trying to find a middle ground of getting a blue collar job, maybe part-time, and working part-time on my projects... But then that brings me back to what projects are worth my time?

I just don't know, at this point. Maybe that's why I keep trying new things; to figure out what is the right one. Or maybe I'm just wasting the precious time I should be spending working on one of my projects.


4:31pm - I've spent some time thinking and I realized there's something else on my mind, and it's been coming to mind more and more lately, but I don't have anyplace to really express it or put it down, so I think I'm going to talk about it here.

I might have spoken about it before, but it's my Adorabillians and their far-future world. I've had them on my mind a lot lately. They've changed quite a bit from how I originally envisioned them. Now they're a post-human group instead of aliens, since I couldn't get past their human culture influences not making sense as aliens.

I've been trying to figure out where they fit in, in the future. It's really not easy. See, by the point they come around, everything is basically immortal. When you can live forever, it tends to change your needs and desires. Most people I've discussed it with say that if they became immortal, they would spend the forseeable future just learning as much as they can. We tend to put limits on what we learn in our lives because we have so much to do before we die. People want to get married, have kids, leave some kind of legacy, and many other options. You can still do that stuff if you're immortal, but it seems like those things mean less to someone who's already got or had them, or they can put them in the long term.

The Adorabillians aren't about learning, exactly. I mean, I'm sure it would be an experience to be one for a period, but why do they exist as a stable culture and community?

One option is that they're decended from human civilization but they're mostly not humans. If they were born as Adorabillians they'd have the option of changing but likely many would stay as they were. However, there would have to be some draw that keeps them the way they are, and brings them together. Otherwise they would either be just one more human decendant amongst countless others, or they would change out and become something else.

Being an Adorabillian is more than just an appearance or an attitude. It has to be a big enough movement to gather people together and make them want to do it.

I imagine there will be many different societies in the far future of posthumanity, and they all have to have a reason to be the way they are. That's just logic, I think.

I imagine there will be societies that allow all types of people, and those that restrict what is 'welcome' for the sake of others. Like a space hab that is designed for humanoids won't want elephants visiting, but there will be space habs that welcome people of all shapes and sizes too.

I want the Adorabillians to exist in both forms, where they have their own habitats for Adorabillians with the standard Adorabillian abilities and scales, and Adorabillians that live in other habitats but are still Adorabillian.

But again, what's the point of being an Adorabillian instead of another thing? Why not just be a superhuman, a VR person, or any of countless other things?

I've considered for some time that the Adorabillians might choose to have mental structures that differ from the standard human mind. They might be natural pacifists, I thought. But I don't think true pacifism is going to be possible for a culture to survive, even in the posthuman future.

They have to be beyond the Hedonism Trap as well. That's the problem where, once you've mastered the brain, there's nothing stopping you from making yourself feel happy and satisfied endlessly and have no reason to do anything anymore. So, they can't just make you happy forever or anything like that.

The reason I mention that is that I was considering having them be like a spa experience. A simple happy life for a while and lots of snuggling for relaxation. But I don't think that's right either.

It seems to me that there would be plenty of happiness in general in the posthuman future, even with the posthuman threats I predict.

Let's go into those a bit, I suppose.

The biggest threat to posthuman existance is posthumans, specifically replicators. Replicators are sort of a sapient grey goo scenario. People who focus their time and energy on replicating themselves endlessly, and taking resources away from others in order to replicate more.

Imagine a person who made a copy of their mind and body, and then made a factory for producing more of themself, and kept making more and more until they outnumbered everybody. There are people like that even today, they just lack the means.

If you go far enough into the future, it seems likely that individuals will have access to all the skills, equipment, and technology to kickstart this process, and then it's a race and a war to see who will get the most resources and control them the best, while people who just want to live in peace suffer.

One of my other ideas is for a posthuman group that fights against these sorts of replicators by alternative methods. Rather than being strict replicators themselves, they identify and restrict those who would become replicators.

I don't generally like traipsing on others freedoms, but after the posthuman revolution people will be both sturdier than now, and more dangerous than now. We need something to keep people from killing eachother, for a start. But also things like explosives including nukes may be available to spacers, and solar lasers are almost a certainty. Crashing your spaceship into a habitat is bad too.

So, these same forces would probably work as police against conventional killers and also replicators.

The awkward thing for me is that a lot of the people who are excited about the posthuman future also hate cops. ^.^;;

So, basically, I'm predicting a future of eternal vigilance and potentially one of constant war against intelligent replicators.

Considering how (Relatively) easy is is to send replicator seeds slow boating across the galaxy to every star and other celestial body, it's quite possible that the later settlers will find someone waiting for them when they get out there.

The irony of all of this is that a big part of the inspiration of this comes from a person I know and respect quite a bit, who may well be a replicator! I don't know if they would kill and steal for their personal survival against competitors, but they do seem interested in copying themself endlessly in order to survive as long as possible.

So with this conflict I envison in the future, where do the Adorabillians fit in? They're not combatants, except in the direst circumstances. So I thought they might perform a comfort role. But I already shot that down. I'm really not sure what position that puts them in.

Part of the problem is that after a certain level of technology, habs are basically self sufficient, and very little in the universe is still rare. So the Adorabillians wouldn't be neccesary for others, they'd have to be neccesary for themselves, and that's part of the quandry.

See, there's no reason for people to choose to be Adorabillian except that they like the asthetics, like I do. Other forms would have either more utility or more focus. As a art piece body, why would you have a whole culture of same art pieces?

They don't progress society or civilization as far as I can tell. Or at least not nearly as much as people who dedicate themselves to that completely. Likewise they're not terribly industrious. I imagine that in the posthuman future we'll finally be beyond the 'intellectual property' era. What that means is that people will freely copy media and ideas, without cost or guilt. So, everyone will have access to all media throughout history and spread throughout the posthuman civilization. Of course, finding good media will be more and more of a challenge as more and more is created, and also across the gulf of space and bandwidth, transfering all the data will become a challenge. The point is that blueprints for everything will be available, and everyone will know how to make anything. Unintelligent drones will do most labour, like gathering and refining raw resources, and probably a lot of the production of goods too.

Apart from doing science and exploration, I figure passtimes of the future will include art and media creation, conflict, and... what?

I'm not really sure what else there is. Maybe you, dear reader, could suggest some ideas? What's a body to do in the posthuman future?

Maybe I will just have the Adorabillians be a mix of originators, born Adorabillians, and converts, all who like the culture and lifestlye for its own sake. Like enjoying a style of art or music, some people would just want to be that way, and there will be countless other ways to be. We'll see how it goes.

I'll keep thinking about it.

6:16pm - Anyways I need to get going, it's not long before the movie I plan to see with my birthday-having roommate.