I started in school and was lucky enough to have teachers who encouraged me to keep writing. The motivation has always been to entertain; to make people laugh with short stories, comics, scripts, whatever. That carried through to my work at university, and I spent a lot of my free time making goofy adventure games and entering game jams.
These days I still have the same core motivation of wanting to entertain, but I guess with the deeper idea of wanting to positively impact the world by giving people memorable experiences. But as any writer will tell you, those noble aspirations will only carry you so far. On the days where I’m less inspired, the motivation is getting paid ;)
PS2/GC/XB was the last generation where, with very few exceptions, the game on the disk was the entire game. No post-launch patches, no DLCs, no microtransactions.
I’m not blinkered enough to say those things are always bad, but it was nice to know you could take a game off a shelf and it’d be the complete product.
Mass sociogenic illness happens when a group of stressed, socially connected people are exposed to a symptom template that the brain and body can, in a real physiological sense, adopt without any conscious decision to fake anything. The symptoms are genuinely experienced. They are not consciously produced.
No need to be condescending. Stupidity has nothing to do with it, which you might’ve known had you bothered reading some of those words in the article.
Star Trek 2009 revived a franchise that had been dead since Nemesis, reviewed well, is still the highest grossing Trek film ever made, and regularly appears near the top of lists of the best films in the franchise.
Not quite what you’re asking, but I’ve learned that an important thing for personal projects is not to tell anyone about them until they’re basically done.
For me, getting to explain the thing and talk about why I’m doing it is a big part of what keeps me excited. If I tell someone about a project too early, my dumb monkey brain says ‘ok, good chemicals dispensed! That project is now dead to me’, and I lose all motivation to actually finish it.
Knowing I’m doing something cool and no one knows yet actually helps keep me going.
Beyond that? Having a clear plan, with concrete goals that define what ‘finished’ looks like, and clear concrete steps that will get me to that point. Literally a checklist. That way, continuing the work just means working from that list, rather than stressing over what to do next and getting bogged down in tangents and distractions.
Start with big tasks that feed into your project goals (‘add feature x’), and then gradually break them down into smaller individual tasks that can be completed in a single session of work. You don’t have to break the entire project down at once; I start each day by saying ‘what meaningful progress can I achieve today?’ and go from there.
DLSS 5 looks horrendous but let’s not pretend gamers haven’t been able to reshade and mod the everloving shit out of games for decades. Saying it’s not a real game because someone decided they wanted to slap on a cel-shade filter or turn the art director’s carefully crafted dragon into Thomas the Tank Engine isn’t really a defensible position.
Fans of true crime media are overwhelmingly female, and there’s at least one study that suggests it’s because they feel it helps them process and prepare for dangerous situations themselves.
The problem I have with most of these services is that every channel is too hyper-specific, often literally just playing a single show or, at best, 2-3 shows but in multi-hour blocks. Incredibly lazy IMO.
To me, the appeal of linear terrestrial TV is having channels that show a wide variety of things throughout the day. If I wanted to see 24 hours of non-stop Mr. Bean I’d download them and shuffle the folder.
In typical Apple fashion, ‘that’s the neat part - it doesn’t’. If you want to be able to hold a letter to type it repeatedly, you have to disable the diacritics popup with a console command.
It’s the sort of stubborn ‘getting in my way’ feature that drives some people nuts when using a Mac, but in my experience it’s far more useful to be able to easily type accented characters than it is to be able to save half a second on the rare occasions I want to type ‘ooooooooooooooh’.
And yeah, if the popup is open you either hit the number displayed under the character you want or use the mouse to click on it.
On macOS you either use dead keys (option + backtick and then a letter will add a grave accent, like à) or just press and hold down the letter to get a little pop-up diacritics picker.
I find it hard to believe that anyone generating LLM text cares that much about individual word choices.