Brian Crick

Reflection

As Marie and prepare for a short New Years’ vacation that I’m looking at with equal amounts of excitement and worry, I find myself thinking a bit about identity. So have some random thoughts (which may be a little navel gazey, but hopefully not too much).

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Part of tech support is calming people down. I did a little bit of this for a while, and from what I hear, I was fairly good at working with cranky customers.

Not that I had any training, mind you; I just made people calmer by virtue of being me. There’s nothing particularly amazing about that; we all, just by virtue of being who we are, make the people around us behave a little differently.

So I think of humanity in general as calm and reasonable. Because whenever I see people, I see my own calm reflected in them.

I kind of wonder about people who make people around them cranky. I’ve certainly met those people, and in all likelihood they don’t realize they make the people around then cranky; in all likelihood they don’t realize people, in general, are more noble than their own point of view would suggest.

* * *

I haven’t been in a few years, but part of why I like going to TypeCon is, I like the person I am when I’m at TypeCon. I’m a little more outgoing, a little more excitable.

I’d like Marie to meet this person, but getting that to happen would be problematic. When I’m around Marie I tend to let myself fade into the background, though I’m working on that.

* * *

Going to a meeting of the Cleveland Game Developers tonight for the first time, and I’m a bit nervous about that. Historically, I tend to become easily confused when I’m around other programmers — strangely enough, I see most I’ve met as somewhat alien and difficult to connect to.

But I like the idea of being accountable to a group of other game developers — apparently part of every meeting is project updates from the members.

I’m very curious what the group is like, and how I’m going to come across to them.

Egoless Scheduling

It’s been a while since I babbled about managing myself, so have a random thought.

The concept of egolessness comes up a lot in martial arts. I never quite hit it during my brief dabbling in Judo, but I often lose my sense of self while programming or illustrating.

It can all sound a bit hand wavey I suppose, but to put it in more practical terms, I suppose losing a sense of self is simply a loss of desire (yeah, it’s very Buddhist). The desire to impress; to learn; to meet a promised due date or fulfill a specific expectation.

I do my best work when I stop caring about getting work done. If I’m too excited about the work, it’s easy to get overconfident or impatient to get more work done. (Which, sadly, happened at work-work today.) Which is not to say that I do my best work on projects I hate; hate is a form of caring, a form of emotional attachment, a burning desire not to do something.

So I’m wondering tonight if this concept of mastery and happiness through egolessness also applies to managing one’s responsibilities on a higher, more abstract level.

I’ve mentioned a few times before how I’m most productive when I rapidly cycle through pet projects. Part of the benefit of this is just to make sure I don’t lose track of any of my projects; I frequently waste depressing gobs of valuable time reacquainting myself with things I’ve backburnered. But also, I think this strategy is helpful in that it removes me — it removes desire — from the process of deciding what to work on. Since it’s a predetermined cycle, I always know what I will be working on next. I won’t procrastinate on things I’m afraid won’t go anywhere. I won’t implement quick, poorly conceived ideas because I’m excited about moving something forward.

Removing desire makes the work about the work — not about me.

So I should really start keeping an eye on how excited I am to be working — because if I’ve got too much motivation, it’s probably time to take a break.

Low Hanging Starfruit

Now that work has settled down a bit, I’ve been tinkering with a very old pet project called The Itty Bitty Galaxy.

In sort of the same way I always break new modeling programs in by making the starship Enterprise, for the last decade I’ve broken in new programming languages with this project. I’ve done it in C++, Flash, Flex, Torque, Android, and now Unity.

Been concentrating on the starfield. Another thing I’ve done a zillion times before. I’m very particular about my starfields. Most of them — especially real ones — just look flat and boring to me. There’s no color, no sense of depth, no volumes to look at, and if I’m going to show of how big and vast my universe is, I want to try to do it in a volumetric sort of way, in a way where you have identifiable, three-dimensional volumes of space to look at, so you can say, hey, this here thing is big. It’s tough to wow people with how big and empty space is, though I’ve certainly seen it done (Homeworld comes to mind there).

And actually, this posts has been languishing as a draft for so long that I’m looking at this version of the starfield and thinking to myself, wow, this is not very deep. But I’ll have another update on this later I guess. 🙂

Copyright © 2017 Brian Crick.