ladyskye
26th Sep 2011, 07:03 PM
Let me begin be saying something briefly about myself. I live alone, I am old enough that if my oldest grandson made a stupid choice, I'd be a great-grandmother. I am a freight handler at a superstore. It requires me to memorize where everything in a specific department goes, then I pull it off pallets and put it there, one bottle, jar, box, or package at a time. I am a widow.
I play only a handful of the thousands of video games available. I am a history geek. Oh not so much that I learned the ancient languages, but enough so that until my job took a serious toll on my joints and the nerves that power the muscles, I did recreations of Medieval illuminations. Hence the reason I bought a game called The Sims Medieval. I realized it was a fantasy game. I followed all the pre-release material.
What I am not, is a modder. This became abundantly clear to me as I spent the morning looking through lines of code in one part of one file, out of many, many, many files. After fifteen minutes my eyes were bleeding. After half an hour my brain was bleeding. After an hour I was nearly comatose and could barely knuckle-drag myself into the kitchen for tea. My final cohesive thoughts at that moment in time went something like, "this is so not happening in this life time." This thought was accompanied by a curious sizzling-bubbling sound that I suspect was my brainstem at the beginning stages of final destruction. I'm still recovering.
So to all those who look at those lines of code and think, 'I can do this better'; who see lines of code as a morality play of modern life; who can look at a file and think 'this is going to be so cool'; I thank you. To those of you that look at a mediocre game as a personal challenge; to those of you who think that not blinking for an hour is normal; to those of you who can increase the interest time in a game from days to months; I thank you. And to all of you who do this for little more than personal satisfaction and hearing someone say 'hey, that's really cool, great job'; I personally thank you from the bottom of my heart and soul. I realize that most of you probably do this for yourself first. But there is no rule that you must share what you did, yet all of you do. And that is perhaps the finest part of what you do. You do a really great job. All of you. :beer:
I play only a handful of the thousands of video games available. I am a history geek. Oh not so much that I learned the ancient languages, but enough so that until my job took a serious toll on my joints and the nerves that power the muscles, I did recreations of Medieval illuminations. Hence the reason I bought a game called The Sims Medieval. I realized it was a fantasy game. I followed all the pre-release material.
What I am not, is a modder. This became abundantly clear to me as I spent the morning looking through lines of code in one part of one file, out of many, many, many files. After fifteen minutes my eyes were bleeding. After half an hour my brain was bleeding. After an hour I was nearly comatose and could barely knuckle-drag myself into the kitchen for tea. My final cohesive thoughts at that moment in time went something like, "this is so not happening in this life time." This thought was accompanied by a curious sizzling-bubbling sound that I suspect was my brainstem at the beginning stages of final destruction. I'm still recovering.
So to all those who look at those lines of code and think, 'I can do this better'; who see lines of code as a morality play of modern life; who can look at a file and think 'this is going to be so cool'; I thank you. To those of you that look at a mediocre game as a personal challenge; to those of you who think that not blinking for an hour is normal; to those of you who can increase the interest time in a game from days to months; I thank you. And to all of you who do this for little more than personal satisfaction and hearing someone say 'hey, that's really cool, great job'; I personally thank you from the bottom of my heart and soul. I realize that most of you probably do this for yourself first. But there is no rule that you must share what you did, yet all of you do. And that is perhaps the finest part of what you do. You do a really great job. All of you. :beer: