3 min
Experiments in happiness
👋 This page was last updated ~12 years ago. Just so you know.
If you're a regular, you might've noticed the place has changed around a little. Thing is, I've been spending time playing around with a radical new concept: happiness.
The year and a few months that I've spent working for a start-up were actually a pretty gloomy time for me, both for professional and personal reasons. It took me a while to get out of this hole and start thinking positive again.
That's not immediately obvious if you look at all I've done in that timeline though! Lots of progress on ooc, many new games, new videos, new tracks, I've been keeping myself busy to stay sane, but my heart wasn't all that into it.
One of my biggest challenges over the past few years were uncertainty and guilt. I actually had plans to make a very personal game about abuse and how things are not always what they seem - a subject which I feel is still very much taboo in the otherwise very open indie game scene.
But life is short, right? You can't spend it mulling over the past. That's just not cool. So let's leave behind the things I, you, we can't change and go ahead!
Happiness
So, happiness. Happiness is not the opposite of sadness - you can be sad about things and yet happy in general - in fact, either English sucks or my English is too poor because I can't find the proper translation of the French word "heureux".
Happiness is looking at your bank account getting emptier and not worry about it because you have a plan and you know you are going to stick to it. Happiness is being comfortable with your clients and being okay with your weird sleep schedule because, eh, whatever works!
Happiness is having friends around, and then messing up, and then apologizing over a beer and then spending the rest of the night playing Sanctum or coding to Megaman's soundtrack and mean mashups.
Happiness is buying a hard-cover book, letting your phone and laptop aside, and read a good hundred pages of it. And then download the epub and continue reading it in bed, alongside your fiancée, because you know what? That's okay! It's all good, really.
Happiness is getting over that stupid instinct of "everybody is going to hate that if I do it" and just slam colors and happy pictures all over your blog's design.
Happiness is breaking your own rules and your parents' legacy, not because you're a pissed off teenager but because it's time to experiment and you've grown up enough to understand that broadening your horizons is not necessarily silly, or irresponsible, or childish. Much the opposite in fact.
It takes time to get there. But it feels good when you do. Wherever you are, take your time, just don't forget to try new things!
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I still get excited about programming languages. But these days, it's not so much because of what they let me do, but rather what they don't let me do.
Ultimately, what you can with a programming language is seldom limited by the language itself: there's nothing you can do in C++ that you can't do in C, given infinite time.
As long as a language is turing-complete and compiles down to assembly, no matter the interface, it's the same machine you're talking to. You're limited by... what your hardware can do, how much memory it has (and how fast it is), what kind of peripherals are plugged into it, and so on.