I’m working through Reece’s Pixel art class and the most important thing I can think of right now
is that when I ask Alexa to play classical music, I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT TO HEAR A VIOLIN COVER OF AN ALANIS MORRISSETTE SONG!
Like, dude, I gotta be specific and ask for Mahler, or Wagner, or…anyway, my sprite sheet in progress:
I got most of my skin tones colored, but this is a pretty big sprite sheet so it’s going to take a bit longer than I thought. Fortunately, it was a good excuse to dig my old Wacom drawing pad out of hte closet.
Wow, this is some really dedicated work if you’re doing so many sprites. When I did this exercise, I went for Sonic’s running animation, and stopped at the 2nd animation frame 
Perhaps don’t overdo it? You’ll get much more practice by creating your own stuff in the next lectures.
C’est quoi c’est. 
J’aime bien votre travail en pixel art. Je n’avais pas laissé mon commentaire pour vous offenser. Au contraire, mon but était d’offrir du criticisme constructif. Je suis d’avis que vous avez beaucoup plus à gagner en suivant la suite du cours avec la diversité de défis qu’en restant trop de temps sur ce même défi de replication. 
Je vous souhaite une bonne continuation!
No harm done. I understand you have good intentions.
Honestly, I live with depression and I just wanted to kill a Sunday to watch it die. It’s better than spending all day thinking about the alternative.
Also, my French sucks. Thank God for Google Translate.
I appreciate the well written response. It means a lot to me that you took the time.
Thank you.
Oh, I couldn’t have guessed about the depression. I do hope doing some art helps out however possible.
About the French, I answered that way because I thought you spoke it, given your prior message, lol. Since it just happened to be a language I know, I thought it might be nice to respond in it in case you were more familiar with it than English, my bad.
In any case, have a good day, and good luck with your pixel art course. The community is here to be supportive 
It’s no big deal…I mean, it’s not something anyone thinks about. It’s an invisible war. There’s nobody to blame.
I wish doing artistic things helped more, because I like ‘doing art’ and stuff, but more often than not, it’s pretty rare when anyone bothers to look at or listen to anything I do. I’m usually doing it wrong anyway, so it is what it is. It’s really not worth bothering other people about, so I don’t usually do anything anymore. I used to want to be a musician and play on stage to entertain people, but now I believe that I just either had delusions of grandeur or I maybe wanted attention. Whichever.
I would still like to write and record songs, maybe to put in my games, but most of them are stupid and I wouldn’t ask anyone to sit and listen to them.
I can’t remember the last time I played my guitars, but it must have been over two or three years ago. It seems like such a waste of time these days because frankly, nobody is interested in hearing it and if I’m having trouble at work (when I am employed), I just get criticism about why I’m not spending all of my free time boot-camping myself to learn more about my job.
It’s also why I haven’t been working on my GameDev classes for about a year. I try to enjoy it, but it’s difficult sometimes.
I tried to be a React Native/JavaScript developer at my last job, but my boss wouldn’t really help me with the support I needed. I wasn’t taught any best practices. We never worked on any project together, and I was expected to perform as a Senior, despite having only about 6 months of experience with JS and React combined. There was no mentoring at all. I was expected to go figure out everything myself and use all of my free time to do it.
So under those conditions, playing music, painting, and working on things that I really enjoy have become a complete waste of time when I should be doing other things, but he had no problem having me sign a paper stating he had claims to all of my artwork, videos, paintings, and music. What’s worse, he wasn’t the least bit interested in my paintings, videos, artwork, and music…just any money that I might accidentally make on the side should be his to claim, I guess.
That’s a start-up for you. No guidance at all, but claims to any money that you might make in your free time.
I deleted my LinkedIn, SoundCloud, and FB accounts yesterday. I hadn’t used FB in I don’t know how long. No loss there. Same with SoundCloud. I had been trying to use LinkedIn for some sort of validation that I’m a person, but nobody ever really responded to anything I posted unless they were trying to sell me something. For what ever reason, I had about 98 followers or so, but I don’t know any of them. Nothing I posted about got any ‘likes’ at all. No big loss. I don’t know why people bothered ‘following’ me.
I like the community here. This is the only social media that I really appreciate. I don’t use anything else anymore. Even Discord gets on my nerves, but specifically, I don’t spend much time in GameDev Discord. I’ve posted there a couple of times, but I’m still not comfortable there.
I’ve asked questions in other Discord servers like ZTM (some other classes I take) or TryHackMe, but a lot of people are jerks and I only go to those places to ask the occasional question. Once in a while I get a useful response, but many people are jack-asses or smart-asses so I don’t bother unless I’m really stuck on something.
I don’t mind the response in French. It was fun to look up, and thank you for playing along. Most of the time I just do that to shut people up, as folks are not often capable of Googling a simple phrase. It’s usually enough to make people go away…but seriously, I don’t mind. I truly appreciate when someone takes the time to write a well-written response in any language. I’ll work to translate it.
I’m not really good enough to do things that I really want to do, and I’ve been ‘trained’, for lack of a better word, that those things are a waste of time. I haven’t felt like myself in years and I don’t know who I am anymore.
On Sunday, I just wanted to play for a little while…just to try and have a little fun and see if maybe I could…I don’t know…try to do a little better at something I guess.
Anyway, I should go fill out some applications. My mortgage is due in a few days and I don’t have a job yet. I should be doing more productive things than whining on GameDev, but it is what it is.
Thank you for being well-written. It means a lot.
I can recognize myself in this. Software development isn’t fun anymore. It’s getting automated with automation in very abstract ways. I do understand why this is happening. I’ve many years of development practice. But you need to learn every day more and more. And I can’t say it’s even a learning process. Solving coding problems. Going back and forth to stack Overflow and your editor. Cutting and pasting, following the rules of the automated software coding process.
Coding creativity is dead. I think the human aspects of coding are becoming less and less. As a developer, you need to fulfill the rules of the machine. And now we are at the point where AI can check, validate, and give advice on the code we’ve written. No fun at all.
So I try to combine dull stuff with creative tools, like Blender, etc. Not to be the best, but just to have fun. Trying to find people with the same interests, without a huge completion factor. This is what I find on Game Dev.
Have fun, and show your work regularly.
Ok, first of all, to this I wanna say, screw them. I can’t claim having lived under the same conditions since I don’t do any programming even as a hobby, but I do know people who have chosen this path for a career, and this is not an excuse to say that all your free time should be spent learning how to do your job. I think it applies to any field. It’s common sense, really, and I’m sorry to hear that people who have none of it crossed your path, it’s really unfair, but that’s not on you, it’s on them, and they should be the ones who are sorry.
Most of the programmers I know have an affinity for playing boardgames and making puns and going to rock concerts and collecting rubber duckies (my boyfriend fits all these criteria), and as much as they enjoy their work, or as much as they hate it when it doesn’t work out, because let’s be serious, it’s not easy to have things work out all the time, that doesn’t mean they aren’t or shouldn’t be allowed to have their own life outside of that. I want to think you were just unlucky so far and will come across better people in the future.
With that out of my sistem, I wanted to touch on some of the other interesting things you said. Take them or leave them as you will.
I absolutely relate on this one. I have two (I think?) Blender courses from GameDev, and as much as I enjoy Blender, AND the course material, I haven’t managed to go through either of them to the end. It’s been years since I started on them, and I noticed a pattern, that I tend to come back to Blender during the summer, and in particular in August. And I’m cool with that. I do it for fun. Every time I come back to it and remember the things I thought I’d forgotten, I also learn something new and it’s rewarding. It’s a hobby, so do it at whatever pace is comfortable and have no shame about it. this applies to any hobby.
Another example I can give you on this same topic is my writing. I’ve been writing fiction since middle grade, and now in my 4th year at uni am still writing as well as ever. I took breaks from it, sometimes days, or weeks, or months, but I always came back to it because it’s something I identify with and I’m taking it at my own pace. Sure, at this point I am considering turning it into a career path at some point, but I still see it as a hobby, just a more productive one as compared to the many others I have (little things like playing the flute or poi spinning, or even art which I come back to pretty often and can see some real progress with).
Point I’m making is, if it’s a hobby, do it at your own pace. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, so long as when you do choose to come back to it, you’re doing it because it brings you satisfaction. And sure, it can be difficult sometimes, but remember that you’re setting the pace in this regard, no external pressures.
I love the community here too I’m not always active, but it’s one of the few forms of social media I actually get involved in. I have Facebook, but I haven’t posted anything in years, people ask me why I don’t have Instagram and I just shrug, and although I have Discord, I’m literally a fly on the wall in 3 servers and that’s it. So, yeah, I get you.
I’m glad to hear I passed your test 
It’s actually a pretty interesting idea to say something in a foreign language to hint you’re trying to end a conversation. Not the most polite one, I do want to point out, but I can totally appreciate how ingenious it is. I never considered it, and it’s actually quite funny.
Also, if you do take criticism, I’d like to suggest a more grammatically sound alternative to your phrase. That would be “C’est quoi ça?”, a colloquial version of “What is this?” which also expresses revolt, that I believe you might have meant to say. Alternatively, if you meant something around the lines of “It is what it is” then a grammatically correct version to express this would be “C’est ce qu’il est,” though I’ve never heard it used and as a non-native I cannot vouch for it expressing 100% the meaning you might have intended. Just speculating here, if you want to update your conversation stoppers 
Alright, I rambled enough. Sorry for getting long, I sometimes get involved a bit over the top. But if anything of what I said was good to read, then my time wasn’t wasted and I’m glad to have participated in this conversation
Thank you for taking the time.
Yeah, I don’t know anyone in person who is even remotely interested in working on this kind of stuff.
Everyone who is interested is already here in this forum. I don’t know anyone in person with whom I can hold a coding conversation.
I live in Kansas. People seem way behind the times here. I thought for sure that with four or so college campuses here, people would be beating down the door to try to get employment or internships at Salina Code Academy, but NOBODY seems to know about it.
I was writing four new summer classes for Modding Minecraft, Roblox with Lua, Level Design with Unity, and React Native app development, and we only got 1 sign up.
I personally put out 500 flyers on Memorial Day, and my old manager at Pizza Hut was nice enough to put 300 flyers out for us on pizza boxes, but we only got 1 sign-up.
Man, I was crushed.
Thank you again.
I wasn’t trying to be rude. I basically meant “It is what it is”. I just didn’t have anything else I could think of at the time.
Contextually, for me, it was like, “Hey, I’m doing a thing…” and someone was like, “Why aren’t you doing it some other way?” and I’m like, “Whatever, I just wanted to color.”
I’ll redraw my next tattoo again and make the appropriate grammatical corrections.
