@thenomain Well... I can tell you one thing, at least. Yeah, the thing I was describing would work.
I'd be willing to help you do one with a wiki tailored around your code setup if you wanted.
I started puttering away on one with my stuff about a week ago after getting to the point of 'I may never play anywhere like I used to, but I think I have some good ideas for things that could work, and I wanna see if they can/will/do.'
The 'why bother' is a hard question (and there's a reason I'm putting this here instead of in the other spot). Everybody's answers are going to be different. Mine is, admittedly, hokey as all fuck, and an official new reason everybody gets to call me a crazy wackadoo weirdo. (But, y'know? Fuck it.)
It's because... imagination. Stories. That old quote about how the world is not made of atoms but stories is a truism for me.
Real life thing happens? How you tell it (even if you're only framing it within your own mind) helps you shape your feelings about it, and that really matters -- if I can make myself laugh about it, I'm one hell of a lot better able to get through it, even when it's hard or seems impossible, for instance.
The Hannibal television series, in its last season, had one of the few quotes from television I've ever stopped immediately to write down, though I'm paraphrasing it now: "Even the most horrible thing can be borne if it can be made into a story."
I got that, I get that, and I think, whether it's to a greater or lesser extent, most of us here will find that resonates with them on some level.
And that's really before the imagination kicks in. I always link to this or the video of it when it comes up, but he's right.
Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.
Make good art.
I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.
Make it on the good days too.
This was directed at artists, but don't let that fool you. It really does apply to everyone. (Don't think for a second that code isn't the same kind of creative problem solving and experimentation as most art, either; it just has a different set of tools from a pencil or a typewriter or a sewing machine.)
And I've been talking about things that somebody could just cook up privately in their own head, or on their own computer, or their own secret sketchbook, and go on their merry way, with no one else ever the wiser.
But then... here we go, another quote from the speech:
When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing.
This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can.
If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do. And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.
I'm going to take this in another direction, though. Within each of our own heads, we have a definition of ourselves, who we are, and what we are capable of. It is often dead wrong. Dunning-Krueger comes to mind, but that isn't all of it. Most of us, whether we admit it or not, carry around all the horrible things someone said to or about us at one point or another in our lives, and even if we know they're not true, we often begin to doubt -- our ideas, our work, our feelings, ourselves. (Or, conversely -- and sometimes even simultaneously! -- we go full bore behavior blind and refuse to believe what's obvious to everyone else is possible. These people are never afraid to bare their ignorance to the public, and just enjoy the audience.)
As a result, we're not really very good -- we being 'people' -- at knowing, or really understanding, what or where our limits are. We essentially create our own list of impossibles for ourselves out of all of these things, and often enough, we are thoroughly capable of many of the things we've completely ruled out because they are 'beyond us' when the reality is, we maybe never thought of that in the first place, or never actually tried before we convinced ourselves that that's just not a thing I can do.
Nearly everybody has their own set of impossibles in their head. The kicker is, they're all as different as we all are. My impossible may be your easy peasy, and vice versa.
And this isn't just about drawing, or code; it can be as simple as being able to clearly explain an idea, or an emotion, or being willing to even try something to see if it will work or not.
When people come together in any creative exchange of any kind, sometimes, they just double up on their impossibles for it and nothing happens but a contagion of impossibles. (That happens a lot around here on the forum, and the 'doomsaying' I complain about a lot is a manifestation of this in action.)
But then there are the times that isn't what happens at all, and your easy peasy shows me that my impossible is not so impossible after all, and the story we end up with is one that I never could have imagined on my own. I thought it was impossible, after all, until it actually happened.
I hate marketing buzzwords with a passion, but it's a synergy thing, and synergy is one thing that cannot really exist in the vacuum of one's own head.
Maybe all you end up with is a story that makes you pause and think, say wow as your jaw drops, use up all your tissues as tears drop, but it's a story you never could have had before, and maybe it's the same for the other person, too, if your easy peasy showed them how to overcome their impossibles while contained wholly within the scope of something as simple as shared fiction. It need never be extrapolated further to still be positively transformative. (And many times it shouldn't be, which would normally go without saying.)
It's small, but it's big, too. (" ...it depends, yes and no?" 
)
So. For me, at least? So long as there are people who want to launch their imaginations at each other to see if there's a big bang (not just that kind of bang!!!) instead of bouncing off of each other's skulls with a lingering headache within the scope of shared fiction, it's worth my time to continue to try to make things that would enable them to do that as comfortably, easily, and peaceably as possible.
Bear in mind, none of what I'm describing really requires much. It doesn't need fancy (or even any) wikis. It doesn't demand anything other than the most basic code for communication, which is already 'in the box', as it were. This could be done in a gdoc, or on skype. The tools are just tools; they're there to make it easier, they're there to, ideally, help.
But I'mma quote even more of that speech now, 'cause it's the answer I wish I was smart enough to have written myself on this point.
Secondly, If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that.
And that's much harder than it sounds and, sometimes in the end, so much easier than you might imagine. Because normally, there are things you have to do before you can get to the place you want to be. I wanted to write comics and novels and stories and films, so I became a journalist, because journalists are allowed to ask questions, and to simply go and find out how the world works, and besides, to do those things I needed to write and to write well, and I was being paid to learn how to write economically, crisply, sometimes under adverse conditions, and on time.
Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, because you'll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get.
Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be – an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics and supporting myself through my words – was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal.
And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right.
)
