Post #1517475

Whether in art, in game dev, or anything really, I struggle (immensely) with doing something for the sake of tinkering and experimenting and figuring things out. Getting my hands dirty, figuratively speaking. I both had a ton of anxiety around doing stuff that was never going to be "finished", and also my perfectionism and my... inability to conceptualise preliminary work and prototyping got in the way. Like, I have decent skills at drawing and pixel art I think, but I can't sketch for shit. My brain just protests. I think it's a combination of my various neurodivergences, mental illnesses and possibly trauma. So I wanna share a weirdly enlightening experience that I had today, in hopes of helping others that may've struggled in a similar way. Feel free to Boost if some of this resonates with you :3 I kinda hate wallets. They are cumbersome and it's not easy to grab a card out of them even if they are supposedly designed to allow easy access to those and they have compartments I have no use for and also I have the Touch of Entropy, anything I own just disintegrates from use much faster than laws of physics would allow. I carry only four cards with me anyway. My ID, a bank card, my library card and my public transport card. But I can't carry those loose in my pants pocket because again, Touch of Entropy. I have destroyed or scratched up or damaged so many plastic cards and paper forms of ID in my life. Like... it'd take a separate thread to tell the story of my misadventures. And I can't carry them in my purse because I tend to want them in one place, and you know what happens in purses. So today, on a whim, I decided to make a thing for holding those four cards. And I did. By any rational metric, it was a waste of time. I spent a few hours, it's almost 4 AM. I could buy a cheap whatever to hold those cards and not have spent hours on it. But, I made the thing. It's ugly as sin but, despite me not knowing the first thing about wallets and not having experience making stuff, I think it's leagues better for my purposes than any wallet I've ever owned. The cards don't slide out of it when it's closed and they slide out easily when it's open. I can show my ID or swipe a card for payment without taking out a card. It opens and closes easily but not on its own. It's extremely small and lightweight. It doesn't get caught on anything when putting it in a pocket or taking it out. I can clip it to a belt or another thing. It's made of a zip-lock bag (the kind for freezing food inside) and seven zip ties. That's it. But most importantly, the process. With just a few random tools (sharp knife, old safety razor blade, pair of dull scissors, needle and thread for first experiments), I learnt a LOT about what works, what can go wrong, how to measure things, what to watch out for, what folds where. I had a few happy accidents that actually made the thing better than I'd envisioned. I could never have learnt half of this stuff just by looking at a wallet, or reading about wallets, or anything like that. And again, for my particular purposes, this thing is much more functional than anything I've ever owned. I am actually going to use it until I can make something prettier. And I'm not stupid. I've made stuff before. But it's NEVER clicked for me this way. Like, it's 4 AM for a reason. I'd completely lost track of time, I was in the zone. Like, this may actually make me better at like, game dev. Make stuff for the sake of making it. Prototype. Tinker. It can be a transcendent experience!