March 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Take a look at the Tildes Statistics site. Couple things:

1, and most obvious: there has been a decline in users over the past few days for the first time that I'm aware of.
2: (I was going to make this point before the user decline occurred but it's probably moot now) Due to the scaling of the Y-axis, it appears that there is healthy user growth in the site. But if you look at the numbers, we're talking about user growth of roughly 60 people over the past month.

I know we want controlled growth, and I know we don't want to open it up to the masses. But we also want this site to succeed (i.e. provide interesting discourse and keep people coming back on a regular basis). I don't believe success can happen when growth is stagnant (or, declining!)

I don't think that the conversations are necessarily stagnant per se, in fact there's an impressive amount of thoughtful discussion relative to the size of the user base. But if a given topic is too niche (e.g. MLS football or MUDs, two of my interests), the odds of finding like-minded users to discuss with is obviously lower.

Is it time to consider some sort of growth campaign (one that is not reactionary a la the Reddit API changes) in order to infuse some new life into this awesome site?

I want to make a game.

... is what I've been telling myself for the past few weeks. Honestly, I might have subconsciously had this thought for the past few months, if not years.

Strange as it sounds, I've gone on a weird mental journey in getting to the point where I'm able to acknowledge this desire. I've always had a vague, constant urge to be creative, but for the past few years, this urge has been tied to an outcome: "I want to write a JS library because it'll make for a cool product later"; something like that. Inevitably, having that outcome in mind makes me set a standard of perfection for what the thing is supposed to be, which makes me start planning every piece of the thing, which... tires me out, and then I just don't do it.

I'd say I've been better about this recently, in that I'll sometimes do one-off things because it seems like fun at the time. Small coding projects that serve no purpose at all. I randomly got into drawing for a week, so the day's drawing for that week. Rediscovering this process has been fun, and it's definitely been fulfilling to just marvel at my work without having to check off boxes for what the thing is supposed to do.

But now, I've got the idea that I want to make a game. A game isn't a small project, or at least not as small as what I've been working on recently. I'm pretty sure my motivation for wanting to do this is entirely intrinsic: I just want to do it, I don't want to sell it, I don't care if nobody plays it. And yet, I'm still finding it pretty hard to do anything.

Firstly, I don't have much time during the week to work on this game; I also work full-time. Second, when I do have time, I find it pretty hard to make any progress. A game isn't small, so I feel the need to plan stuff out, even just roughly. Which is what I do at work. So then it just feels like work. I tire of planning pretty quickly, and I think I've come to conflate this tired feeling with burnout at work, so I just stop and scroll on the internet.

Sometimes I'm able to focus and just write something without planning. It's nice when I'm able to do this, but inevitably I start thinking about the bigger picture... "Okay, the protagonist feels X because the theme I'm going for is Y, which..." and then the planning starts again.

Anyway, this is all a very long way to say that I struggle with creating for creation's sake, partly because budgeting my time as a full-time laborer is hard, and partly because I have trouble seeing the trees for the forest, so to speak. Have you all ever had to deal with this? I'm curious to know what's helped you, or just your thoughts on the topic/my situation.

Cheers!