A little bit of background for this topic: from my teenage years into my early 20s I was a prolific writer and artist. I wrote dozens of short stories, fanfics, and even a full length novel which I never posted publicly. I drew a lot, too. I would never consider myself ‘good’ at either discipline, but I’d say I reached the lofty heights of ‘passable’.
Unfortunately, you need to make a living in this world, so I put all that aside for about 10 years to become a software developer. I was still consuming a lot of media, though, and still do to this day. Like you guys, I lamented the wokeification of games, films, and books, and frequently discussed it with people in my personal life. I kept coming around to the same conclusion: ‘If we’re not happy with the stories the mainstream are providing, we need to create our own’.
Fast forward to today, I’m at a position in my career where I’ve automated a lot of things so that I have more free time. A few months ago my wandering mind was struck by a bolt of inspiration from the blue, and for the first time in ages I felt the desire to create again. As I sat down and organised my ideas, though, I realised that I was (consciously and sub-consciously) pulling elements from media which I have enjoyed and combining them into my own story. It’s very difficult to put a number on these things, but if I had to estimate I’d say about 60% of my ideas come from media, 40% from my own personal experiences. Of course, I did the same thing as a teenager, but I’m a bit more self-aware now than I was back then.
My question to you guys is, do you care about originality for its own sake, or does it have more to do with how a story is told? When I think about my favourite stories, some of them are extremely trite and tropey, but they are told masterfully well. Is it even possible to be truly original in such a media-saturated world as ours?
For what it’s worth, I don’t intend to shake the foundations of the world with my story, I just want to tell a good one that isn’t full of woke BS.
Just something I have anecdotally noticed occuring with more frequency. Several creators I follow have spoken about being diagnosed with ADHD in recent years, and their experiences with medication like adderall. When I was a kid, ADHD was something only kids had, and was famously overdiagnosed in America as an excuse to get a ton of kids on pills.
Is this just a more recent extension of that? Is it just as simple as big pharma looking for more addicts? I have definitely noticed that my own attention span has been eroded by the 24 hour news cycle and too much screen time, but I'd never think to go to the doctor about it.
I have seen a lot of know-it-all democrat voters posting in the last few days about how Trump's economic strategy is bound to fail and those who voted for him for economic reasons are fools. Obviously I am extremely sceptical of these people, as economic literacy has never been a strong point of progressives (not to mention how they are all suddenly experts, like how they were for virus propagation, climate change, etc.).
Nonetheless, I myself am no economist. Can somebody with a better understanding explain the strategy to me, and also any potential ways in which it COULD backfire in the way progressives are suggesting?
I visited today and the catalogue appears to be empty. Getting a bunch of 400 errors in the browser.
I don't know anything about the mod other than the fact that it was recently released, and I happened to glance over an article on Gamespot talking about it. Not sure how much I trust their colouring of the issue, though. Something about one of the devs being a pedophile and putting questionable content in the mod?