Fort Awesome

Or is that a decifit. It depends on whether you’re looking at the intention, or the actual output. Recently my creative gland has been secreting its special endocrines into my bloodstream, giving me the urge to make things. This could be building a shelf, drawing a picture, making an animation, filming a movie, writing a computer game, painting a shelf, drawing a movie, filming a picture… any of those. All of them, in fact. That’s part of my problem: I want to do all of these things so much that I can never settle on getting started with just one.

Now you might say, “come on Nick, you’re a scientist. Get back in your labcoat and titrate this acid solution.” You are partly correct, except I forgot anything to do with Chemistry years ago. While I may be a coding fiend, I am also other kinds of fiend too. I’m a fiend of all trades.

I want to be disgustingly good at drawing. I’m currently alright at doodling, but nothing epic. These people who can whip out their sketchbook and 3B pencil and knock up a fantastically detailed drawing of a dragon grabbing burning peasants and smoking them like cigars (or whatever)… they’re amazing. I want to be that good, and I realise that this takes years of practice. So why haven’t I been practising? I don’t know. I do a bit and then move on to something else. So while I know I could get really good at something if I put in the time, I never do, and thus, nothing is created, and the world supply of commas runs out at the end of this sentence.

Making a computer game is within my abilities now, but it takes a lot of time and it was disheartening when I tried recently and came across a show-stopping bug with the engine I was using. I might try again sometime with a different engine.

The other endeavours - movie making, animation, even plain old writing - are all things that could benefit from a little practice. I don’t mean to be arrogant but I think I could make something really good if I stuck to it, and occassionally I have. Enough people have informed me that I’m an intelligent individual, so I’m quite clever, whoop de doo. That just makes me harder to please mentally (oh, the trials of being a white middle-class male. I’m such a dick!). I really want to make something that people see and think, “that’s cool”. I want to make a name for myself. Being “Nick who hasn’t made anything” or even “Nick who has a job but nothing in particular to show for it” doesn’t make me feel good. I don’t want to just get through life without rolling 3 doubles and going to jail. I want to leave stuff behind that I made. “Remember that guy, the one who made this thing?” “No.” “Ahhh, but look at it. It’s all… dusty. Brilliant.”

So my point is that I need to set myself some goals, and things to do every day. This is probably an ideal time of my life for it, as I am freelancing from home and have spare time to draw and play. Note to self: playing Zelda on the Gamecube doesn’t count.

Although none of us are students any more, Fort Awesome is technically a “student house”, which is basically shorthand for “has as many rooms converted into bedrooms as is humanly possible (including partitioning living rooms to make an extra bedroom) and has an unspoken clause in which random strangers can turn up with no notice and look at your house and even just start taking photos without permission“. I can appreciate that we were students once and we once had to look around houses, but you know, I’m not in the mood for being fair because we’ve just had to show round the eighth fucking group of people today. Yes the double beds don’t come with it, the bar doesn’t come with it, blah blah blah.

So as you might have gathered, we’re not going to be living in this house next year, if only so we can get out of the student housing system, and join the magical realm of regular houses where people don’t give themselves the right to wander in and out (for anybody in doubt, you do technically have to give notice before you come round, but there’s no point arguing with students, they just stand there looking sheepish and say something about “we’ve come all this way”, blah blah).

I was a student once. That’s why I hate you all so much.

I’ve been looking at the Fort Awesome website, and pondering on what is missing. We wanted it to be a sort of portal for excellency and a place where we can put funny things, but at the moment it’s little more than a blog, and blogs are so 2005. I’ve jazzed it up a little by putting in that Flickr photo bar so that we can put up our photos (at the time of writing I’d uploaded 4 wonderful pictures of ‘Moses’ being wonderfully drunk, and grinning like a wonderful idiot).

Any ideas? I think the blog thing should have less focus, and just be a little column with headings which people can peruse. Perhaps a dedicated area for putting funny pictures and sounds that we make. What could be better!

Comments people, comments.