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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2431 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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So, where is Zorba?

Is he really busy with work? Life in general? Doesn't like the opinions of the most prolific posters these days? The site still loads every time, so I'm assuming he's around doing something. There's months between bits of activity, and the last comment was on election night.

Zorba I miss you.

Is he really busy with work? Life in general?

Pretty much, yeah.

(ping @TitaniumButterfly @Southkraut)

So, here, lemme give a sort of tl;dr of The Shape Of Zorba's Life.

I vaguely divide most of my tasks into a few categories. In no particular order, those are:

  • Sanity
  • Family
  • Survival
  • Professional hobby
  • Unprofessional hobby

The tricky part is that I usually have time for at most four of them. Unsurprisingly, Sanity, Family, and Survival end up in those four. They're kinda important.

In my case, I work in the game industry. So "professional hobby" is making my own game studio. "Unprofessional hobby" is The Motte. I end up having to choose between them, and for a while, I was aiming most of that spare time at The Motte in the hopes I could make it start paying for itself; if The Motte could take over Survival (which more-or-less gets summarized as Money, usually in the form of Day Job) then suddenly "I have time for four of them" starts looking pretty good.

Well, I'm not going to say that outcome is impossible, but at the moment, it seems pretty unlikely. I took a serious shot, it did not immediately work out. This meant I had the long-term choice of sacrificing professional-hobby in favor of unprofessional-hobby, or vice-versa.

That whole "can I make The Motte take over Survival" thing also applies to the game studio, though. And I found myself in a situation where I had some really promising ideas and tools, which made it seem like I had a plausible shot at making Professional Hobby actually become my day job, thus subsuming Survival entirely, if I started working for myself and managed to get something viable before I ran out of savings.

And so that's what I'm fundamentally focusing on. If I can collapse Professional Hobby and Survival into one thing, then I have spare time to keep working on Motte stuff. But I just can't afford to get too distracted from this, because the bank account isn't going to last forever.

So the tl;dr is that I ended up needing to triage and The Motte got the short end of the stick. That doesn't mean it's abandoned - I really do want to work on it - that just means that there's enough stuff I have more immediate needs for that it has to be sidelined for now.

I will say that the mods have done a great job of keeping this place going. Its current survival is entirely thanks to them and I am extremely grateful. Fingers crossed that my current project is successful - in fact I'm looking at a major milestone coming up in a week that'll give me a much better sense of whether this is viable - and if it is, then I'll be able to come back to The Motte and put some serious effort into long-term plans that I simply never managed to work on.

Until then . . . keep it up, y'all.

Best of luck with the project!

Let us know what it's about, once you've got a sliver of dry land beneath you and a moment to spare.

Absolutely! I'm hoping to get a somewhat-serious public release in the next few months.

Cheers!

We have a Tinker Tuesday Thread if you ever want to share progress.

I should definitely do that - I actually started a #workshop thread on a Discord for much the same reason, though unfortunately a lot of stuff that I'm doing is backend and hard to share in interesting ways. But I'll see if I can start posting there when I do have things of interest :)

I'm on a server with him so pinged him for you, but in general yeah I think the guy is just incredibly busy and tbh I'm amazed and a bit humbled at how much love he still has to keep this site afloat.

Awesome, thank you.

Hail Mary ping: @ZorbaTHut

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