I’m going to summarize Ayn Rand’s whole deal: Do what you want, not what other people tell you.

She said more than that, but it’s only a summary. This sounds like pretty standard advice. You might be wondering how she became so controversial. You should know that she followed with (and I’m summarizing again): Practically everybody is a tool. And she goes on to say mean things about practically everybody.

Tool:

One who lacks the mental capacity to know he is being used.

Ayn Rand is a popular topic today. She illustrates her thesis in a way that strikes a chord with many people. But you will need to stomach loads of pessimism. Satire without comedy is depressing.

There’s danger in speaking too abstractly. People may apply your ideas to a context that doesn’t work, or worse, your ideas might not work in any context. It’s also kind of lazy.

Like this post doesn’t mention any examples. See? Lazy.

“I would hazard to guess that 99% of us have things in the back of our brains that we want to work on for ourselves… as an artist to be happy, you have to indulge your labors of love.”

Big Illustration Party Time Podcast, episode 1

Today I found The Big Illustration Party Time Podcast, and I like hearing them talk about walking the line between art and business. It’s something game developers struggle with, too.

I considered making a career out of drawing. I stayed with game programming, but the goal is the same: make cool experiences. Programmers share this goal but have alien definitions of cool. Programmers want their gadgets to be thrilling, but an appliance should not require too much attention. If programmers made toasters they would have thirty buttons and complain about the quality of your bagels. At least games are supposed to impress, but the object of the programmer’s zeal is still sometimes misplaced.

Gabe from Penny-Arcade:

Indiana Jones – This was the year of procedurally generated content. Every other developer was telling me how instead of having artists and animators create a game for me they figured out a way to make a computer do it. They seem to think this is better but Indiana Jones is a great example of why it’s not. Instead of animating Indy they essentially taught him how to behave and react to his surroundings. They said this was better because it means you’ll never see the same canned animation over and over. What it means is that I see different stupid looking animations all the time though. I’m not sure that’s an improvement. I’ll take God of Wars beautifully animated special moves over Indy looking like some kind of retarded marionette any day.

So I don’t always feel like a programmer at heart. Though I’ve been sucked into technology hype, in the end I only care about tech insofar that it serves art. Tech hype is one distraction that illustrators don’t deal with–you wouldn’t care what brush was used to paint something. Another is scale. To a game developer it’s refreshing to hear creative people in mass media think about themselves as artists.

Public housing in many places in the states has a  zero tolerance policy. Any criminal activity found on the premise, especially drugs, means everyone gets evicted. It’s a broad dismissal, a way for the community to say “you are not my problem”.

That works in a big pond. Throw fools overboard, and you can forget about them. Your life is easier, theirs is harder, justice is served. But in a small pond, you will still see those guys around. The more you throw over, the less pleasant your boat ride. The taxpayer spends more on the people thrown to the streets than if they had stayed in public housing. They will get sicker, and we will pay more for them in our emergency rooms. They will turn to crime, and we will pay for them to be policed, arrested, and jailed. They will hang around our shopping areas, smelling like pee. The world isn’t big enough anymore to say “you are not my problem”.