This is one of those topics that just sits on the top of my brain like a tangled mass of cables stockpiled in that Sterlite container in my basement. I don’t know where to start, or where to end, and there’s no good place anywhere in between to just dive right in because it’s a complete overlapping and confusing mess, but somehow, it makes perfect sense to me. I just don’t know if I can explain it.

I value “newness”. I have blamed this three-word admission every time I stopped playing a game and moved on to a new one. The old game had ceased to provide me with anything “new”, so I have to go out and find something that I don’t know about yet. I might understand the backing mechanics, but not the specific implementation, so I’d only play a game until it stopped teaching me anything.

I was reading through the online manual for After Effects and ran into the section on color. It was excruciatingly informative, but it was one web page. I went looking for more books on the subject of color theory, but couldn’t find a damn one. That made me sad and angry because I didn’t know where to go to learn more.

I have spent the past few weeks building my space trader game as a web site. In order to achieve what I needed to achieve, I had to get to know a lot of new technologies. Now that I’ve gotten comfortable with them, I’m losing interest.

I was watching a video this morning on “how to film yourself”, not in a “selfie-stick” kind of way, but in the “I don’t have anyone else who I can rope into this crazy idea of mine” kind of way. During the video, I was enumerating various elements that weren’t even the focus, like how well lit the scene was, how crisp the audio was, and how the editing was handled. I wanted to read up on photography and cameras, and filmmaking. I felt that if I didn’t learn this stuff, I was wasting my time learning anything that relied on it.

These feelings are all real. When I’m thinking about a subject, I think about it in terms of what I do not know, which leads me to think of what do I need to know? which leads me to how can I learn this? Sometimes that is just a dead-end. I might be able to learn something about photography and videography, but it’ll be limited on account of the fact that I don’t have the right equipment. I have written recently about my desire to investigate woodworking, but I know I don’t have the tools, or the time, or the money, or even the knowledge on how to start gaining the knowledge I need. When I can’t learn, I get antsy, upset, and despondent.

I apparently need to keep learning. Doing is fine, and achieving is also fine, but the process of understanding something that I don’t understand, even if it’s about something that I cannot participate in, has immense value to me, apparently. Moreso if I can do something with it.