How strong does a company's reality distortion field have to be for people to think your friends are going to want to come over to play with a new version of Windows?
I mean, why not "Let's all have wine and cheese and do root canals on each other!"?
I honestly was excited about Windows 95. Win98 was underwhelming, and WinME was a joke that I never bothered to install on my own machines. Win2K brought back some of the excitement, but not much.
Then Vista came out, and it was a total flop at first. Win7 fixed most of those mistakes, but the damage was done. Vista basically killed any chance Microsoft had at building excitement for an OS.
FWIW, I think the last macOS version that I was really looking forward to was High Sierra.
Yeah, younger folks don't remember that new operating systems used to be a thing of excitement -- what cool new features will we get? -- and not, like today, a thing of distress -- what did they break this time, and which new ways have they found to piss me off
I remember my dad driving us to the local Windows 95 pre-launch event by Microsoft. I was 10 and had learned the ridiculous and useless skills of DOS memory configuration and bootdisk juggling to get all of the games to run. Win95 was so cool! I remember spending hours on the multimedia catalog and demos on the CD-ROM and marvelling at the possibilities.
Why is parent's advice ironic? I, like probably most people, would have more time for relationships I value now if I had followed their advice. Your first sentence reads as if their advice was "earn money at the expense of relationships and well-being" and that isn't the case at all.
You can't be certain of that, though. If you had (for example) pursued work and money more ambitiously in your 20s, maybe those relationships you value now would never have formed in the first place. Maybe then-existing relationships would have suffered to the point of estrangement.
I'm lucky: I worked very hard and did decently well in the startup lottery, but I still left myself enough time to forge valuable relationships. I've witnessed people who chase higher and higher salaries but aren't that lucky, and end up using the years of their life where their mind and body are at their peak of their ability for work instead of play, and regret it.
I'm in my 40s now, and see some younger friends and acquaintances doing things like taking multi-month world trips, diving head-first into new hobbies/skills that take hundreds/thousands of hours to get good at, and I wish I'd done things like that in my 20s and 30s. In part because my responsibilities today make it difficult to do now, but also because I just don't want to do some of those things anymore, because they sound kinda exhausting at my age. But I still wish I had those experiences in my past to look back fondly upon.
I guess what I'm saying is that nothing is certain, and we can't reliably look back and say "if I'd done X 15 years ago, today I'd be able to do Y". Life just doesn't work that way. I think we should do what makes us happy whenever we have the ability to. Sure, look hard for and always be open to opportunities to take on work that could make a big change in your financial life. But be careful with those sorts of choices, because there's always opportunity cost.
I want to retire early and make music and games for 40 years after I turn 40.
I don't want to wait until I'm 69 to retire for at most 11 years.
Plus none of us know how much time we actually have. A lot of people plan to retire at 68, die on the job at 67, and your replacement is in your chair next week.
> Plus none of us know how much time we actually have
Precisely because of this, you should be making music and games now. You never know if once you reach the amount of money you desire, death will knock on your door.
If you are already doing it, that's great. But so many people defer the enjoyment and overwork themselves waiting for that future where they hit the number.
That's a good point, I make plenty of music, and every now and then I release a really small game. I can't imagine more than 100 people have played them, but in a strange way that's okay. It was never for other people.
I'd love to check out your games, if you'd be willing to post. I've spent 10 years dabbling in indie game dev when I was young, there's something nostalgic about seeing people's projects. Never published anything myself btw, it always stayed firmly in demo stage haha.
It won't be a problem for them. They'll find a way to make it not enough - disable functionality that people want or need and then charge a subscription fee to enable it. And more ads. Easy peasy.
> Douglas, procrastinator that he was, was already a year past his deadline for delivering the manuscript for So Long And Thanks For All The Fish to his publisher … and he hadn’t yet written a word.
When you’re a professional procrastinator, you get used to the background hum of anxiety in your mind - it becomes little more relevant than a buzzing fluorescent tube over the kitchen table. An annoyance, but not something you particularly feel the need to do anything about.
Generally this arises because you’ve procrastinated on so many matters that resolving any one of them simply won’t make a difference, and you know that resolving all of them is an impossibility, particularly those where the deadline has been, gone, had children, and moved to the country in its senescence to spend more time in nature.
I used to work with someone (back in Palm Pilot days) who would have a list of something like 100s of overdue ToDo items. He was just terrible at starting and completing tasks.
And, yes, you can get to the point where the magnitude of curating and chipping away at your list is so great that it's easier to just put it out of mind.
I think it's a reworked quote from someone else originally, but I like "Writing is easy - all you have to do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until your forehead bleeds..."
One of the books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (of however many books there are) ends very abruptly because the publisher was so annoyed with him missing deadlines they told him to just finish the page he was on and published whatever he had written so far.
He was very funny about it, but honestly I think he was probably a bit of a nightmare to work with. If he hadn't had the huge success with the Hitchhikers paperback his publishers and other collaborators would have been a lot less understanding I'm sure!
Since you brought up the topic--in the snow picture, is the red vehicle on the right an older 4Runner with some kind of pickup truck cap on it? Something that turns it into a Chevy Avalanche configuration.
> In 2002, during a press briefing about the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld famously divided information into four categories: known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns. These distinctions became the basis for the Rumsfeld Matrix, a decision-making framework that maps and evaluates the various degrees of certainty and uncertainty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ