Impact

We are the product of everyone and everything we have seen and experienced, so in a way everyone and everything has an impact, but this is an answer that skirts around the question of what has the most impact to us.

There is a handful of events that have left the greatest impact upon me. The first thing that impacted me, was an impact of awe and inspiration, seeing Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance run on the PlayStation 2, and seeing its graphical effects with the water rippling and how much fun and mysterious the entire game was, it was an experience of awe that left me with a great deal of respect for game developers of the era. Nowadays, I still feel this respect and awe whenever I see an impressive execution of some graphics programming, however I feel that this has been diminished significantly over the years, possibly partly down to the standardisation of PBR Materials which leaves very little room for stylistic expression beyond post processing on the entire viewport, which is quite sad. The comparison between Quake 3 in how it handles textures and shaders is distinctly different to how modern video games handle textures. Not necessarily better, but the differences between modern games are slim.

I would then mark 3 particular experiences from school that were significant in impacting me. The first, is this idea that not everyone appreciates things to the same degree I did. If I found some game, puzzle or effect to be awe inspiring, and I tried to share it to others I would get fairly muted and unenthused responses. This I felt was important, though greatly disheartening at the time, as I could see how others didn't get what I saw. They didn't see why something was cool, and how it can be extended or applied in a lot more ways.

Perhaps the saddest part of that impact, is the realisation I can't share the fruit of the world that I enjoyed, but all I can do is leave seeds for others to hopefully stumble upon them and enjoy them too. I try to keep this in mind whenever I share things nowadays, knowing that many people will simply not get it.

In the modern era, I might even go as far to say the average person is hostile to be shared or shown new and cool things, and from my own experience, I think it's because things in the world leave too many negative impressions upon people, that they refuse to take any more.

The 2nd experience from school, was simply introduction classes to Computer Science. I was offered to do CS for my GCSEs, but I fell in love with programming from it. Unfortunately at A level CS wasn't offered(which was possibly a good thing because the expanded mathematics knowledge from taking physics, Mathematics and Further Mathematics has typically been much more useful), but it also impressed upon me how I can do a lot more CS-related stuff outside of school.

A 3rd thing that left an impact on me, was some volunteering I did at school. I set up a Chess Club alongside a friend, and I ended up discovering that most people didn't really use clubs as a way to engage in the subject of it, or at best engage in it in a very lukewarm way, and they instead used it primarily for socialising. This experience, and my experience later on in life going to several various clubs, I've found it to repeatedly be the case. The impact of this, is it has marked all future club or conference-like events as 95% socialising and 5% related to the subject, which is a real shame and puts me off a lot of the time.

Continuing after school, the number of things that have impacted me as much have gone down. There was an experience going to the Philippines which was a big shock, and put into context how much is compromised in modernity, but also the sheer selfishness of a lot of Anglo nations. It also put into context how little anyone needs.

Finally and arguably the biggest impact on me, is a chance encounter with someone who led a videogame clan, and effectively served as a mentor of sorts. From them I learnt sharpness in words, classical libertarian views, and generally speaking a lot about how best to conduct myself in a lot of circumstances life throws at me. I suspect it's probably the libertarian views, but he pulled himself into a whirlpool of his own degeneracy. There was little I could do to give him reason and sense here, so I left him to it. Even in this, I learnt that while everyone has keys and locks, there's no reason their keys can't unlock your locks- locks in perspective and understanding of the world.

In many ways I think the greatest impact a man can leave, is to give up all their keys, and to be completely spent as an individual- in giving up their keys they unlock more understanding in more people. But even then I think of the Donkey led to water and refusing to drink.

Most people want the bonds of ignorance.

A couple of more minor impacts in my life, is stumbling upon people of different religious and political beliefs too, form far left extremists who support LGBTQIA+ to the ends of the earth, all the way to far right Nazis. There has also been experiences meeting ethnic Jews who are atheists as well as religious Jews, then there are experiences meeting fairly informal non-denominational Christians, as well as hardcore Sufis and some English pagans who I have enjoyed time with. In all these things, I'm extraordinarily grateful to have met with them and shared food with them all.

Those were the personal impacts on my life. There's a handful of other people who have left a big impact on me, and I'll blow through them quickly though, as they're not very unique or interesting. There's Friedrich Nietzsche, but I think his impact is that in order to understand him, you end up going through a lot of the Western Canon to make sense of his works. There's Jonathan Blow, who I learnt a fair amount of Game Design through, but also through him, I found about Italo Calvino, the author of Invisible Cities which is a book that amazes me in how personified a lot of the elements of a city can be. Then there is Alan Lightman who I was also shown through Jon, who's book Einstein's Dreams showed me just how fundamentally important time is to every argument, evey ideal, every dream and to the human condition. So fundamentally important, that when you scrub it away, all you're left with are adjectives locked in eternity that describe Heaven, Hell or Limbo. As far as the arts go, I would say Caspar David Friedrich for the painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, which I have always found myself in that painting, and I found my love of romantic and impressionistic art from that.

In many ways, the most impactful moments are like the most impactful puzzles which are a perfect crystallization of an idea, a problem and an interesting solution. It's a crystal, and that crystallization of who we are is a mirror of those impactful moments that have left their impression.

Thanks to Xandra for hosting the November 2024 IndieWeb Carnival with the theme of Impact!

Published on 2024/11/02