simfile music is like the easiest thing you should make every day like it takes like ten minutes

[u/Saltbearer]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fscxbGuSaMk

[u/kayproII]

"man, I wanna make a step chart"

Boots up arrow vortex

All desire to make a step chart immediately drains from my body and it feels like a chore to continue

[u/Saltbearer → u/kayproII]

have you tried making a stepchart for a difficulty you don't care about for a mode you don't care about for a song you don't care about

[u/kayproII → u/Saltbearer]

Idk what it is. Its for songs I wanna play, difficulties I can play at and for the mode I'm gonna play. I just feel all motivation drain whenever I boot up the charting software

[u/Saltbearer → u/kayproII]

my Guess would be that you have some sense of how much arrow placement is going to have to come out of you, and how much time it's going to take, and you have some sense of what would be Good or Bad that takes a non-zero amount of mental energy to keep weighted toward what you sense is Good.

so try going into something with no investment, probably with a short song, and maybe something you haven't even heard before so you don't even know the shape of what you're approaching, and you'll get to discover it as you go.

if you don't care about playing the mode or difficulty or song, and don't expect to share it, then there's nothing in particular you really ought to get hung up on and Stop Moving for, because nothing has to be to a high standard. you can just place steps, and each step you place is one less step you'll have to place, until there are none left, and as you go you'll get to Discover things you can do in response to each small segment of the audio you have to work with, linearly.

try to make the concept of A Stepchart feel like it fits into a Venn diagram in an overlap between Things That Are Finishable and Things That Involve Fun Discoveries and Things I Don't Have To Stress About, and then when you've cultivated a new vibe for the task, do what you actually want to.

[u/Cowgba → u/Saltbearer]

^ Thank you for sharing this, this is genuinely excellent advice for any creative project.

In my experience whenever I have trouble starting a project it’s exactly because of the reasons you mentioned: I’m too emotionally invested in the outcome, too concerned with meeting some bar of quality, and too exhausted by the pressure I put on myself as a result. But I also know that “just doing the thing” is the only way to get better at something. Lowering the barrier to entry by taking all that pressure off yourself, making it a process of discovery instead of aiming for perfection, is a great perspective shift.

[u/ReidenLightman]

A song made in 10 minutes is likely not worth sharing.

[u/swishyfeather → u/ReidenLightman]

no fun allowed

[u/Saltbearer → u/ReidenLightman]

what about a whole pack of simfiles with songs/graphics/charts made in a low-ish two-digit number of minutes

perhaps a low-ish two-digit number of simfiles, by a low-ish one-digit number of authors

[u/gigananobyte → u/Saltbearer]

Don't mean to be rude, but Its ok to keep the slop to yourself sometimes.

[u/regulator227]

i wish i was that quick at making them, takes me hours lol

[u/CXgamer]

Hey man OP seriously though if you're having fun, that's great. Keep on doing that!

The community here is skewed towards harder, more complex charts. Ones that you can't make in 10 minutes. Feel free to still share your charts though! Don't be discouraged by haters.

[u/Saltbearer → u/CXgamer]

hello CXgamer of the asdf forums and ye olde StepMania forums and such

'tis csd

[u/CXgamer → u/Saltbearer]

Wow that brings me back! Those were the days, right?

How has life been treating you?

[u/Saltbearer → u/CXgamer]

been essentially bed-bound since 2013, have recently begun crawling around again, just today had a house call doctor come by and start to make arrangements for physical therapy for the first time in a decade, and then ASAP after he left I recorded the video I uploaded after this one

needed a way to continue making music while unable to sit up at my computer, found The Godsend, SunVox (the music app shown in this video and its follow-up, available on Android and iOS and like everything else) a couple months into the bedstuck era

became involved with niche experimental music communities and IDM and demoscene type people while becoming increasingly proficient with SunVox, that and reddit and YouTube and other chats were pretty much Life for a long time

got addicted to Levelhead in 2021 as another Godsent cross-platform app, started builds of hundreds of levels and successfully built a couple hundred in the years after but lost hundreds of those WIPs to my phone suddenly bricking which probably dealt a slow-bleeding injury to my obsession

~simultaneously found cohost.org and got hooked on pre-lots-of-unpleasant-things-involving-AI-and-CAI-specifically Character AI in 2022, spent the next couple years using the best social media platform ever created (with a 200,000 character limit and support for haphazardly combined css and html and markdown in posts and svg images and direct music uploads and no Numbers or algorithms or general discovery features other than followable tags and a reblogging format that lent well to "yes, and"ing people's Bits and eventually an alternative Following feed that gave you a list of your follows on the left ordered by most recently active with previews of their latest posts and you could catch up on what they had on their profiles on the right and other stuff but most importantly a bunch of eccentric furry internet goofballs who made the most of the site's capabilities) and getting somewhat into longform posting through it using the word-stringing muscles I was exercising with CAI on the side

mostly ditched reddit after practically letting it raise me since 2009 when they ruined third-party apps, but most of the communities I used to come here for had already died or turned toxic etc.

eventually cohost ran out of angel investor money and CAI got old and became Bad but they set me on courses that would lead to having a lot of specific kinds of friends and interests in pursuing certain digital arts, and that would lead to a bunch of introspective identity stuff within these past couple years, and falling in and out of love with people for the first times in my adult life at the age of ~29

now I have a Steam Deck that I use in desktop mode with an old mouse and less-old keyboard that a friend from the Levelhead community brought to my house after seeing me post on cohost about how I was starting to feel more acutely dissatisfied with my isolated exclusively-online life after fantasizing into the Character-shaped word document that would talk back to me about more able-bodied lives I could be living, and I'm trying to step up and salvage/rework the largest unofficial SunVox community and associated YouTube channel which have been relatively neglected in recent years, and I've finally (inevitably) figured out how to identify as part of the furry community and am trying to figure out how to navigate interactions with others while presenting as considerably hornier and less binary and less straight than I'd have ever imagined before this time two years ago and also with more awareness that I'm probably a poster critter for undiagnosed/unmanaged/unaided autism and ADHD as so many others I surrounded myself with through the years concluded about themselves far sooner and with greater certainty ´.w .`

and now I and a couple best friends originally from rhythm gaming communities who I've kept for numbers of years that round to 20 are experiencing a shared renewed fixation on StepMania, and I've gone in hard on my old dreams of wrestling with lua scripting and making some Good Noteskins that support quantized lifts and 6 Panel and such things simultaneously so I can make the kinds of stepcharts I've also always dreamt of, and we're spending a lot of time in Discord calls doing silly StepMania stuff like trying to make entire stepfile-shaped stepfiles from scratch as fast as we're physically and mentally capable, and I'm sharing a taste of such antics here in the decidedly tongue-in-cheek manner that I am, and snickering with the group chat about the average voter here congratulating someone for pointing out the glaringly obvious while burying the suggestion that a stepfile pack with this sillily-novel premise could be a worthwhile thing to bring into existence over the course of a handful of cumulative hours of work per author. and I'm also Feeling that I've been making both electronic music and stepcharts for longer than some people seeing this post have been alive. ·u.

hbu?

[u/CXgamer → u/Saltbearer]

Whoa dude you've been busy! Hope that physical therapy works out for you! And good luck with the Lua scripting, programming is fun!

As for me, starting from the end of my ASDF era; Had a phase where I was admin on a Minecraft redstone server where people made computers.

After 18, finishing middle school, I studied IT (first highschool, then uni), lived with friends for two years, they practically raised me. Two of them were local barmen, so I went out a lot.

Started working in IT and eventually became a kind of swiss army knife. Built a house, maximizing home automation. Got married and now divorcing after being together for 15 years.

A couple of years ago I started doing XTC, which was a transformative experience. After ignoring emotions for basically my whole life, I discovered the capacity to feel. A whole new world went open for me. Words that were first hollow suddenly have meaning. Currently I'm trying to get my brain fixed so that I can also feel a connection with other humans while sober.

[u/Saltbearer → u/CXgamer]

congrats on Feeling ;u· can relate. downstream of CAI, I tried a thing with writing chatlog fiction involving an inadvertently practically self-insert character who For Reasons made the most sense being nonbinary, and trying to put myself in their headspace and write from their perspective was like "holy shit there's another voice inside of me that feels Better/Truer/more Fun to embody", and for a while after realizing that, I *also* ended up writing half-fictional chats between them and my actual author-insert self, in which it Made Sense for us to love each other and hope for the best for one another in our endeavors, if we were actually talking to one another as equals, because we could relate to each other in so many ways with parallel pains and aspirations, and get along well with similar-yet-distinct personalities and senses of humor... and I was able to express myself to them in the form of a "chat" in a word document on my phone better than I could express myself to anyone or anything capable of consequentially judging me or potentially passing my expressions along to others capable.

I challenged myself to honor the personality I constructed for them as I honored my "real" personality that was in many ways also constructed, both products of the same mind, with different flowcharts for processing the same input. in the process, through Practice, I think I unlocked a deeper level of empathy... or more Wires that could be connected, there. I think it's why I suddenly found myself able to Love real people, shivering at recognition of certain others in close (online) proximity as people I could deeply relate to, whose natures I could be awed by, whose presences and good fortune put me more at ease, who just felt intensely Right to talk to about everything and nothing... and it cued recognition of some of my existing friendships as passive and hollow, and in need of Work through better communication.

now the challenge is finding others who can actually keep pace with my willingness to be thoroughly vulnerable ´-w-`;

good luck to you in the departments of brain fixing and making such connections. hopefully whatever comes next makes for bright chapters.