I love building things. Heck, I think I wrote about that here recently.
Sometimes, people even appreciate and/or make use of those things. That sure feels good, doesn’t it?
Usually, though, nobody really does. This goes back so, so far. Heck, my last really successful endeavor was when I took over the Anime Blog Muyo forum (well, kind of… I built my own and everyone migrated over when RadicalBender was done running his forum) and that lasted for… a couple of years? The Wayback Machine stopped indexing AEIOU’s content in mid-2008 and I genuinely don’t remember when we closed up shop there for good. We had some good times back then, the handful of us who remained…
(Side note: Nailing down some of the details in the previous paragraph involved reading through a lot of my own blog posts of the time and boy howdy was that a dark couple of years for me. Yikes.)
Then there’s stuff like the Mastodon server (I had two other users besides myself, and only one of them “tooted” more than a small handful of times). The home-theater computing rigs that only I would use in the household. Various purchased and/or assembled gadgets like that. Websites, forums, what-have-you. I ran a webcomic for four entire years with a readership of… half a dozen entire humans? Maybe?
Never mind this website that almost nobody reads. (Ha ha, how meta.)
It happens at work, too. A wiki almost nobody used. Fancy scripted automation stuff that only I ever actually use. Documentation nobody reads. (Well, I do: I don’t always remember how I did the fancy scripted automation thing the last time, after all.)
I can’t help myself, though. Not really. The challenge of getting something built has its rewards, and what else am I supposed to do? Just… not make stuff? Be serious. This is why I’m probably going to fire up another Mastodon instance (the one I’m on currently is shutting down, which may be ironic, I dunno). It’s why I’m still hoping to do more GoPro-footage YouTube videos that nobody will watch.
It’s fun to make stuff, dagnabbit. So… as much as some recognition would be (hugely) appreciated, I’m going to keep at it.
The alternative isn’t worth considering.