#i had computer problems and was deleting files I didn't need while working on this and...

[teotheratking]

Are you still heterosexual life partners if you're married? Asking for a friend

[blazehedgehog]

Considering your financial situation, wouldnt it be justified to just pirate the big releases especially when they often leak/the fact that you wait some time anyways before making a video?

Ofcourse I understand supporting indies and other smaller games, but I think sonic games will survive one less sale tbh

Working for TSSZ kind of broke me of my habit of pirating most games. I didn't need to pirate games anymore. Tristan was a consummate professional about that kind of stuff. If I wanted to write about a game and did not own it, I'd put in a request and it'd get bought for me, or I'd even buy it for myself and expense it to get that money back.

Here's the deal about pirating big new games: my computer is from 2015. My faith in capturing video from PC games, especially brand new PC games, is not very strong. Even if it's something like Sonic Superstars, a game that seems to be targeting lower spec systems than most.

That is why you see me holding a PS4 copy of Superstars and not just buying it on Steam. On PS4, I'll get consistent performance and consistent video capture.

It's also just a different world out there. The last time I was into pirating PC games, torrenting was a lot safer and a lot easier to do. I've got accounts at a couple of private, invite-only trackers, and both of them straight up say "Hey if you're torrenting files, either from us or anywhere else, you should be using a VPN bare minimum."

And I don't. Nor do I want to use a VPN. It's a lot of hoops to jump through just to get a game, what, a few days early?

And then there's the other headache: I mentioned having accounts at a few private trackers, and those places will crack the whip on you pretty hard if you don't seed. To give you a peek behind the curtain a little bit, during the Sonic Frontiers review, for the pinball segment, I was debating on how to get footage of "real" pinball. Do I borrow somebody else's video?

Then it dawned on me: No, Farsight Studios made a bunch of really great pinball conversions via Pinball Arcade. One problem, though: another developer named Zen bought out the rights to most of their library and as a result Pinball Arcade lost like 70% of its tables. So, I figured I'd have to pirate them. It was also a good excuse to get the PC version of Addams Family Pinball, which I bought and paid for on my phone years ago.

So I grabbed a torrent from one of these private trackers. All seven seasons from before the Zen Pinball buyout. 8, almost 9gb. Something like 100 pinball tables total. I was literally in the process of scanning the rar files for viruses when I realized: wait, I'm an idiot, I bought Pinball Arcade Season 7 on the PS4. There was a pricing error when it launched and they were selling the whole season for like $6, when normally a season would be closer to $30.

So I fired up the PS4, captured my video from that, and that's what is in the final product: me playing Pinball Arcade Season 7 on console.

So now I have this torrent of all of Pinball Arcade on my PC and I'm not sure I want to risk installing it. It seems clean, but there's always that worry. I have bricked a PC once from playing illicit software.

And clearing that torrent with the private tracker? They had me seed that thing every day for two months before they took me off the "Hit & Run" list (meaning my account was potentially up for deletion). All the while they're saying "Hey, protect yourself, use a VPN when you torrent from us."

All of that is just one big bundle of nerves and stress and work that is solved by just waiting for it to officially release and buying it normally. It is the ultimate in convenience.

[solradguy]

hi! could please tell me a bit more about how and why you rebooted your laptop? does it help speed up its processing? clean up unnecessary files? i want to do something similar to my laptop but am too scared it will delete important documents and programs from my drives.

Yeah, no problem!

My laptop started bluescreening a lot (one day it did it 5 times...) and I couldn't figure out why so my last resort was resetting it and hoping that whatever was causing it would get wiped. It didn't, because the issue turned out to be a faulty Nvidia graphics driver. Installing an older driver fixed the issue and it hasn't BSOD'd since. Thankfully lol (BSOD=blue screen of death)

Wiping your laptop every couple of years can speed it up, especially if you download or install programs a lot, but it's honestly not something you really need to do to keep it running efficiently. If your computer's suddenly acting weird, like BSOD-ing or lagging when it didn't used to, then resetting it could potentially help.

I'm running Windows 11 and it had a feature in the reset options to keep my settings and some important files but it wiped everything else. This included programs, photos, downloads, and some UI personalization options. It generated a .HTML file that listed all the programs it uninstalled and linked to the website to redownload them, if it could find it, which saved me a shit ton of effort after the reset. Windows 10 might do this too, but I'm not sure. If you go to the reset menu the wizard will let you know. I have no idea how resetting works on Macs, sorry...

If you do decide to reset your laptop, I recommend backing up all of your personal files onto either an external hard drive or the cloud. You get something like 12 or 15gb with a free Google Drive account and I think 8gb with Dropbox? so if you don't have an external HDD, those are some free options. You can uninstall them after you get your files back.

Here's a guide I referenced before resetting my laptop that explains some of the options in more detail:

The guide mentions it too, but resetting takes a long time and the completion percentage will hang at a number for a while, like mine sat at 63% for like 30 minutes before continuing. Don't turn the power off, just let it do its thing. My laptop had a lot of files to wipe and IIRC it took it about 90 minutes to fully reset.

OH ALSO make sure any sites you have two-factor authentication enabled on are up to date because, man, talk about a pain in the ass if you no longer have the device/email it'd send the auth request to lmfao

Good luck! Hope it goes well if you do choose to wipe your computer.

[delilahdadirtydork]

Rant: Thanks for Nothing Microsoft!

So because of a mandatory update for my computer that didn't get installed properly for reasons beyond my comprehension, File explorer did not want to work anymore. Meaning I could not access my folders that holds all my stuff. Ya know...the primary thing you do when you use a computer.

If I wanted to say open a word document, I could open Libreoffice the program and open the file that I want like normal. I just can't open folder to click on that specific file. When ever I did the tool bar would vanish & refresh itself.

I had tried every method in order to fix this issue. I followed the exact steps. Nothing. Finally...in desperation I was forced to use the Nuclear option. Blow the whole thing away and reinstall windows 11 again.

Of course like a real Nuke, there is going to fallout radiation from that too. I was lucky because while I was able to do so in a round about method to back up all my stuff on to an external drive, there were some stuff (like saved files from my steam games) that were gone. Some of them were stuff I don't remember what they ever were because they were background programs that I needed in order to run other things, so because I wasn't actively & consciously aware of they were...I don't remember what they are only vaguely remembering icon images.

Of course as perv who has their private little collection of lewd stuff naturally I'm sweating a few bullets hoping that doesn't get accidentally discovered while getting help in an attempt to fix things.

Then there's the onerous task of trying to put your computer back together again. Reinstalling stuff. Putting everything back into their little places that you had before. Deleting bloatware. Trying adjust all the settings & micro adjustments to fit my personal tastes. Getting rid of all the BS that Microsoft likes to think is cool such as disabling the newly enforced Copilot bs. Getting rid of things like the visual image of announcing that I'm using the caps lock on my computer that the company that makes my laptop thing is a cool fetcher. Re logging into to stuff and going to your e-mail to do the confirmation that yes YOU ARE the person who is accessing this stuff. Reinstalling add ons & reteaching your favorite websites all the preferences you like to have. Having to sigh in resignation in that despite some of my best efforts there's always SOMETHING that you lost like save game files and knowing you gotta play through the whole thing again.

Plus the frustration, anxiety, & stress that you're doing this while other real life stuff is going on like fixing dinner and your minor chores that feel more like a distract from trying to fix things.

And the worst sin of: Having to spend a couple of hours waiting for in between it all for the reinstaling process.

All this...ALL OF THIS EFFORT, because of ONE single problem caused by an update to my system that I didn't want to do in the first place.

I'm am a very tired bat. I just wanted to watch some smut, play my games & write my stories.

[omamervt]

I think the thing that fucks me up about Unity's move the most is that they absolutely know for a fact that most in-development games cannot afford to change engines. Unity sucks, it always has, any time I have been forced to use it, some terrible internal system I had to spend a ridiculous amount of hours learning last time has been deprecated and replaced with something that's better on paper but since they didn't actually finish it, it's worse.

That being said, it is currently the only free-to-use, lightweight, and beginner/educator-friendly game engine on the market with a clear path to console ports.

Unreal Engine is easier to use and also has a clear path to consoles, but it's a massive file to install, requires a $1.5K computer from the current year to run it without having to adjust a million internal settings, and there's a limit to how low it can go with a port unless you're willing to rewrite the shaders in the source code yourself. While it can do 2D, it'll likely make them ridiculously hardware-intensive, and that's no good.

It's just a matter of time before Godot catches up with more established engines at the pace it's developing, but if you try and make a game in it right now, you're looking at a significantly more time-consuming and expensive process trying to get the game on consoles.

GameMaker is kind of a sad tale because of all the ones I mentioned, it was actually developed with education in mind, but their pricing system has become more aggressive and predatory over time. Its current pricing plan requires you to pay $50/yr just to port to DESKTOP! and it goes up from there.

RPG Maker (doesn't matter which version but let's be real, for most of y'all it's 2003) is super easy to use, but because of the programming language it uses, in order to port a game made in it to console, the amount of extra work you'd need to do would be better spent rewriting the game from scratch in Unity, which, uhhhh..... Again, no 3D.

Construct used to be good, but now the entire engine has to run in your browser and there's not a desktop version anymore. You also have to pay $130/yr for the ability to port to DESKTOP! Again, no 3D. The only upside over GameMaker is that you can publish to web for free, but god help you if you try to monetize without paying them.

CryEngine seems fine, but it also has a steeper learning curve and I basically never hear about people using it. I guess that doesn't mean they don't but then again, up until this point, there were two better alternatives. Now there's just one and a runner-up, so we'll see. Could also be that they start asking you to pay them faster than Unity or Unreal did, I have to imagine that plays into it.

These are the most popular alternatives to Unity I know of. Some of them are fine, others will get better, most have no redeeming qualities, but if you're an indie studio maybe making your first mid-budget game, switching would require sacrificing something huge, and I'm not just talking about the wasted man-hours in an engine that you can't afford to use anymore. For all its faults, Unity was at the perfect intersection of features that made its functionality issues worth looking past.

And make no mistake - Unity knew that from the start. They knew that even if people jumped ship, a lot of upcoming games couldn't afford to, and what happens to them post-release isn't Unity's problem. The plan has always been to hold those developers hostage. I think the only thing they didn't anticipate is games like Cult of the Lamb or Among Us deleting their existing games, but considering how Steam and the console stores work, I doubt they're too worried about that, either.

[jacobfiel]

Week #2

We started off the day by recapping key tools and elements we had learnt in Adobe Illustrator (AI) and on the computer in general from the week before. We continued you discuss our Tumblr workbooks and looked at some examples of good workbooks which had a great amount of screenshots/proof of work which were accompanied by detailed explanations of how they did each task and their personal thoughts.

Following this we redrew a shape from last week for a little bit of practice. key thing a took from this part of the 'remembering session' was making sure to put the red line over the fill box so that your shapes are not always on fill.

We then deleted this practice and moved to paper to start Single Arc Curves. We started by mimicking curves that were drawn on the white board. These curves were very simple yet getting them perfect is hard if you don't properly understand the control points/handles. When I first attempted the curves I was only creating one anchor point with a handle. This meant that as I went back to edit my curves and improve them with my direct selection tool I only could adjust one anchor points handle. Although this made getting my curves 'perfect' slightly more difficult the task was still doable. Yet this would become more of a problem when using curves with more than 2 points because one point wouldn't be editable and would become stagnate amongst the other curves. I also attempted doing a circle by copy and pasting my curves and connecting them but I didn't quite do it right and it looked weird.

Post doing this I did my first project save point of the session. It is important to note that when saving to always 'save as' rather than 'save' because when you just 'save' the work saves over the previous file where as hitting 'save as' will save everything from that day but still hold all the information from previous sessions.

After saving my progress we moved onto Single and Multi arc curves. The main thing we originally focused one was how many points do i need for each shape? We talked about the fact that the more anchor points you have the harder the line is to edit afterwards. where as having less points means the curves are easily editable and is much more time efficient. Toby made the curves we were drawing on the board himself and displayed them to the class on the big screen with the handles displayed. I felt that looking at where his handles were sitting and which ways he had dragged his mouse really helped me understand where i had to drag with my handles and it was at this point I was feeling a little bit more comfortable with the curves and handles. As we were creating our single and multi curves in AI Toby brought up that you can use the arrow keys to nudge anchor points and even curves them sleeves in the direction of the arrows. I found this super good for cleaning up my curves and creating the 'perfect' replicas that were very tidy and nice to look at. You can also hold down shift while hitting the arrows to do slightly bigger nudges. We then learnt about that if you want the line to be straight down at the bottom of a shape you must make the anchor points upright using the direct selection tool after the fact, (as displayed by the M's)

We pushed forward into closed curve where the first thing I noticed was that you had to use the zoom tool a lot more to get the details on the smaller curves. When drawing these shapes that are closed I was unable to make the last point curve properly. I asked my friend Leo and as he watched me do it he pointed out that you must still drag the last anchor point even when connecting it to the first point otherwise you lose the curve. This took me a little bit to wrap my head around.

Next we started Curves and Straights. When doing curves and straights we learn about the other types of curves so now we have corner points and curved points as well as Hybrid points and Broken points. These points can be controlled by option which you hold down to modify the points. By holding down option you can bend a point after a straight line point and vice vs'a. You can also hold option and click on a point followed by realigning the anchor points to break a point. I think this was one thing I always wondered about with AI before I learnt how to use it because I never understood how to get a straight line and if i've done one curve it would always curve again for the next point. this makes me feel a lot more confidant in my understanding of AI and i'm keen to put all of today's tools into work in the homework task.

Homework image I picked for my partner Leo.

Image he picked for me.

Adobe Illustrator Shortcuts so far.

[2022504breilamia]

Feedback & according edits -

After being sick for a week, I worked really hard to get everything done even if they were just drafts. I had a few issues concerning quality, speed/glitches and a weird sizing issue when exporting. In our last class, I went in for feedback. 

When I exported, it looked like this -

after talking to my lecturers, they told me it was because I had accidentally set an artboard default on my setup. We discovered this was on all my animations and so edited that down to be the right size.

resolution - when making my animations, I had forgotten to set mine at 72 res rather than 300, meaning my photoshop files would be massive and also maybe why my computer is having memory problems. So when exporting my final versions, I will change the res to 72.

When I was making my first gif animation, I forgot/didn't digest the tip of making objects/text smart objects so that the quality isn't affected if they are expanded. After being reminded of this, in Gif 1 I went back and made new layers of text, transforming them into smart objects and making the text smooth going for all the layers.

With my second timeline animation, I had the feedback that my text was looking not too smooth at the beginning with my text weight introduction. I realised I had way too many keyframes which were unnecessary. Throughout the entire animation, I edited out a lot of keyframes. Realising the time it took to make it, I got muddled and added a lot more keyframes than I needed to. I adjusted the keyframes with my lecturer's help to make the text go directly across the screen while still giving the bigger-to-smaller effect I wanted. method: Find the middle keyframe - delete all before except the starting one. Copy the middle and paste it earlier where you want.

a lot of my edits and feedback/help concerned my first timeline animation. We started with the palm trees, as my typeface is based on California, I wanted to include a palm tree growing. When I first made it, I was very new to the timeline and didn't understand till later that the reason mine was flipping is that when I downsized it I must have gone too far and flipped it the other way. We remedied that and my lecturer gave me the idea of mimicking the famous palm tree-lined street. He taught me how to do this, I removed more keyframes using the same method ( Find the middle keyframe - delete all before except the starting one. Copy the middle and paste it earlier where you want,) then duplicated that tree, set it behind the first one and turned the contrast down, repeating that twice more to create a line effect. I moved each tree's keyframes just behind the leading one so they grew at slightly different times. I then selected all, made it all one smart object, duplicated it and flipped. This made the effect of the street. I also moved the Barlow text to make it more aligned and made the sun go faster because I was given the feedback that my text quote wasn't legible because it was moving so fast. I slowed down that quote, giving people time to read it.

[krakenartificer]

When I got my ADHD diagnosis, I looked at the questions on the screening form and thought, "If this result comes back positive, then I'm definitely not the only person in my family who has it." Questions like

"Have difficulty finishing one activity before starting another one" and

"I finish others' sentences before they can finish it themselves" and

"have trouble staying on one topic when talking"

...I thought were just weird quirks of my family, but no. When I got my results, I contacted my cousin, and she contacted her sisters and mother, and .. .. yeah. Basically everyone in my dad's side of the family is ADHD.

Now there are some problems with that, obviously, (getting family reunions to stick to a schedule is lol no) but there are some really fantastic perks. For one thing, no one in that family minds if I interrupt them while they're talking ... everyone's happy to keep 3 conversations going at the same time .... and no one minds if you fidget constantly.

But the best perk -- at least that I've found so far -- is that all of our parents have coping mechanisms, and passed them on to us. When I found myself unable to handle tasks with more than one step, my father didn't say "WTF are you talking about? It's easy! Just do the thing! Stop being lazy!" No, he could relate completely, and he sat down and taught me how to handle that.

So today, I'm going to pass on to you the coping mechanism my dad taught me for handling the "cannot put tasks in order / cannot get started / forget what I'm doing" problem. You'll need to adjust it for your own needs and your own struggles, but hopefully it'll be helpful in setting up your own process.

I'm going to walk through it with a big project I'm doing at work, just to have a concrete example. That will make some of the discussion specific to computer programming and technical writing, but I do the same thing for all my projects, so hopefully it'll be generalizable.

So to set the stage:

I was supposed to modify this piece of code -- we'll call it "Rosetta" -- to make it handle call data as well as what it was already doing. I did that.... but we now need the code to be able to handle calls (if that's wanted) but also to be able to handle NOT having calls (if THAT'S wanted).

Which is just .... ugh. So much. SOOOOOOOO much.

So. Break it down.

Step one is to get some recording mechanism - pen and paper, whiteboard, blank computer document, whatever

(Technically, this is a different coping strategy, so we'll just take a quick detour: WRITE THINGS DOWN. Your brain is shit at remembering things, and anyway you've already got limits on your working memory; why would you choose to tie up some of that limited resource in something that could be accomplished with literal stone-age technology? Don't even try to remember things. WRITE THEM DOWN.)

I like sticky notes: they're readily available in all offices, they're pretty cheap, and (most importantly) they can be rearranged if it turns out that I forgot a step or put the steps in the wrong order (which, like, let's be honest, I am definitely going to do). But they kill trees and create unnecessary methane emissions, so I've recently switched over to using virtual sticky notes. That's the format I'm going to use for this example, but you can use anything that meets your purposes.

So, you've got something to write with, you're ready to start.

The first question is: what are you trying to accomplish here? What would "done" look like? What is our goal?

I need to end up with a version of Rosetta that will make the correct results if you don't want calls, and will also make the correct results if you do.

The goal here is that you end up with a statement that you can definitively say (a) Yes this is what I wanted or (b)No this is not right because _______

In this case, in order to do that, I'll need to define "correct results" for both call- and non-call versions. But if I have that nailed down, then this statement meets that criterion: I'll be able to say "Yes, this is what I wanted: see, it makes the correct result for calls, and it makes the correct result for not-calls". Or else I'll be able to say, "No, this is wrong: see, it makes the correct result for calls, but on not-calls it does X and we wanted Y."

I have a clear, definitive standard about what I need to do and whether or not I've done it.

But there was a prerequisite there: I need to define "correct results".

So that goes on a sticky note: Create test that will compare my results to existing call!Rosetta-results and to existing not-call!Rosetta-results.

[ID: Two blue boxes, one on top of the other. The top one says in white text "Create test to compare my results to call!results" The bottom one says "Create test to compare my results to not-call!results"] OK. So now we know what we want. The second question is: what do we need to do in order to get that? Here's where the sticky-note recording system really shines, because you don't have to answer this question sequentially. You just start writing down every single thing that is not the way you want it to end up.

I need it to remove commas in the python script, not the bash script

I need to delete the first part of the get_runs() function, which doesn't do anything

I need to delete the rest of the parameters passed to build_query_script() function, because runs encompasses all the others

while we're on that subject, runs doesn't even need the group_variable, so let's pull that out of the parameter document

we also have a dmf defined, which the bash script demands but doesn't use; let's change that demand

since we're changing the structure of the parameter document, we don't need to pull new metrics for each run, so let's move that outside of the runs() loop and only run once

right now the parameter document is ALMOST but not quite "one row per template". Make it so it's actually one row per template.

among other things, that's going to require making it possible for a template to be followed by nothing at all, since it's the assumption that a template will have a metrics block after it that makes it not quite one row per template. So make it possible to publish a template with a null block

the other thing that's weirdly hard-coded is the definition of what a block looks like. Would it make more sense to separate that out into an input file, like the parameters document? On the one hand, that would make it much more flexible; on the other hand, that's another piece that can break. Don't know. Put a question mark on it.

etc

Here's what it looks like at the end of this step:

[ID: A black and white background showing many boxes in two different shades of blue, all with white text. Some of the boxes are overlapping each other.]

As you can see, at this phase you don't need to worry about any of the following:

ordering the tasks. Just stick 'em right on top of each other for now

how you're going to do any of this. Right now we just need to know what, not how

sticking to only one project. As I was working on this, it occurred to me that this whole process would have been a heck of a lot easier if someone had just made a user manual for this, and since I have to go through all the code line-by-line anyway, I might as well write up the documentation while I'm at it. (To help out future-me, if nothing else.) So I put those tasks on another color of sticky note.

making notes that make any ***ing sense to anyone else. This process is for you, and only you need to understand what you're talking about it. Phrase it in ways that make sense to your brain, and to hell with anyone else.

on that topic, also don't worry about making steps that are "too small" or "too dumb" to write down. This is for you. If "save document" feels like a step to you, then write it down.

You also don't need to get every single step involved in the project right now. Get as many as you can, to be sure, but the process is designed on the assumption that you ARE going to forget important steps, and is designed to handle that.

When you can't think of any more steps, then the third question is: what order does it make sense to do these in? Are there any steps that would be easier if you did another step first? Are there any that literally cannot be done unless another step is complete?

This is also a good place to group steps if they fit together nicely. When I used physical sticky notes, I used two different sizes; digitally I can of course make them whatever size I want.

So I have several documentation steps that (a) do need to be written to make sense to other people and (b) I really need to know what's going on before I can do that. I could write them now, but if I did, I'd just end up re-writing them based on things that change as I'm coding. So we'll move those to the end:

[ID: Three dark blue boxes with white text. They read "Create step-by-step instructions for creating your own metric agg", "Create step-by-step instructions for modifying a metric", "Create step-by-step instructions for modifying a query."]

These parts, though -- if I had all the variable structures written down, I could look at them while I'm coding. Then I won't have to keep scrolling back and forth in the code, trying to remember if it's an array or a dictionary while also trying to remember what part of the code I was working on. Brilliant. Move that to the front.

[ID: Seven dark blue boxes with white text, three large, four small. The first one is large and says "Write up explanation of how Rosetta works." The second one is large and says "Document structure of all variables." Attached to that one are four smaller boxes that say "All_blocks", "Runs", "metric", "New_block". The third large one says "Document what qb_parameters.csv contains"]

Also, while I'm at it, I should get the list of variables I need to document -- then I won't have to keep scrolling to find them. Make those sub-steps.

I definitely keep needing to look up what's in the parameters document, so I should write that down, too. For the user manual I also should write down what's in the metric document, but I don't need that for myself, so I can send that to the end.

[ID: The same three dark blue boxes from two screenshots ago (create step-by-step instructions for metric agg, modifying a metric, and modifying a query), now with another dark blue box in front of them with white text that says "Document what granular_metrics.tsv contains."]

These five are all small steps, and are all related in that they don't actually (hopefully) change the functionality of the code; they're just stuff left over from prior versions of this code. So we can lump them all together.

[ID: Five light blue boxes with white text that say "Delete first part of get_runs()", "Have build_query_script only receive the "run" parameter" "Delete dmf" "Move metrics=get_metrics() outside build_all_blocks (all the way up to the top level?" "Delete group_variable from qp_parameters"]

My brain likes this better, so that I can keep track of fewer "main steps", but that's just a peculiarity of me -- you should lump and split however you prefer to make this process easier for you.

[ID: The same five boxes from the prior screenshot, now all made smaller and attached to a larger box that says "Remove Legacy Code"]

Keep going, step by step, sticky by sticky, until you've got them in order. If -- while you're doing this -- you remember another thing you need to do, write it on a sticky and slap it on the pile; you don't have to stop what you're doing to deal with it, because it's written down and it's on the pile and it will get processed; you can just keep working on the thing you're on right now.

[ID: All the same boxes from the first screenshot, now in a neat row. Some of the original boxes have been grouped together. The ones that were said to be at the beginning of the process are on the left and the ones that were said to be at the end are on the right.]

Step four: for the love of all that's holy, SAVE THIS LIST.

Write it on your cubicle whiteboard where it won't be erased

write it on a piece of paper and tape it to the office wall

send an email to yourself

take a picture with your phone

I don't care but save it.

When I used physical sticky notes, I kept them all on the hood of my cubicle's shelf. Now, as you can see, I use Powerpoint, which is irritating af but does allow me to keep everything in a single document, which I can write down the path of.

[ID: White text on a black background says "open ~/Documents/Rosetta\ Modifications\ and \Documentation.pptx" The next line says "Notes in Rocketbook pg 10-12, 16" The next line says "Turn that into documentation that can be used for making modifications."]

And now (finally) you can answer the question "How would I even get started on that?" You look at the first thing on the list, and you treat it as its own project. You can hyperfocus on this step and completely forget about everything else this project requires, because everything you need to remember for the rest of it is written down.

If, as you're working a step, you think of something else you need to do for the big project, write it on a sticky and slap it on the pile. Don't even worry about trying to order it or identify sub-steps; as long as it's not blocking the thing you need to work on right now, you don't have to care. Just stick that bugger anywhere at all on the list, and go back to what you were doing. When you un-hyperfocus and come back to look at your list, there'll be a big sticky note stuck sideways across all the rest of the steps, and you'll remember to file and order it then.

Other benefits of this system

1) The first question really helps with unclear directions from your boss. You can take whatever they told you to do, and translate it into a requirement that is clearly either met or not-met, and then run it back by the boss.

If they say, "No, no, we want ______" then phew! You just saved a huge miscommunication and weeks of wasted work! What a good employee you are! What an excellent team player with strong communication skills!

If they say "Yes, that's what I want," then you know -- for sure -- what it is you're trying to accomplish. Your anxiety is reduced, and your boss thinks you're super-conscientious.

(And if your boss is a jerk who likes to move the goalposts and blame it on their subordinates, then have this conversation over email, so you can show it to their boss or to HR should it become necessary.)

2) Having this project map means that when you spend an hour staring at the requirements and trying to figure out how to get started (which, let's be honest, you were definitely going to do anyway) ... When your boss/coworker comes by and says, "How's it going?" Instead of having to say "I haven't even started 😞" You can say, "Pretty well! I've got all the steps mapped out and am getting ready to start on implementation!" and show them your list, and they think you're very organized and meticulous. 3) Sometimes, especially in corporate jobs, you and your coworkers will run into a problem that's too big for even Neurotypicals to hold all in their heads. At that point, the NTs will be completely lost -- they've never had to develop a way to handle projects they can't just look at and know how to get started. So then you pipe up in the meeting and say, "OK, well, what exactly are we trying to accomplish?" and everybody at the conference table looks at you like you're a goddamned genius and you don't have to tell them that you use this exact same process to remember how to make a sandwich 😅

4) Having this project map makes it so much easier to stop work and then start it up again later, but this post is already really really really long, so I'm going to address that in a separate (really really long) post.